MECCS/EI Project
1507 E. 53rd Street - #500
Chicago, IL
60615
Email : info@electronicintifada.net URL: Website
Website that reports on the Arab-Israeli Mideast conflict "from a Palestinian perspective"
Launched in February 2001, Electronic Intifada (EI) is a not-for-profit, independent website focusing on “the question of Palestine, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the economic, political, legal, and human dimensions of Israel's … occupation of Palestinian territories.” Specifically, EI seeks to provide an alternative to what it deems “the prevailing pro-Israeli slant in U.S. media coverage by offering information from a Palestinian perspective.” With close ties to the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), Electronic Intifada refers to Israel’s 1948 creation as Al Nakba (Arabic for “The Catastrophe”). While EI typically draws a quarter-million visitors to its website each month, that figure soars to approximately one million per month during times of acute crisis in the Middle East, such as Israel’s war with Lebanon in the summer of 2006.
EI’s Executive Director (and co-founder) is Ali Abunimah, who is also a member of ISM and currently serves as Vice President of the Arab American Action Network. In Abunimah’s view, Palestinian violence and terrorism is caused entirely by Israel's “land confiscation,” its “ongoing orgy of violence,” and its “routine human-rights abuses” that have “made life under a seemingly endless occupation so intolerable.”
Another EI co-founder is Arjan El Fassed, a former researcher at the Nablus-based Center for Palestine Research & Studies, a contributor to the Palestinian Independent Commission for Citizens' Rights in Ramallah, and the author of the 1999 book Institutional Design and Prospects for Palestinian Democratic Transition. El Fassed is also affiliated with Al-Awda (a.k.a. the Palestine Right to Return Coalition).
A fourth co-founder is Nigel Parry, the former webmaster for BirZeit University which is located in the West Bank.
EI reveres the memory of Rachel Corrie, an American member of ISM who in March 2003 was accidentally killed while trying to block an Israeli bulldozer from destroying a Palestinian home that was concealing a tunnel through which Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists were receiving smuggled weapons. In her article “Of broken Bodies and Unbreakable Laws” (published a week after Corrie’s death), Laurie King-Irani wrote: “Time and again Rachel … put her body in the path of the instruments of a brutal military occupation in order to defend and protect those rights and their holders: Palestinian men, women, and children, all of whom lack even the most basic legal protection of citizenship, since they also lack a state.”
EI has two sister websites -- Electronic Iraqand Electronic Lebanon -- which focus principally on alleged American and Israeli transgressions in those two nations.
According to the Marxist, anti-American journalist Alexander Cockburn: “There are a number of excellent news outlets for those who want unjaundiced reporting ... The Electronic Intifada ... is trusted.” In 2003, EI received the “Voices for Peace" award from the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, in recognition of its commitment “to bringing the concerns, voices, and experiences of the Iraqi and Palestinian peoples to audiences the world over via the Internet.”