Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman on Sunday proposed that in a future peace deal the Palestinians should take his country's 1.3 million Arabs and let Israel keep its West Bank settlements.
"Our guiding principle in negotiations with the Palestinians must not be 'land for peace' but an exchange of territories and populations," Lieberman told reporters as he arrived for Sunday's weekly cabinet meeting.
The maverick nationalist has campaigned in the past for Israel's Arab citizens to be stripped of their nationality unless they take an oath of allegiance to the Jewish state.
The phrase "land for peace" refers to the concept of Israel withdrawing from Palestinian territories it occupied in the 1967 Middle East war in return for an end to the conflict.
Israeli and Palestinian leaders this month renewed direct peace talks after a gap of nearly two years and have pledged to seek agreement within 12 months.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says any treaty must include recognition of Israel as a Jewish state.
The Palestinians oppose the demand, fearing that it could prejudge the future of refugees seeking to return to old homes now in Israel. "It's as if someone sells you a flat and then demands that his mother-in-law continues living there," Lieberman said.
"The vigorous refusal of the Arab League and the Palestinian Authority to recognise Israel as the state of the Jewish people obliges us to make the question of the Israeli Arabs one of the main issues on the negotiating table," he said.
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