"Toward Nakba as a Legal Concept": Meet the Palestinian Lawyer Censored by Columbia and Harvard

The website of the Columbia Law Review was taken down by its board of directors on Monday after student editors refused a request from the board to halt the publication of an academic article written by Palestinian human rights lawyer Rabea Eghbariah titled “Toward Nakba as a Legal Concept.” The article argues for the Nakba to be developed as a unique legal framework, related to but distinct from other processes defined under modern international law, including apartheid and genocide. This is not the first time that Eghbariah’s legal scholarship has been censored by an Ivy League institution. The Harvard Law Review last year refused to publish a similar, shorter article it had solicited from Eghbariah even after it was initially accepted, fully edited and fact-checked. Eghbariah calls the abrupt rejection of his work “offensive,” “unprofessional” and “discriminatory,” and says “it is really unfortunate to see how this is playing out and the extent to which the board of directors is willing to go to shut down and silence Palestinian scholarship. … What are they afraid of? Of Palestinians narrating their own reality, speaking their own truth?”