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.”
Website Takedown
Seven editors who had worked on the article told The Intercept that, over the weekend, members of the board of directors pressured the law review’s leadership to delay and even rescind publication. Most of the CLR editors spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity, fearing the backlash that others have faced for speaking out for Palestine.
Numerous editors stressed that the editorial input had been extensive, and that the text was more widely circulated among a greater number of people than is the case prior to the publication for most CLR articles.
After a back-and-forth with the board and fellow editors, the members of CLR responsible for the Eghbariah article said they feared that the draft had been leaked and decided to preempt outside pressure by publishing the issue online in the early morning hours of June 3. After the editors declined a board of directors request to take down the articles, the board pulled the plug on the entire website.
The CLR board of directors told The Intercept in a statement that there were concerns about “deviation from the Review’s usual processes” and said it had taken the website down to give all CLR members the chance to read........