Ali Hasan Abunimah (, 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. 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).
Early life and education
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.
Activism
Electronic Intifada
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.
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 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. "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."