The detention of Ali Abunimah ahead of a speaking engagement in Zurich, Switzerland and his subsequent deportation has sent shockwaves across the global Palestine solidarity movement. In a lengthy post on X, the Palestinian-American journalist and executive director of the Electronic Intifada news website described his ordeal at the hands of the Swiss security state, illustrating the Orwellian nightmare western democracies have become for those advocating for justice in Palestine.

"On Monday evening I was brought to Zurich airport in handcuffs, in a small metal cage inside a windowless prison van, and led all the way to the plane by police. This is after three days and two nights in a Swiss prison cut off from communication with the outside world, in a cell 24 hours a day with one cell mate, not even permitted to contact my family," the 53-year-old wrote after landing at Istanbul airport following his deportation from Switzerland on 27 January.

I’m free! I wrote this on the plane and I’m posting it just after landing at Istanbul. On Monday evening I was brought to Zurich airport in handcuffs, in a small metal cage inside a windowless prison van and led all the way to the plane by police. This is after three days and two… pic.twitter.com/GKvme89ouR

— Ali Abunimah (@AliAbunimah) January 27, 2025

I use the qualifier "Orwellian" because Abunimah’s arrest is yet another reminder of how the totalitarian state and repressive regimentation of citizens depicted in George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 is increasingly becoming a bitter reality in the west since 7 October 2023.

A modified version of the iconic Doublespeak slogan "War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength", namely "Genocide is self-defence. Victims are perpetrators. Propaganda is truth" continues to be the guiding principle behind hegemonic efforts to justify "Israel's" war of annihilation on Gaza and the accompanying culture of genocide denialism and cracking down on Palestine solidarity in sycophantic, allied states.

The normalisation of authoritarianism

Switzerland is a pioneer of legalised Islamophobia in Europe alongside Austria and France, its anti- Muslim bigotry so petty that in a November 2009 referendum, a constitutional amendment banning the construction of new minarets was approved by 57.5 % of voters. Yes, minarets.

With anti-Palestinian hatred having become one of the most visible expressions of Islamophobia in many western countries since "Israel" began its genocidal onslaught on Gaza, Abunimah’s arrest should come as no surprise. After all, governments from Washington DC to Berlin have spent the last 15 months aiding, abetting, and cheerleading the wholesale destruction of what was already the world’s largest open-air prison and the deaths of over 48,000 Palestinians at the blood-stained hands of "Israel’s" sadistic colonial war machine in what many have described as the Holocaust of our time.

And yet, surprise it still does, as the arrest and the terrifying way it was executed constitutes yet another escalation in how so-called western "democracies" can so easily do away with basic human rights protections when it comes to pleasing "Israel", ultimately contributing to the further normalisation of anti-democratic behaviours under the guise of democracy and further desensitising people to authoritarianism.

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Just how impervious especially young people in the west have become to the allure of authoritarian leadership was exposed in a recent poll which found that over half of the United Kingdom’s Gen Z age cohort are in favour of turning their polity into a dictatorship in which a "strong leader was in charge who did not have to bother with parliament and elections."

It is in this dangerous climate in which even those who are seen as the human races’s future have little to no respect for basic democratic norms that human rights advocates like Ali Abunimah can be abducted off the streets by elected western governments’ shadowy security establishments, incarcerated without charge and unjustly deported.

Treating journalism as a crime

This is not the first time Electronic Intifada staff have been targeted by law enforcement. In October, police raided the London home of its associate editor, Asa Winstanley, and confiscated his electronic devices, with the London Metropolitan police service’s "Counter Terror Command" informing him that he was being investigated under the Terrorism Act.

Winstanley is also the author of the 2023 book Weaponising Antisemitism: How the Israel Lobby Brought Down Jeremy Corbyn, a fact that undoubtedly put him further in the crosshairs of Britain’s Zionist establishment.

The message that Ali Abunimah’s arrest sends is clear: journalism has de-facto become a crime in post-October 7 Europe. Legacy media outlets would disagree, of course, as they have been complicit in Israel’s genocide from day one by siding with the perpetrator and dehumanising Palestinians in their mendacious reporting in a hitherto unprecedented manner.

One of Switzerland’s most respected news publications, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ), was particularly sloppy and slanderous in its coverage of Abunimah’s arrest.

In what can only be described as a hit piece, the author brands him as an "extremist", a designation undoubtedly arrived at by relying on the comments of two Zionist propagandists: the board member of an obscure group by the name of "Never Again is Now" in whose eyes the journalist and his platform are "a mouthpiece of Hamas" and the security official responsible for Abunimah’s detention, Mario Fehr, who is quoted as saying about the self-described non-religious person that is Abunimah: "We do not want an Islamist Jew-hater who calls for violence in Switzerland."

Investigative news website The Grayzone did a deep dive into Fehr, who is the head of Zurich’s Department of Security, and what it calls his "allegiance to the Zionist narrative", exposing his virulently racist views on Muslims, Arabs and Palestinians which inarguably led him to go after Abunimah in the authoritarian and dehumanising manner that he did, using bogus claims to falsely imprison him.

It is worth mentioning that the alleged "mouthpiece of Hamas" that the Electronic Intifada is being defamed as has provided a crucial space for victim-centric, first-person narratives from Gaza like no other online publication has during the world’s first live-streamed and most documented genocide in history, something western media with their selective infatuation with the perpetrator’s perspective have routinely refused to do.

Condemnation from human rights defenders

The willful ignorance, virulent Islamophobia, and vile anti-Palestinian racism of mainstream western media and the fact that they can knowingly publish defamatory lies and get away with it have also contributed to the ease with which increasingly authoritarian states in the service of the Zionist entity’s continued violent colonisation of Palestine can persecute anti-Zionist activists like Abunimah.

How worried we should be about this latest example of state-sponsored persecution of Palestine advocacy in the so-called "free world" can be gauged by the adjectives used in the reactions of human rights defenders. Irene Khan, the UN special rapporteur on freedom of expression, called the news of Abunimah's arrest "shocking", Geneva-based Euro-Med Monitor said it was "extremely concerning" and Amnesty International described it as "alarming."

Yet, despite these unambiguous condemnations from the guardians of the international human rights order, it is safe to say that crackdowns on Palestine solidarity will sadly continue. As long as not only peace, but also justice for Palestinians (a distinction western pundits routinely fail to make) and nothing short of their full liberation from the yoke of settler-colonial Israeli domination remain elusive, the global Palestine movement will keep standing up for the people whom former Tunisian president Moncef Marzouki recently referred to as "the last Arabs who are fighting for their first independence."