Ali Abunimah

Ali Abunimah
Born	Ali Hasan Abunimah December 29, 1971 (1971-12-29) Washington, D.C., United States
Occupation	Journalist, activist

Ali Hasan Abunimah (Arabic: علي حسن ابو نعمة‎, Levantine Arabic: [ˈʕali ˈħasan abuˈnɪʕme]) (born December 29, 1971) is a Palestinian American journalist and co-founder of Electronic Intifada, a not-for-profit, independent online publication about the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. Born in Washington D.C., he 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 became a refugee in the 1948 Palestinian exodus. 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.

Abunimah is a graduate of Princeton University and the University of Chicago and is a frequent speaker and commentator on the Middle East, contributing regularly to the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times among other publications. He lives in Chicago, Illinois. He has also served as the Vice-President on the Board of Directors of the Arab American Action Network.

He is a fellow at the Palestine Center.

Published work

Abunimah is author of the book One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, which proposes to revive the idea of one state shared by two peoples.

In response to the Gaza War he wrote the article in The Guardian: "We have no words left". In the article, Abunimah commented about the end of the truce: "But what is Israel's idea of a truce? It is very simple: Palestinians have the right to remain silent while Israel starves them, kills them and continues to violently colonise their land" and "any act of resistance including the peaceful protests against the apartheid wall in the West Bank is always met by Israeli bullets and bombs. There are no rockets launched at Israel from the West Bank, and yet Israel's extrajudicial killings, land theft, settler progroms and kidnappings never stopped for a day during the truce."

American Arab Action Network

Abunimah is vice-president of the American Arab Action Network (AAAN), founded by Rashid Khalidi of Columbia University.

Views on Barack Obama

Abunimah met Barack Obama on a number of occasions in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Abunimah has said that Obama regularly attended pro-Palestinian events during this period, and that he introduced the future president on one occasion at a fundraiser for the Deheishe refugee camp. The last time they spoke was in 2004. According to Abunimah, in the winter of 2004 while running for the Senate, Obama told him, "Hey, I’m sorry I haven’t said more about Palestine right now, but we are in a tough primary race. I’m hoping when things calm down I can be more up front."

This notwithstanding, Abunimah has also written that Obama gradually shifted to a pro-Israel position during his rise to the presidency, a process he says began as early as 2002. He has strongly criticized Obama's approach to Mid-East affairs, writing that the president has "entrenched" the policies of his predecessor, George W. Bush, and has not contributed to "even the pretense of a serious peace effort."

Views on Israel and Palestine

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 Israel-Palestine 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.

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 movement, while also putting forward a positive vision of a single democratic state.

References

• "One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict" ISBN 978-0-8050-8034-6

External links

• Electronic Intifada Official Website
• Abunimah.org Official Website
• Palestine Center
• Profile on Ali Abunimah at The Institute for Middle East Understanding
• Ali Abunimah on Opening of US-Brokered Mideast Peace Talks - video report by Democracy Now!