TIBI, AHMAD (1958–)

Palestinian Israeli political figure, born in 1958 at Taibeh, near Tel Aviv. A medical doctor, with a degree from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Ahmad Tibi had very good relations with a number of Israeli personages, including former president Ezer Weizman. He developed into an important intermediary between the Israeli leaders and the head of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Yasir Arafat, whom he came to know in 1984, through Raymonda Hawa Tawil, a prominent Palestinian journalist (and Arafat's future mother-in-law). In September 1993, in the context of the Oslo Accords signed in Washington that month, he became a special advisor to Arafat. In June of 1994, on the advice of an advisor to the Israeli government, Michael Ben Yair, according to whom contacts with a representative of the PLO were prohibited, Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, decided to stop using Tibi as a liaison. In March, 1996, anticipating Israeli general elections scheduled for the following May, he founded the Arab Movement for Change (AMC). With ambitions to become one of the leaders of the Palestinian Israeli camp, he envisaged constituting a common electoral list with the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality and the Arab Democratic Party (ADP). After this project fell through, he changed the name of his movement to "Arab Alliance for Progress and Renewal," hoping, in vain, to obtain the support of the ADP and the Islamists. On 21 May of the same year he decided to withdraw his candidacy from the elections, calling on his supporters to vote for the Israeli Labor Party. In February 1999, he resigned his functions as advisor to Yasir Arafat to present himself as a candidate at the scheduled Israeli elections in May, on the list constituted by Azmi Bishara, the Democratic National Alliance, known as "Balad." In that election, in which Laborite Ehud Barak was voted in as prime minister, Balad obtained two seats, which were allotted to Bishara and Tibi. In 2002 Bishara and Tibi were barred from running in the next election on the grounds that they had "supported terrorists" by denouncing the Israeli assault on Jenin that spring. The Israeli Supreme Court overturned the ban shortly before the election in January 2003. Both Tibi and Bishara were reelected to the Knesset.

SEE ALSO Arab Democratic Party;Arab Movement for Change;Arafat, Yasir Muhammad;Barak, Ehud;Bishara, Azmi;Democratic Front for Peace and Equality;Democratic National Alliance;Oslo Accords;Palestine Liberation Organization;Palestinian Israelis;Rabin, Yitzhak;Tawil, Raymonda Hawa;Weizman, Ezer.