Occupied Jerusalem: Israel’s defence minister on Monday called Arab MPs “war criminals”. a day after he urged a boycott of Palestinians of the 1948 areas living near the scene of clashes over the US president’s declaration on occupied Jerusalem.

Avigdor Lieberman was speaking in a televised parliamentary debate on a motion of no confidence in the right-wing government filed by the mainly Arab Joint List alliance.

Presenting the motion, Joint List lawmaker Hanin Zoabi said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “should be tried at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, because he is a war criminal”.

“Occupation is always belligerent, violent, illegitimate and a basis for war crimes,” she added, referring to Israel’s 50-year occupation of Palestine.

“All the Joint List are war criminals, every one of you,” Lieberman responded.

The alliance has 12 Arab members and one Jew.

“You exploit the weaknesses and advantages of a democratic state to destroy us from within, we have no illusions,” he told them.

“You are here by mistake and the time will come when you will not be here.”

Palestinians of the 1948 areas are descendants of Palestinians who remained on their land following the creation of Israel in 1948. Today they account for some 17.5 per cent of the population of Israel.

Lieberman has long advocated land-swaps in a future peace deal that would see some Arab areas of Israel handed over to the Palestinians in exchange for Israeli retention of some West Bank Jewish colonies.

He has also proposed conditioning the continued Israeli citizenship of the Palestinians of the 1948 areas on them taking oaths of loyalty to Israel. Dozens of Palestinians of the 1948 areas on Saturday night blocked the Wadi Ara intersection in northern Israel, police said, throwing stones at vehicles and burning tyres in protest at Donald Trump’s declaration.

The windows of a bus were smashed and its driver was slightly injured. Police arrested two minors and a man from Arara, an Arab town in the Wadi Ara area.

Speaking to Israeli occupation army’s radio the next day, Lieberman proposed collective punitive sanctions.

“I call on Israeli citizens to impose an economic boycott on Wadi Ara — don’t shop there, don’t eat in the restaurants and don’t buy services from them.”

Jewish Israelis must simply “give them the feeling they’re not wanted here,” he said.

Clashes and protests erupted in the Occupied Territories after Trump’s declaration last Wednesday, but there has been relatively little unrest within Israel itself.