Above photo: Palestinian legal scholar Rabea Eghbariah. Arab Reform Initiative.
The board of directors of the prestigious law journal took the website offline.
After the student editors refused requests to block the article’s publication.
The Columbia Law Review (CLR) board of directors has taken down the publication’s website in response to its editors publishing a lengthy article about the Nakba by a Palestinian legal scholar, The Intercept reported on 4 June.
The CLR publishes scholarly articles, essays, and student notes and is edited by Columbia Law School students.
Five months ago, editors of the CLR had reached out to Palestinian human rights lawyer Rabea Eghbariah, asking him to contribute an article establishing the “Nakba” as a formal legal concept. Palestinians use the word, which means “catastrophe” in Arabic, to refer to the expulsion and dispossession of 750,000 Palestinians by Zionist militias in 1948.
The Nakba cleansed Palestine of most of its indigenous Muslim and Christian inhabitants, paving the way for the establishment of the state of Israel for Jews from Europe and elsewhere.
Eghbariah is completing his doctoral studies at Harvard Law School and has tried landmark Palestinian civil rights cases before the Israeli Supreme Court. A previous article he prepared about the Nakba for the Harvard Law Review was also censored at the last minute.
He noted that in its current case charging Israel with genocide at the International Court of Justice, South Africa’s legal team referred to the Palestinian “ongoing Nakba” as the context for the current genocide case.
Eghbariah’s article for the CLR, which is more than 100 pages long, underwent a rigorous editorial process before publication, with input from 30 CLR members.
“Every single piece that we publish goes through an incredibly, incredibly rigorous publication process. We just have high publication standards,” said Jamie Jenkins, one of the main editors. Jenkins noted the piece was given even more scrutiny because of the controversial nature of the subject matter. “So there was some additional work put into it, but in general, it was the same steps of production.”
However, when the article was scheduled to be published in the May edition, members of the CLR board of directors insisted that publication be delayed and made the unusual request that the article be sent to the rest of the law review for additional scrutiny.
Fearing a draft of the article would be leaked, the editors finally published it on 3 June at 2:30 am.
In response, the board of directors contacted the editors again, requesting the entire May edition to be taken down. When the editorial leadership refused the request, the entire CLR website was taken down and remains offline as of 4 June.
Since the beginning of the war on Gaza, pro-Israel lobby groups and business elites in the US have sought to suppress the speech of Palestinians and those opposing Israel’s war on Gaza, including through police suppression of protests at universities, limiting the scope and reach of pro-Palestinian social media posts on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and by banning Tik Tok.
Despite this, the horrific images of Israeli bombs killing Palestinian women and children over the past seven months have made it difficult for pro-Israel interests to control the perception of events. Israel’s war on Gaza is now widely viewed as genocide.
The Intercept adds that both Eghbariah and numerous editors at the CLR remain committed to the importance of the legal scholarship concerning the Nakba.
“What we need to do is to acknowledge the Nakba as its own independent framework that intersects and overlaps with genocide and apartheid,” Eghbariah told The Intercept while adding that the Nakba also “stands as a distinct framework that can be understood as its own crime with a distinctive historical analytical foundation structure and purpose.”