Electronic Intifada

Introduction

EI is an online platform that publishes viciously anti-Israel and antisemitic articles, promoting BDS campaigns, as well as the one-state formula. Founder Ali Abunimah has called Zionism “one of the worst forms of anti-Semitism in existence today” and claims “Supporting Zionism is not atonement for the Holocaust, but its continuation in spirit.”

Profile

Country/TerritoryUnited States
Websitehttp://electronicintifada.net

Funding

  • EI does not publish financial information, reflecting a lack of transparency and accountability.
  • EI is a project of the Middle East Cultural and Charitable Society (MECCS).
    • In 2020, MECCS had a total revenue of $557,349; $431,116 was provided to EI.
  • NGO Monitor revealed that between 2006 and 2009, €150,000 was provided by the Dutch government from ICCO, a Dutch inter-church development organization. In 2010, ICCO provided an additional €50,000 to EI (latest available financial information).
    • In November 2010, Dutch FM Uri Rosenthal told the Jerusalem Post, that he would “look into the matter personally.”
    • In January 2011, Minister Rosenthal had a “frank and open discussion” with ICCO, noting that EI’s activities are “directly contrary to Dutch government policy.” The Minister dismissed ICCO claims that its funding of EI comes from private donations as “disingenuous.”
    • ICCO refused to change its policy and defended support for BDS and EI as “a peaceful and legal way to push for an end to the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories.”

Activities

  • Electronic Intifada (EI) is a major online media outlet active in promoting the Palestinian agenda with news articles and commentary.
  • Founded in 2001 to counter Israel’s “orchestrated media campaign to spin news reports to its own advantage.”
  • Co-founder and executive director of EI is Ali Abunimah, a leading advocate of BDS (boycotts, divestments and sanctions) campaigns against Israel and the one-state solution.
  • In December 2010, Maureen Claire Murphy, senior editor of Electronic Intifada and a former Al-Haq employee, was subpoenaed by the FBI to appear before a Federal Grand Jury for her work with the Palestine Solidarity Group.

Political Advocacy

  • EI submissions regularly utilize highly biased and politicized rhetoric, accusing Israel of “apartheid,” “ethnic cleansing,” “war crimes,” “crimes against humanity,” “genocide,” “massacres” and the “Judaization of Jerusalem.”
  • Publishes articles in which terrorist attacks are described as “allegedly” having taken place and condemning Israel for actions taken to protect the lives of civilians.
  • In November 2022, EI hosted a podcast titled “How Zionists collaborated with the Nazis.” According to the podcast, “Zionists during that time not only were not bothered about the Holocaust, they actively tried to stop anyone who wanted to provide a refuge from doing so.”
  • In August 2022, Abunimah stated in an interview that “Israel always has to kill Palestinians because it is an illegitimate settler-colonial regime that faces constant resistance from the people whose land it is occupying, colonizing and stealing…the regular shedding of Palestinian blood is a necessary component of maintaining the existence of Israel.”
  • In January 2022, EI assistant editor Tamara Nassar published an article titled “Palestinians fight ongoing ethnic cleansing in Sheikh Jarrah.” According to Nassar, diplomats who staged photo-ops in Sheikh Jarrah “represent governments that arm, fund or support Israel in other ways that make them directly complicit in the crimes they purport to oppose.”
  • In November 2021, Electronic Intifada senior editor Maureen Claire Murphy published an article condemning the decision by the Israeli Ministry to designate six Palestinian NGOs, According to the article, “Terror designations promote tolerance of apartheid…the terror designations may well achieve the desired aim of cutting off funding and denying access to financial services, starving the organizations of the resources necessary to carry out their work.”
  • In June 2021, EI Associate Editor Nora Barrows participated in a conference, “Challenging Apartheid in Palestine: Reclaiming the Narrative, Formulating A Vision,” hosted by the Istanbul Sabahattin Zaim University. Conference organizers and sponsors, as well as other participants, were linked to various terror groups, including Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).
  • In August 2020, Electronic Intifada published an article by Samidoun coordinator Khaled Barakat writing that “Association with the Palestinian armed resistance and its political parties is not a cause for shame or a justification for repression…boycott campaigns and popular organizing are not alternatives to armed resistance but interdependent tactics of struggle. Any meaningful defense of the Palestinian people must clearly uphold the right to resist colonialism by all means, including armed struggle – and support efforts to remove Palestinian resistance groups from lists of ‘terrorist organizations.’”
  • In May 2018, Maureen Clare Murphy, the managing editor of EI, published an article alleging“Israel[‘s] slaughter[] [of] Palestinians marching to return.” Murphy ignored the violent nature of the protests, which consisted of an organized armed attack on the Israeli border and IDF positions, attempts to destroy and breach the border fence, and sustained arson, rocket, and mortar attacks on Israeli civilian communities.
  • In May 2018, Ali Abunimah participated in a conference organized by BADIL titled the “Palestinian Freedom Conference: Overcoming the Ongoing Nakba” discussing how “In late 1947, colonial Zionist paramilitary forces began the process of ethnically cleansing more than 750,000 Palestinians…70 years later…in Palestine a process of ongoing ethnic cleansing via occupation, colonisation, apartheid, and cruel siege continues apace, with no intervention from the international community.”
  • Published a May 2018 article by Ilan Pappe referring to the “barbarism and dehumanization” of 1948 when “Israeli forces committed some of the worst atrocities in the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine…some leading Zionists described them as Nazi actions.”
    • Ilan Pappe, an Israeli academic at the University of Exeter, is a supporter of BDS and violence against Israel, stating “I support Hamas in its resistance against the Israeli occupation.” Pappe’s article “Genocide in Gaza” refers to the “Palestinian resistance in front of Israeli occupation” and uses terms such as “imprisoning Gaza,” “massacres,” “ethnic cleansing,” and “genocide politics” to describe the actions of the Israeli government. 
  • Posted a May 15, 2015 article by the Palestinian Boycott National Committee, calling the founding of the State of Israel a “Nakba” or “catastrophe,” and claiming that to “Palestinians everywhere, and in Gaza in particular, the 1948 Nakba is ongoing.” The article further accuses Israel of “war crimes,” “crimes against humanity,” and “violations of international law” and urges readers to take up the BDS call by  “pressuring universities, banks and pension funds to divest from companies profiting from Israel’s occupation and war crimes” and “[p]ressure governments to  impose military embargoes and trade sanctions” against Israel.
  • Following the kidnapping of three Israeli teenagers in June 2014, Rana Baker, a writer for EI, posted on Twitter:

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BDS Activities

  • EI has an extensive section on BDS, including academic, consumer, cultural, and church boycotts, commercial divestment, and government sanctions against Israel. Issues reports on BDS developments and “victories.”
  • In September 2022, Electronic Intifada published an article on Booking.com that drew false equivalencies between Russia/Ukraine and Israel. According to the article, “While Booking.com has refused to remove listings of accommodations located in settlements built illegally on stolen Palestinian land, it has swiftly taken anti-Russian measures following the invasion of Ukraine…Boycotting a country that has violated international law has become justifiable and even a moral duty, but apparently only if this aligns with US interests and sanctions policy.”
  • In January 2022, Abunimah participated in a panel titled “Yes, Canada arms and funds Israel.” According to Abunimah, “Canada presents itself as a benign global promoter of human rights and gender equality, when in reality it is – just like Israel – a settler-colonial state founded on the destruction and dispossession of Indigenous peoples.”
  • In September 2018, Joel Reinstein, member of Jewish Voice for Peace, wrote an article for EI encouraging people to support BDS stating, “Without worrying about whether someone has good intentions, BDS is how we separate the wheat from the chaff, and nothing other than BDS can do that. People’s lives are at stake, and the US gives $3.8 billion every year that Israel uses to kill Palestinians. Anyone who’s going to be part of the US state must be held to a strict standard, and respecting the boycott is the bare minimum.”
  • In July 2018, Abunimah published an article supporting the “Control of Economic Activity (Occupied territories)” bill that would make it illegal for Irish citizens and residents to import or sell “settlement goods” or to provide or attempt to provide “settlement services.”
  • In June 2018, Adri Nieuwhof, a BDS Activist and Electronic Intifada contributor, wrote an article for EI regarding a report by  Al-Haq, Association France Palestine Solidarité (AFPS), International Federation of Human Rights (FIDH), and Ligue des droits de l’Hommes (LdH), titled “The Jerusalem light-rail and how French companies contribute to the settlement of Occupied Palestinian Territory.” Despite French court rulings that building the Jerusalem Light Rail is not illegal, Nieuwhof claimed, “The colonial character of the light rail is clear from the underlying political intentions of the master plan as mentioned in the report: to unify Jerusalem under Israeli sovereignty and to achieve Jewish demographic supremacy.”

Ali Abunimah

  • Abunimah has called Zionistm “one of the worst forms of anti-Semitism in existence today,” claiming that it “dehumanizes its victims, denies their history, and has a cult-like worship of ethnoracial purity” (Twitter; October 26, 2010). He further wrote “That is something Zionism shares with anti-Semitism, a disdain for actual Jewish culture and life as it existed.”
  • Abunimah frequently makes Holocaust references in his comments. He calls Gaza a “concentration camp” and repeated a claim that IDF statements are the words “of a Nazi.”. He calls Gaza a “ghetto for surplus non-Jews,” compares the Israeli press to “Der Sturmer,” and claims “Supporting Zionism is not atonement for the Holocaust, but its continuation in spirit.” He calls Gaza a “concentration camp” and repeated a claim that IDF statements are the words “of a Nazi.”
  • In February 2019, Abunimah accused Israel of poisoning the Palestinian’s water supply
  • In November 2018, Abunimah wrote that he was mourning for the six Palestinians who died in Gaza during an Israeli military operation. Abunimah ignored the fact that the six individuals were members of Hamas, a terrorist organization designated as such by the U.S., Canada, the EU, and Israel.
  • Referred to Nobel laureate and holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel as a “moral fraud and huckster.” (Twitter; March 3, 2015)
  • In response to an initiative to recognize Yom Kippur as an official United Nations holiday, Abunimah wrote, “Making Yom Kippur a UN holiday to honor the genocidal ‘state’ of Israel would be sure way to increase global anti-Jewish sentiment.” (Twitter; August 27, 2014)
  • He said that in order to actualize the “one-state” solution, “coercion is necessary.” He  dismisses Jewish concerns of living under an Arab majority as “irrational, racist fears.”
  • During the 2014 Gaza War, Abunimah tweeted: “I again call on the EU to send guidance and targeting systems to defense forces in Gaza so resistance can hit ‘IDF’ terror bases accurately.” (July 7, 2014)
  • Labels PA President Mahmud Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad as “collaborators”, and PA participation in peace talks as “collaboration.” Collaboration is punishable by death in the PA and Gaza.

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Further Reading