An Israeli Cabinet minister called for the Jewish state and West Bank to be partitioned according to ethnicity.

Avigdor Lieberman of the right-wing Yisrael Beiteinu Party said in an interview Sunday that rather than evacuating Jewish settlements in the West Bank, Israel should keep them while ceding Israeli Arab communities to a future Palestinian state.

“I think separation between two nations is the best solution,” Lieberman told Britain’s Sunday Times.

“I want to provide an Israel that is a Jewish, Zionist country.”

He invoked as a model the forcible 1974 separation of ethnic Turks and Greeks in Cyprus.

Lieberman recently joined Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s Cabinet as minister for strategic threats.

A Lieberman aide told the Sunday Telegraph that under the partition vision, Israeli Arabs would have the option of remaining in the Jewish state on condition that they pledged allegiance to it.