Israel’s hard-line right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met on May 18 with far-right politician Avigdor Lieberman. Netanyahu offered him the positions of minister of defense and minister of immigrant absorption, and Lieberman accepted the defense minister offer, the Israeli media reported.

Lieberman is the founder and leader of the far-right Yisrael Beiteinu party. He served as Israel’s minister of foreign affairs from 2013 to 2015 and 2009 to 2012.

While serving as the foreign minister in March 2015, Lieberman declared that Palestinian citizens of Israel who are disloyal should be beheaded.

“Those who are against us, there’s nothing to be done – we need to pick up an ax and cut off his head,” Lieberman asserted at Israel’s “Voting for Democracy – 2015 Elections” conference. “Otherwise we won’t survive here.”

At the conference, he also reiterated his support for expelling at least some of Israel’s Arab citizens from the country. Lieberman has repeatedly proposed “transferring” Palestinians from Israel.

He also frequently challenges the “loyalty” of Palestinian citizens, recalling anti-Semitic accusations of “dual loyalty.”

Lieberman’s fascistic decapitation proposal led a member of Knesset, Israel’s parliament, to characterize him as the Jewish version of the so-called Islamic State, or ISIS/ISIL.

Meanwhile, major U.S. media outlets, including the New York Times, failed to report on Lieberman’s ISIS-like call. (There still appears to be no mention in the pages of the American newspaper of record.)

Activists and journalists later cited Lieberman’s call for beheading disloyal Arabs when they coined the phrase JSIL to protest Israel’s increasing extremism.

Prominent Middle East scholar Juan Cole has described Lieberman as a “far-right extremist,” noting he is “dogged by accusations of corruption (though acquitted in the Israeli courts) and widely considered a racist and flamethrower.”

“There is no European cabinet minister who comes close to Lieberman’s far, far right positions, and if there were he or she would be boycotted by the other Europeans,” Cole said, adding that, if one had to made a connection, Hungary’s neo-fascist party “comes closest to the themes of the ruling Israeli far right at the moment.”

Lieberman has a long history of proposing fascistic policies. In 2003, he asserted that thousands of Palestinian prisoners should be drowned in the Dead Sea, adding that he would happily provide the buses to take them there.