Israeli Foreign Minister and Kadima Prime Minister candidate Tzipi Livni spoke to Israeli high school students on Thursday and stated that the national aspirations for full equality among Israeli Arabs would ostensibly end with the creation of a Palestinian state.

“Once a Palestinian state is established, I can come to the Palestinian citizens, whom we call Israeli Arabs, and say to them ‘you are citizens with equal rights, but the national solution for you is elsewhere.”

“The idea is to maintain two states for two peoples, that is my path to a democratic nation,” she added.

Previously Livni angered Palestinian Knesset members but stating that it should be established “that the State of Israel is a national homeland for the Jewish people.”

Ghaleb Majadele, the Cabinet Minister for Culture, Sports and Science and the first and only Arab Minister in Israel, responded then to Livni’s comments: “The roots of the Israeli Arab citizens of Israel were planted before the state was established. They are residents of this country with rights; their residency and citizenship are not open for negotiation.”

“Anyone who raises the idea of transferring the Arab population in Israel to the territories of the state of Palestine is anti-democractic,” he added.

Palestinian citizens of Israeli number 1.3 million and compromise 20% of the Israeli public. As Majadele notes, Arabs in Israel proper have been there since before the state was born. Concentrated in norther Israeli, in the Galilee, the community was spared ethnic cleansing, unlike their brethren elsewhere in Palestine, in 1948 and/or decided not to leave. Due to their high birth rate, the Arabs in Israel are expected to increase their numbers greatly in the future. The Israeli right and to a lesser extent the Israeli left consistently refers to Arabs in Israel as a “fifth column”.