Ali Abunimah

He has appeared on many television discussion programs on CNN, MSNBC, PBS, and other networks, and in a number of documentaries about the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, including Collecting Stories from Exile: Chicago Palestinians Remember 1948 (1999).

Born in Washington, D.C., Abunimah spent his early years in the United Kingdom and Belgium before returning to the United States to attend college.

His mother is originally from the village of Lifta, now part of Israel, but she became a refugee in the 1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight.

His father is from the village of Battir, now in the West Bank, and is a former Jordanian diplomat who served as ambassador to the United Nations.

According to his friend Max Blumenthal, in an article for the Mondoweiss website, part of the Abunimah family members say their forefathers came from Spain to Palestine following the fall of Granada in 1492.

Abunimah received degrees from Princeton University and the University of Chicago.

He began participating in activism while at Princeton.

While at the University of Chicago, his work as a researcher for a community-based organization resulted in encounters with that city's Arab community, with which he became actively involved.

This in turn brought him in contact with the Arab American Action Network, of which he would later serve as vice president and of which he remains a board member.

"The Arab-Zionist conflict did not begin in 1948 but rather long before it," Abunimah maintained in a 2009 lecture.

It began, he said, "when the Zionists came to Palestine in the beginning of the last century, and was exacerbated with the appearance of the refugee problem."

He made the following argument: "If for example the Jews returned to their original countries, those countries would be shocked, and those are their countries who exported them to Palestine. So how can these countries, most of which sing the praises of democracy and human rights, be silent about the right of return of the Palestinian people, the people and owners of the land, to their villages and cities?"

He also claimed that "Zionism is strong, but it has not been renewed or rooted in the land of Palestine, and the Palestinians hold their land and identities dearly and are on their way to a majority."

Ali Hasan Abunimah (علي حسن ابو نعمة, Arabic: ; born December 29, 1971) is a Palestinian-American journalist who has been described as "the leading American proponent of a one-state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict".

A resident of Chicago who contributes regularly to publications such as the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, he has served as the vice-president on the board of directors of the Arab American Action Network, is a fellow at the Palestine Center, and is a co-founder of The Electronic Intifada website.

Abunimah is one of the founders of The Electronic Intifada website, a non-profit online publication which covers the Israeli–Palestinian conflict from a Palestinian perspective, which was established in 2001.

Abunimah believed that Gilad Shalit – an Israeli soldier captured in 2006 via cross-border Hamas raid into the Israeli town of Kerem Shalom, released in a prisoner exchange in 2011 – should not have been considered a captive but rather a prisoner of war (POW).

As such, he does not believe that Shalit would necessarily be entitled to an ICRC visit or contact with his family – both of which Hamas routinely denied.

Abunimah said that if he were to be considered a POW, his status would fall under the guidelines set forth at the Third Geneva Convention.

Under these guidelines, the right of the ICRC to visit prisoners of war is never unconditional, and the ICRC never claims an unconditional right.

Abunimah noted that such visits are subject to the measure which the detaining powers consider essential to their security – which is the justification given by Hamas for denying visitation.

Allowing visits presents the risk of revealing the location of the Israeli POW, and would run the risk of an Israeli military attack.

Hamas would not have been obligated to release any POW until the end of hostilities or until the POW is severely injured or in critical condition.

In 2009, Abunimah wrote an article entitled, "Israeli Jews and the one-state solution," covering some of the same arguments as he raised in his book, One Country.

Abunimah's position is that the two-state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict has "no chance of being implemented" and has been superseded by a "de facto binational state" under Israeli control.

He supports the creation of a single democratic state, based on the equality of citizens and taking into account the legitimate concerns of Israel's Jewish population.

Naomi Zeveloff has described Abunimah as "the leading American proponent of a one-state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, which calls for a shared democratic state from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River. It is a state, in Abunimah's view, in which all residents of Israel and the territories it now occupies would enjoy equal rights and obligations. But in the eyes of his detractors, Abunimah's idea is tantamount to the destruction of the State of Israel, a proposal that would obliterate the Jewish character of the country in favor of majority Arab rule."

Abunimah opposes Zionism, which he describes as "a dying project, in retreat and failing to find new recruits."

He argues that Zionism's promotion of Jewish self-determination in Israel and Palestine's "intermixed population" has the effect of maintaining "a status quo in which Israeli Jews exercise power in perpetuity."

Abunimah's position is that Palestinians should pursue coercive measures against Israel such as the non-violent Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (B.D.S.) movement.

He has acknowledged the potential for anti-Jewish violence in Israel should a one-state solution be realized, stating in a Q&A at a 2009 conference at Hampshire College: "You can never have an absolute guarantee about what the future will be like. ... You cannot guarantee that if there was a one-state solution it wouldn't, it would be…the best scenario is if it's more in the direction of South Africa and Northern Ireland than Zimbabwe. But we couldn't rule out, you know, some disastrous situation, like Zimbabwe."

Abunimah has given two theories about the strong relationship between the U.S. and Israel: first, he said Israel plays an important role in U.S. imperialism by allowing it to control the Middle East and their resources; second, he believes "there are powerful organizations and networks that consider support for Israel very important and they influence the politics of the United States through elections and contributions to political campaigns to make candidates adopt to Israel's position."

In 2010, he tweeted that "Supporting Zionism is not atonement for the Holocaust, but its continuation in spirit" and has also said "Zionism is one of the worst forms of anti-Semitism in existence today".

In his opinion, the Israeli press is comparable to Der Stürmer and IDF statements are the word "of a Nazi" and Gaza is a "ghetto for surplus non-Jews".

His reference was to a June 2011 tweet by Treviño about the Gaza flotilla: "Dear IDF: If you end up shooting any Americans on the new Gaza flotilla – well, most Americans are cool with that. Including me."

Responding to this and several other articles and posts by Abunimah about Treviño's hiring, the CiF Watch website cited Abunimah's tweet calling for a "third intifada" as evidence of "selective outrage" and "double standards."

"Ultimately, I believe," he wrote in January 2012, "the logic and inevitability of a single state will be accepted. As in South Africa and Northern Ireland, any just solution will involve a difficult and lengthy process of renegotiating political, economic and cultural relationships. But that is where the debate, unstoppably, is shifting."

In addition, he also approvingly cites comparisons of Israel to Nazi Germany made by Gerald Kaufman, and has reportedly made them himself.

In an Electronic Intifada posting dated May 13, 2012, Abunimah praised the documentary film The Great Book Robbery, which "tells the story of the systematic looting in 1948 of tens of thousands of Palestinian books in a joint operation by the Haganah – what became the Israeli army – and the Israeli national library. ... Using eyewitness interviews, secretly shot footage, and historic images, and shots of the books themselves, The Great Book Robbery tells the story of the books and their owners, despite ongoing Israeli official denial.

In an August 2012 article for Al Jazeera headlined "What's gone wrong at The Guardian?", Abunimah criticized the British newspaper's hiring of Joshua Treviño as a political correspondent, calling Treviño "a Republican party operative, paid political consultant and ideologue for hire" with a "propensity to call for violence."