Short answer: No. Ali Abunimah does not support Israel. He is a Palestinian-American journalist and the co-founder and executive director of The Electronic Intifada, and he has spent over two decades as one of the most prominent advocates against Israel, calling it an apartheid, settler-colonial state, backing a single democratic state "from the river to the sea" instead of Israel's existence as a Jewish state, and actively supporting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. As of August 2026, he remains active and outspoken on this position.
What Ali Abunimah has actually said and done
- 2001: Co-founded The Electronic Intifada with Arjan El Fassed, Laurie King and Nigel Parry, according to Wikipedia. He serves as its executive director, running the outlet's Palestinian-perspective coverage that is consistently critical of Israeli policy.
- 2006: Published his book "One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse," arguing for a single democratic state across Israel and the occupied territories rather than a separate Jewish state alongside a Palestinian one, per Wikipedia.
- 2014: Published "The Battle for Justice in Palestine," advocating BDS against Israel as a strategy for Palestinian self-determination, according to Wikipedia.
- January 25-27, 2025: Abunimah was detained by plainclothes individuals on the street in Zurich and held by Zurich cantonal police, which deported him from Switzerland on January 27, 2025 after issuing an entry ban.
- 2026: A Zurich court ruled that the arrest and entry ban had violated the Swiss constitution and the European Convention on Human Rights, as Abunimah wrote in The Electronic Intifada and as The Canary also reported.
- March 2026: The Swiss federal government formally conceded that the entry ban and expulsion order against Abunimah was issued without supporting evidence and in violation of established procedure, following a parliamentary report that found political interference by then-Fedpol director Nicoletta della Valle, according to The Electronic Intifada.
- April 2026: In an Electronic Intifada piece, Abunimah wrote that Israel, funded and armed by the United States, was "destroying Palestinian life in Gaza, accelerating ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and expanding its war across the region, from Lebanon to Iran," arguing that "two-state solution" language served as cover for continued occupation and apartheid, per The Electronic Intifada.
- June 2026: Continued active publication criticizing Israel on The Electronic Intifada, including a June 3, 2026 piece on a UN report regarding Gaza detainees and a June 19, 2026 piece on regional escalation involving Israel, Lebanon and Iran, according to his Electronic Intifada author page.
Who is Ali Abunimah
Ali Abunimah, born in 1971, is a Palestinian-American journalist and activist based in Chicago. His mother is from the village of Lifta, now part of Israel, and became a refugee in the 1948 Palestinian exodus. His father, from the West Bank village of Battir, was a Jordanian diplomat who served as Jordan's ambassador to the United Nations. He is best known as co-founder and executive director of The Electronic Intifada, a website launched in 2001 that publishes Palestinian-perspective news and commentary and is consistently critical of Israeli government policy, framing it in terms of apartheid and settler-colonialism. He has authored two books arguing against Israel's existence as a separate Jewish state in favor of a single binational state, and he supports the BDS movement against Israel.
In January 2025, Swiss authorities detained and deported him from Zurich and imposed an entry ban. Swiss courts, and later the Swiss government itself, found the ban unjustified and improperly influenced by a Fedpol official, a reversal that Abunimah and The Electronic Intifada have covered extensively as vindication. Through mid-2026 he remained an active, outspoken critic of Israeli policy in Gaza, the West Bank, and the wider region.
The bottom line
Ali Abunimah does not support Israel. He is one of the most prominent and consistent critics of Israeli government policy in English-language media, an architect of the one-state alternative to Israel's existence as a Jewish state, and an active BDS advocate, a position he has held publicly for over two decades and continued to voice through mid-2026.
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Last updated August 2026. We update these profiles as the record changes.
