Columbia Law Review website taken down over article on Palestine

By Al Mayadeen English
Source: The Intercept
4 Jun 2024 15:01
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The Columbia Law Review's website has been completely removed from the digital sphere, marking a dramatic stance following its refusal to remove an article that delves into the Nakba.

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Columbia Law Review’s site was taken offline after publishing an article to develop legal frameworks for the Nakba. (@ColumLRev)

In a controversial move, the Columbia Law Review's website was taken down entirely following its refusal to delete an article on Palestine, The Intercept reported on Monday.

The article, penned by human rights lawyer Rabea Eghbariah, faced exceptional editorial scrutiny and eventual censorship by the Harvard Law Review last November.

Columbia Law Review Board of Directors has taken down the entire website after @RabeaEghbariah’s article on Nakba went live.

This is the second time Rabea has been censored by a prominent law journal which commissioned his work. @ColumLRev please explain how this is anything… pic.twitter.com/rkkyn9kcaM
— Sarah Schwartz (@Sarah__Schwartz) June 4, 2024

Eghbariah, slated to be the first Palestinian legal researcher published in the prestigious journal, saw his work met with censorship once again, this time from the board of directors of the Columbia Law Review.

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Eghbariah's essay, advocating for the formal recognition of Nakba – the expulsion, dispossession, and oppression of Palestinians – as a legal concept, underwent intense editorial scrutiny and eventual censorship when it was rejected by the Harvard publication.

However, editors from another prestigious law school approached Eghbariah, with students from the Columbia Law Review commissioning a new article from him. Despite these efforts, Eghbariah's work has once again been suppressed, this time by the Columbia Law Review's board of directors, comprising law school professors and notable alumni overseeing the review's student editors.

This most recent repression by the Columbia Law Review Board of Directors is a shameful attempt to silence groundbreaking legal scholarship shining light on the catastrophe of Zionism and the ways in which is fragments, displaces, and disempowers Palestinian society. pic.twitter.com/iMjB37QJIp
— Harvard Undergraduate PSC (@HarvxrdPSC) June 3, 2024

Eghbariah's paper, intended for publication in the Columbia Law Review, was released on its website early Monday morning. However, the board of directors reacted by taking the entire website offline, displaying a "Website under maintenance" message on the homepage.

He disclosed that he collaborated with editors at the Columbia Law Review for over five months on the extensive text, which spanned over 100 pages.

"Nakba is an extended present that promises to continue in the future," #Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.

The Zionist movement didn't only colonize space, but also time. Time has stood still in #Palestine since the 1948 Nakba, where attempts at cleansing the land of its people… pic.twitter.com/d4QjiMFc8Z
— Al Mayadeen English (@MayadeenEnglish) May 15, 2024

“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 said, as quoted by The Intercept, “but are also a testament to a deplorable culture of Nakba denialism.”