Columbia Law Review editors refused to censor an article on the Nakba. Board of directors then took down the site
Last November, the Harvard Law Review made the unprecedented decision to kill a fully edited essay prior to publication. The author, human rights lawyer Rabea Eghbariah, was to be the first Palestinian legal scholar published in the prestigious journal.
As The Intercept reported at the time, Eghbariah’s essay — an argument for establishing “Nakba,” the expulsion, dispossession, and oppression of Palestinians, as a formal legal concept that widens its scope — faced extraordinary editorial scrutiny and eventual censorship.
When the Harvard publication spiked his article, editors from another Ivy League law school reached out to Eghbariah. Students from the Columbia Law Review solicited a new article from the scholar and, upon receiving it, decided to edit it and prepare it for publication.
Now, eight months into Israel’s onslaught against Gaza, Eghbariah’s work has once again been stifled — this time by the Columbia Law Review’s board of directors, a group of law school professors and prominent alumni that oversee the students running the review.
Eghbariah’s paper for the Columbia Law Review, or CLR, was published on its website in the early hours of Monday morning. The journal’s board of directors responded by pulling the entire website offline. The homepage on Monday morning read “Website under maintenance.”
According to Eghbariah, he worked with editors at the Columbia Law Review for over five months on the 100-plus-page text.
“The attempts to silence legal scholarship on the Nakba by subjecting it to an unusual and discriminatory process are not only reflective of a pervasive and alarming Palestine exception to academic freedom,” Eghbariah told The Intercept, “but are also a testament to a deplorable culture of Nakba denialism.” [Continue reading…]
This article was *censored* by the board of directors of the Columbia Law Review because it was about the Nakba. They preferred to take down their whole website rather than let you read Rabea Eghbariah's analysis.
Get it here instead https://t.co/iDjDdRWwyz— Mona Chalabi (@MonaChalabi) June 3, 2024