In the past nine months, national and local authorities in the United States have tried to suppress and criminalise Palestinian activism and expressions of identity. This crackdown has affected various sectors, including politics, business, civil society, higher education, culture and others.

Security forces have quelled peaceful protests, officials have made sweeping accusations of anti-Semitism against protesters, and various public figures have ridiculously labelled wearing the Palestinian chequered keffiyeh scarf and using the word intifada (Arabic for uprising) code for “wiping out Israel”.

Israel and its national and local American allies wish to erase Palestinians from history, because as Palestinians challenge the US-Israeli racist onslaught, they also force a public discussion of the historical background and actions of the settler-colonial philosophy of Israel and the Zionist movement that created it. Israel and Zionism cannot withstand such scrutiny.

One of the most blatant recent attempts to silence Palestinian voices was made against Rabea Eghbariah, a Palestinian lawyer, legal scholar, and JSD candidate at Harvard University. In November, the Harvard Law Review journal decided not to publish an article it had commissioned from Eghbariah that proposed the Nakba as a legal framework for Palestine. The piece was killed after it was edited, fact-checked and approved by the journal’s own editors.

After the incident, editors from Columbia Law Review reached out to Eghbariah and commissioned from him another article, also on Palestine. Five months later, following a lengthy and thorough editing process, the journal published the article titled Toward Nakba as a Legal Concept, only for its editorial board to shut down its website. Editors stood up to pressure to take down the text and threatened to stop........

© Al Jazeera