Arab members of the Labor Party are livid over the party's expected decision to remain in the government despite the entry of Avigdor Lieberman's Yisrael Beiteinu Party. Despite vocal threats to quit the party, however, many are in no hurry to turn in their membership cards, prefering instead to remain and settle their score with party chairman Amir Peretz in the next leadership primary, which is expected to take place next year.

"We'll know how to settle accounts with them, and therefore, I'm in favor of strengthening the Labor Party's Arab constituency," said Milham Milham of Arara, an advisor to Interior Minister Ophir Pines-Paz.

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"How would Peretz and [Prime Minister Ehud] Olmert respond if the government of France, for instance, had brought in a man who calls for expelling Jews from France?" Milham added.

Arab activists also dismissed the "compensation" that Peretz extracted from Olmert - the establishment of a ministerial committee to deal with the Arab sector's problems.

"It's impossible to sell this bill of goods to the Arab street," said Ziad Odeh, a Labor Central Committee member from Nazareth.

According to Jamal Diab of Tamra, party activists plan to call a meeting of all of Labor's Arab members in another few days to discuss how they should respond to Labor's decision to serve in the government with Lieberman.

Several activists said that they were considering quitting the party, but had not yet decided.

Arab MKs, meanwhile, continued to lambaste the decision, and one, MK Abas Zkoor (Ra'am-Ta'al), urged Arab states that maintain relations with Israel to sever these ties in light of Lieberman's entry into the government.

Noting that the world had boycotted the Palestinian Authority's Hamas government over its refusal to recognize Israel, Zkoor argued that the same treatment should be extended to a government that included Lieberman, who, he charged, wanted to "ethnically cleanse" Israel of its Arabs.

Amir Makhoul, director general of Itijah, an umbrella organization for Arab civil society groups, similarly urged the European Union to work to prevent Lieberman's entry into the government. "His party arose from the same foundations as did neo-Nazi and fascist parties in Europe," Makhoul said.

The Mossawa Center, an Arab advocacy organization, filed a protest with European representatives yesterday over the fact that Javier Solana, the EU's foreign policy czar, agreed to meet with Lieberman.