Cover story in Issue 2, May 11, 2009 of The Jerusalem Report. To subscribe to The Jerusalem Report click here.

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman meets U.S. envoy George Mitchell
Photo: Ariel Jerozolimzki , JRep

In mid-April, just two weeks after Avigdor Lieberman was sworn in as Israel's foreign minister, his Egyptian counterpart declared him persona non grata. The hawkish leader of the right-wing Yisrael Beiteinu party had more than once threatened to bomb the Aswan dam and six months ago declared in the Knesset that if Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak didn't want to visit Israel, he could "go to hell."

This is not the kind of talk the Egyptians, with their proud tradition of regional leadership, could take lying down or pretend to forget. Pointing slowly to his head and then to his mouth, Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit admonished Lieberman for having been so brash. "When a man speaks, he should be aware that the words traveling from his brain to his tongue will have consequences," he declared. Egypt, he said, would continue to work with the new Israeli government, but not with its foreign minister.

Lieberman's top aides, however, are convinced the foreign minister will not be circumvented. For the past several weeks, Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon, has been operating assiduously behind the scenes to establish a smooth working relationship with the Egyptians. Ayalon, a former Israeli ambassador to Washington and a leading member of the mainly Russian immigrant Yisrael Beiteinu, is Lieberman's closest adviser in foreign affairs. He is confident the new foreign minister's Egypt imbroglio will soon be resolved. "It won't be a problem," he tells The Report.

But the very fact that so much energy is being invested just to get Israel's most important peace partner to deign to work with Lieberman underscores the bizarre nature of the new government's choice of foreign minister.

The appointment raised hackles and eyebrows not only in the Arab world but across the international community. Lieberman, who on his first day in office rejected the American-sponsored Annapolis peace process between Israel and the Palestinians, and who has said he wouldn't mind drowning released Palestinian prisoners or hanging disloyal Israeli Arab Knesset members, is widely seen as extremist, provocative and even racist, along the lines of ostracized European ultranationalists like the late Jorg Haider in Austria or Jean-Marie Le Pen in France. Add to that the fact that he is under investigation for money laundering, fraud and breach of trust, and that in 2001 he was found guilty by his own admission of striking a 12 year-old boy - and the appointment does seem bizarre, indeed.

One of the biggest problems in making Lieberman Israel's face to the outside world is that it plays into the hands of its detractors. With Israel's image after the Gaza war under a cloud, having the swaggering, tough-talking Lieberman in the foreign ministry makes it easier to portray Israel as the neighborhood bully. "Internationally, the appointment is causing Israel irreversible harm. Other countries will soon join Egypt in declaring Israel's foreign minister persona non grata. There is nothing more dangerous than this for Israel," says former Knesset member Roman Bronfman, founder of a rival dovish, but now defunct, Russian immigrant party, The Democratic Choice.

So why did Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appoint as controversial a figure as Lieberman foreign minister? Supporters of the move point to Lieberman's out-of-the-box thinking and say he could be just the man to find a way out of the current diplomatic morass. Critics, however, say the only reason for the appointment was the fact that politically Lieberman had Netanyahu over a barrel: With 15 seats, Yisrael Beiteinu is the only coalition partner that could bring the ruling Likud's 74-member coalition down on its own. If Lieberman were to pull out of the government for any reason, Netanyahu would be left with a minority of 59 in the 120-member Knesset, whereas if the next largest coalition faction, Ehud Barak's Labor, were to leave, Netanyahu would still have a majority of 61.

The controversial appointment aside, the problems posed for Israel by Lieberman's rise to prominence go well beyond foreign affairs. His election campaign, with its slogan "only Lieberman understands Arabic," contained overtly racist elements, and critics say that this, together with his calls for a stronger executive and weaker Supreme Court, his conditioning of citizenship on manifestations of loyalty and his control of law enforcement centers when he himself is under investigation, constitute a serious threat to Israeli democracy.

"If established parties keep quiet in the face of Lieberman's political racism, and the president doesn't find it necessary to intervene, and the courts don't disqualify a racist Knesset list, the cancer will spread," Bronfman warns.

Avigdor Lieberman was born in Soviet Moldova in 1958, and made aliya with his parents when he was 20. As a student at the Hebrew University in the late 1970s, where he majored in international relations and Russian studies, Lieberman already showed staunch right-wing leanings, bordering on the racist. He was active in the Likud-linked Kastel students' party, led by young Likud hawks, Tzachi Hanegbi (today a leading member of Kadima) and Yisrael Katz (today Minister of Transportation and a member of Netanyahu's inner circle).

Hanegbi, then head of the students' union, gave Lieberman a job as bouncer at the Shablul students' night club, where, within a year, the burly new immigrant became the manager. The big political issue of the day was whether Arab students should be compelled to participate along with their Jewish colleagues in civil guard patrols against would-be terrorists.

Lieberman was for summarily kicking them out of the campus dorms if they refused. His approach then was very similar to his controversial insistence today on conditioning state-sponsored income supplements to Arab-Israelis on national service and citizenship on loyalty to the state.
Lieberman's first big political break came in 1988, when he hitched himself to Netanyahu's rising star. In 1993, he masterminded Netanyahu's campaign for the Likud leadership and was rewarded by being made party CEO. Then, when Netanyahu became prime minister in 1996, he appointed Lieberman director general of the prime minister's office. Not long afterwards, under pressure from party veterans who disparagingly called him "KGB" and "Rasputin," Lieberman was abandoned by Netanyahu and forced to resign. In 1999, he left Likud to found Yisrael Beiteinu, then a hawkish immigrants' rights party. In 2000, he linked up with the far-right Moledet and Tekuma parties to form a radical right-wing Knesset block, and with them won seven seats in the 2003 general election.