The setting seemed surreal, watching Israel’s Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, an ardent ultranationalist, being warmly welcomed to an Arab town.

Only weeks ago Lieberman’s Yisrael Beitenu party had introduced bills proposing to restrict the rights of Arab citizens deemed as disloyal to the Jewish state, and many had responded by denouncing him as a racist.

Yet here he was on weekend evening, being feted with oven- baked fish and skewered lamb, stuffing his mouth with freshly picked cherries after cuddling a local toddler on a porch in Shefaram, one of Israel’s largest Arab towns.

It was the same town where Jewish-Arab tensions had been running high last month as Israel put seven Shefaram men on trial for allegedly killing an armed soldier four years ago at the scene of a deadly shooting attack aboard a public bus in which four Arabs were killed. The suspects insist they acted in self defence and that Israel was following a double standard by trying them, a step Israel seldom takes against Jewish citizens accused of killing Arab assailants.

That issue seemed pretty remote from the gaiety that prevailed at the reception fellow parliamentarian Hamed Amer threw for Lieberman in Shefaram, a town Amer calls home as a member of its tiny Druze minority.

“Our entire community embraces you and loves you,” Amer said, surrounded by several dozen Druze religious leaders wearing customary red and white hats, and some local politicians.

Unlike most other Israeli Arabs, the Druze are openly supportive of the idea of Israel being a Jewish state, and most of the community’s men serve in the Israeli military.

 The Druze, who number some 100,000 in Israel, are just a fraction of Israel’s Arab population. Israeli Arabs account for about a fifth of Israelis. Most, other than the Druze, are descended from Palestinians who stayed after a war over Israel’s founding in 1948, while hundreds of thousands of others either fled or were driven away.

 Lieberman pledged to help the Druze overcome financial difficulties including rising unemployment among their young people who fresh out of military service often have trouble finding work in northern Galilee where industrial growth tends to be slower than in the metropolitan parts of central Israel.

Hundreds of angry Druze youth had protested outside Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office last month to press demands for more jobs and better public services for their communities.

Lieberman praised Amer as someone who “represents our message that loyalty should be a way of life” then moved on to address what he called the “diplomatic challenges” facing Israel, including a U.S.-backed demand to halt Jewish settlement building in occupied land.

Himself a resident of a Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank, Lieberman took a characteristically tough view of U.S. President Barack Obama’s pressure to halt construction in these enclaves built on land Israel captured in a 1967 war.

He said Israel “cannot agree to choke” the settlements with its own hands, and accused world leaders of showing “disproportionate” interest in the issue, given various other world crises, such as North Korea’s latest missile tests.

Palestinians insist all settlement building must stop before they would agree to resume stalled peace talks with Israel. But Lieberman thought Israel’s neighbours didn’t seem ready enough for peace.

“The more we concede the more they love us,” Lieberman said, alluding to Arab and other nations pressing Israel to withdraw from war-won land. He maintained Israel’s past pullouts had not always brought peaceful results.

Yisrael Beitenu, Lieberman’s party, grew to Israel’s third largest in a February election, largely due to support from a growing population of immigrants from former Soviet states, and also thanks in some measure to support from the Druze community.

“Maybe he’s an ultranationalist, but he’s also someone we can speak to,” Fahid Safadi, a Druze lawyer, said.