Harvard student censored for 'war on Gaza continuation of Nakba'
5 Min Read
Rabea Eghbariah sees "Israel’s" war on Gaza as part of a continuing Nakba to destroy Palestinian life on land that the occupation wants to fully occupy.
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Palestinian human rights lawyer and Harvard Law School student Rabea Eghbariah (Harvard Law)
A Monday morning was supposed to be a good day for Palestinian human rights lawyer Rabea Eghbariah after his article went online. “It was supposed to be a very exciting moment,” he remembered. However, shortly after, it became inaccessible and the website was “under maintenance”.
Suddenly, he realizes it's much more than a maintenance bug. “It was very alarming that they would go to that extent,” he said.
His article was censored. But why?
The Harvard Law School doctoral candidate was working for the legal organization Adalah where he has represented Palestinian clients and worked on a landmark case to fight "Israel’s" cyber unit and fought to reunite families separated by "Israel".
“You have an invisible map in your head where you know what laws to invoke depending on the case,” Eghbariah said, “and this is not intuitive at all.”
The Nation has released the article that the Harvard Law Review declined to publish in its entirety.
He explained, “It’s kind of a system of domination by fragmentation,” adding, “We become trained in doing these legal gymnastics, and flipping from one framework to the other, without sometimes even reflecting about the nature of this.”
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 June 3.
— Al Mayadeen English (@MayadeenEnglish) June 5, 2024
Human rights lawyer Rabea Eghbariah's paper, intended for publication in the #Columbia Law Review, was… pic.twitter.com/Ojs6jUmobB
To articulate this, in his piece, he argues that the term Nakba speaks of the layered and overlapping legal entanglements of Palestinian life when self-determination is banned.
He states that the Nakba of 1948 is not a historical point in time, as he cites his grandparents' survival of the Nakba in his research. He sees "Israel’s" war on Gaza as part of a continuing Nakba to destroy Palestinian life on land that the occupation wants to occupy.
“It’s an organic framework that has been developed in Palestine to reference the ramifications and ongoing nature of the Nakba of 1948,” Eghbariah said, noting, “What the genocide moment and discourse did to that is that it actually made me think about it in legal terms.”
'Provocative' screening
The Guardian explains that US laws are made through scholars revealing out a new approach in a law review and practitioners trying it, which can lead to case law or legislative efforts.
Diala Shamas, an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights, told The Guardian, “Those ideas get refined in the process.”
“It’s provocative, and it’s exactly what scholarship should be doing. It’s exactly what Palestinian scholars need to be doing.”
The #Harvard Law Review (HLR) has banned the publication of an article titled: "The Ongoing Nakba: Towards a Legal Framework for Palestine."
— Al Mayadeen English (@MayadeenEnglish) November 26, 2023
Written by #Palestinian human rights lawyer Rabea Eghbariah, a Harvard Law School doctoral candidate, the piece had passed editorial… pic.twitter.com/IKqQ8JSR8m
Student editors at the Columbia Law Review contacted Eghbariah after October 7, given the fact that no Palestinian author had previously written for the journal. 427 footnotes were added to the piece after it went through “at least” five edits from about a dozen editors at the student-run journal.
Despite these efforts, Eghbariah's work was once again suppressed.
Some editors, as per AP, “expressed concerns about threats to their careers and safety if it were to be published,” and when they did publish it, the school board claimed in a statement after restoring the website that it “received multiple credible reports that a secretive process was used to edit” the article, which is why they took it down.
Jameel Jaffer, director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at the university, stated that “nuking the website is a drastic, extraordinary step that requires much more justification than has been supplied by the directors thus far."
The law school journal’s faculty and alumni board had shuttered the website for most of the week rather than publicize Eghbariah’s 105-page article, titled "Toward the Nakba as a Legal Concept." In his piece, Eghbariah proposed a new framework to explain the complex, fragmented legal regimes governing Palestinians.
He wanted to bring the word Nakba – which translates from Arabic as catastrophe and is better known for describing the expulsion and dispossession of Palestinians in 1948 – to the center of a new legal conversation.
“What is so scary about Palestinians having the right to narrate their own realities?” Eghbariah asks, especially as student-run journals rarely ever hear from boards.
Columbia Law Review Board of Directors has taken down the entire website after @RabeaEghbariah’s article on Nakba went live.
— Sarah Schwartz (@Sarah__Schwartz) June 4, 2024
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
“It’s unprecedented to even interfere in editorial processes,” he said.
Prominent academic Noah Feldman and author of To Be a Jew Today is one of Eghbariah’s advisors at Harvard Law School, and he called the lawyer “one of the most brilliant students I’ve taught in 20 years as a law professor," asserting that he “certainly” stood by his assessment of Eghbariah’s talents.
With that being said, Eghbariah expresses hope that this debacle will yield more attention to the genocide in Gaza.
“There is a continuum between the material reality in Gaza and shutting down these debates,” he said. “They’re not separate issues.”
“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 last week, “but are also a testament to a deplorable culture of Nakba denialism.”
