Electronic Intifada

EI was founded in 2001, reportedly as a project of the Middle East Cultural and Charitable Society (MECCS), a non-profit organization that claims to provide humanitarian support to displaced Iraqis in the Middle East.

As of December 2020, MECCS’s GuideStar profile said its other projects included the Electronic Iraq News & Analysis website, which was defunct as of February 2021.

In March 2001, an EI article said that the site aimed to “enable a growing, worldwide network of human rights and media activists to challenge myth, spin, and distortion about Palestinians and Palestinian rights disseminated by Israel’s official spokespersons and allied pro-Israeli organizations in North America and Europe.”

As of December 2020, EI’s Twitter page showed over 116,000 followers, while its Facebook page showed more than 364,000 followers.

As of December 2020, EI stated that it was supported primarily by readers’ donations and funding from private foundations. The site also said that its financial information was included in “public 990 Forms filed with the Internal Revenue Service” by the Middle East Cultural and Charitable Society, Inc. (MECCS), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that listed Ali Abuminah as its CEO in 2018.

According to Schedule A of MECCS’s 2018 990 filing, the organization received $597,415 of “public support” for a total of $2,675,432 since 2014.

In November 2010, it was reported that the Dutch aid organization Interchurch Organization for Development Cooperation (ICCO), which was heavily funded by the Dutch government, financed EI. Since 2016, ICCO has reportedly ceased funding a number of anti-Israel non-governmental organizations.

1. Ali Abunimah is a co-founder and executive director of EI. Abunimah has spread anti-Semitism and called for sending targeting systems to Hamas. Abunimah has been described as the “leading American proponent of a one-state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.” The “one-state solution” has been denounced as a scheme to dissolve Israel as the Jewish State.

2. Arjan El Fassed is a co-founder of EI and a former Dutch politician. He worked for the ICCO and various humanitarian organizations. In 2007, El Fassed reportedly authored a fake, widely circulated letter from Nelson Mandela comparing Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to Apartheid South Africa.

3. Laurie King-Irani is a co-founder of EI and a professor of Anthropology at Georgetown University. She has advocated that Israelis be prosecuted internationally under the principles of Universal Jurisdiction used to extradite individuals for crimes against humanity. King-Irani has also accused Israel of “killing Palestinians, deforming the Jewish people, and preventing the American government from staying true to the founding documents of the United States and the principles of the Geneva Conventions.”

4. Nigel Parry is a co-founder of EI and reportedly a former webmaster for Birzeit University in the West Bank. Parry has justified Palestinian terrorism and demonized Israel for assassinating the founder of Hamas, who financed suicide bombers and said: “The use of suicide bombers is the democratic right of Palestinians everywhere.”

5. Steven Salaita is listed as an EI contributor. In 2014, the University of Illinois (U of I) withdrew an offer of employment to Steven Salaita after becoming aware of his anti-Semitic tweets. One tweet, posted shortly after Hamas kidnapped three teenage Israeli high school students, read: "You may be too refined to say it, but I’m not: I wish all the f**king West Bank settlers would go missing.” On July 8, 2014, he tweeted: "There's something profoundly sexual to the Zionist pleasure w/#Israel's aggression. Sublimation through bloodletting, a common perversion."

6. Ilan Pappe is listed as a contributor to EI. Pappé is an international BDS leader and has toured North American campuses to speak at events organized by Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP).