This week we will address the highly debated subject in Israel of the new loyalty oath law.

A bit of background to begin with: the foreign minister of Israel, Avigdor (Ivet) Lieberman, promised in the last elections (2009) that his party will demand a oath of loyalty from all citizens – or in his words – "no loyalty, no citizenship". Lieberman, who aims one day to become Israel's prime-minister, is using the issue to examine the place of Israeli Arabs within Israeli society.  His agenda is that in order to solve the conflict with the Palestinians, all Arabs should live in Palestine and all Jews in Israel.

But Lieberman is a smart politician who understands that the proposition of transferring more than a million Arabs out of Israel would doom him to lead a small party. Therefore he decided to approach the issue by questioning the loyalty of the Israeli Arabs to the state.

The articles that appear in the blog (taken from the Jerusalem Post, one of Israel’s most widely-read English news publications), deal with his proposal to force all those who seek Israeli citizenship to declare their loyalty to Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. The declaration is not obligatory to Jews who make aliya (come to live in Israel) and thus affects the majority of Arabs living under the Palestinian authority who get married to an Israeli Arab and apply for Israeli citizenship.

The controversy is about the claim itself, the de-legitimization of Israeli Arabs, but for spotlight falls mostly on Lieberman himself and his ideas, which are becoming increasingly popular in Israel.