Ahmed Tibi
Ahmed TibiHadas Parush/Flash 90

MK Ahmed Tibi of the Arab Joint List published a post to Facebook Wednesday in which he expressed his feelings of longing for longtime PLO chairman Yasser Arafat.

"Today, August 4, the 86th birthday of the great symbol, Yasser Arafat,” he wrote. “The leader of a nation, the story of a revolution. How I miss you!”

After Israel signed the Oslo Accords with the PLO in 1993, Arafat and his terrorist establishment were allowed to emerge from their exile in Tunisia and enter Judea, Samaria and Gaza. Tibi, a medical doctor and activist, was named as Arafat's advisor on Israeli matters.

In November of 1996, Tibi said about Arafat: “All of my moves are made in according to his directions. I believe he places trust in me, and I hope that I justify that.”

Arafat is considered to be the father of modern terrorism and the pioneer of such terror techniques as airplane hijackings. In 2000, he launched the massive terror war that is referred to as "the Second Intifada" or "the Oslo War," which featured hundreds of suicide bombings that killed over 1,200 Jews, most of them civilians, many of them children. The degree to which Tibi's advice about Israel figured into Arafat's decision to launch the war will probably never be known.

When Tibi ran for the Knesset in 2003, he was disqualified by the Elections Committee – but this disqualification was overturned by the High Court, which allowed his Raam-Taal list and Azmi Bishara's Balad into the parliament.

They have been a hostile presence there ever since.

In 2012, Tibi praised the Palestinian Authority’s “martyrs” at a ceremony held on the occasion of "Palestinian Martyrs Day” and sponsored by PA chairman Mahmoud Abbas.

“In the history of the peoples and their battles, the Palestinian shahid (martyr) is the height of glory,” Tibi said at the ceremony. “There is no higher value than death for the sake of Allah. The martyr is the one who breaks through and with his blood draws the journey to freedom and liberation.”

“The shahid is a symbol of the homeland,” he added. “I want to offer my blessings to the thousands of martyrs in the homeland and in exile, and congratulations to our and your shahids inside the Green Line, those whom the occupier wants to refer to as terrorists while we say that there is nothing higher than those who die for the homeland. That occupier is the real terrorist and in Israel he is considered a hero or a cabinet minister.”