On Monday morning, June 3, visitors to the website of the highly influential Columbia Law Review saw a blank screen with the announcement “Website is under maintenance.”

The website was not under maintenance. The Law Review’s board of directors, made up of Columbia Law School professors and prominent graduates (including current and former government officials) had shut down the website to stop publication of an article titled “Toward Nakba as a Legal Concept,” which the student editors had posted.

Israel’s Treatment of Palestinians Is an Ongoing “Nakba”—a Crime Against Humanity 

“Toward Nakba as a Legal Concept” was written by Palestinian human rights lawyer Rabea Eghbariah. His article argues that the 76-year history of Israel’s oppression and dispossession of the Palestinian people should be understood as an “ongoing Nakba,” which should be recognized legally and internationally as a crime against humanity. (The Nakba, or catastrophe in Arabic, refers to Israel’s violent displacement and expulsion of over 700,000 Palestinians from their lands in 1948 to create the state of Israel.) 

Eghbariah has drawn on a wide range of scholarly and legal sources to make a well-documented, fact-based case that there’s a common thread running through the different ways Israel has violently mistreated the Palestinian people. “For the last 76 years, Palestinians have been subjected to different types, kinds and forms of violence and oppression that denied them to exercise their political will, to their right to land, their right to nationality and their self-determination,” he told Democracy Now! 

The problem, he writes in his paper, is that currently, “The law does not possess the language that we desperately need to accurately capture the totality of the Palestinian condition.” Therefore, a new legal framework is needed to fully capture and address this reality. He argues that this new legal framework should be named “Nakba.” It would be similar to international legal agreements about genocide and apartheid but be specific to Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.

Eghbariah shows how the decades-long crimes of Israel’s ongoing Nakba result from the colonialist and Jewish-supremacist ideology of Zionism and the state of Israel, which is founded on and embodies this ideology. 

It is beyond the scope of this article to fully analyze Eghbariah’s piece. Readers can go here for his Introduction and here for the full article. 

A Fierce Behind-the-Scenes Battle

The Columbia Law Review is edited by law students who choose, edit, and fact-check articles for publication. This is the process the student editors followed with “Toward Nakba as a Legal Concept.”¹ The Law Review board of directors is not supposed to play a role in this process. But on the weekend of June 1-2, just before Eghbariah’s article was scheduled for publication, the board stepped in. 

The board refused to openly state their political objections to the article. Instead, they falsely claimed that editing procedures had been violated, including that the piece hadn’t been shared widely enough with Law Review staff. And the board tried to pressure student editors to hold off publication.²

When the editors didn’t back down and moved ahead to post “Toward Nakba…” on the Law Review website, the board immediately shut down the whole site. The student editors quickly responded by posting Eghbariah’s article on a publicly accessible website. The board’s act of censorship sparked prominent media coverage and widespread outrage and drew more attention to Eghbariah’s work. Editors of a number of other law reviews called the Columbia board’s intervention an unprecedented breach of editorial independence. 

By June 6, three days later, the Law Review board of directors felt compelled to relaunch the website, including “Toward Nakba as a Legal Concept.”³ But the board posted a misleading disclaimer on the website designed to cast doubt on the scholarly rigor and accuracy of Eghbariah’s work. In response, the student editors voted to go on strike and refuse to do all their normal duties. They are demanding that the board’s disclaimer be removed from the website and total editorial independence from the board of directors. At this writing, the editors remain on strike.

“What are they afraid of?”

Last fall, an earlier article Rabea Eghbariah wrote on his proposed legal framework was suppressed by the Harvard Law Review. Eghbariah called censorship of his work “a microcosm of a broader authoritarian repression taking place across U.S. campuses.” He said, “It is really unfortunate to see how this is playing out and the extent to which the board of directors is willing to go to shut down and silence Palestinian scholarship. … What are they afraid of?”⁴

In his social media dispatch REVOLUTION Number Twenty-Seven, revolutionary leader Bob Avakian gets into what those ruling this system of capitalism-imperialism are so afraid of, and why they’re suppressing speech and protest against the U.S.-backed Israeli genocide of Palestinians. This repression is happening:

because fundamental interests of U.S. capitalism-imperialism are at stake. Because Israel plays a “special role” as a heavily armed bastion of support for U.S. imperialism in a strategically important part of the world (the “Middle East”). And Israel has been a key force in the commission of atrocities which have helped to maintain the oppressive rule of U.S. imperialism in many other parts of the world.

And this repression is happening because representatives of the ruling class in this country have a definite sense that if youth especially at “elite” universities begin to seriously question and act against what this system is doing—if the system “loses the allegiance” of large numbers of those students—that can be a big factor in creating a real crisis for the system as a whole, as happened in the 1960s: a crisis that, now more than ever, this system really cannot afford, when the whole country is already being torn apart by deep divisions, with bitter clashes right among the ruling powers.…⁵

“Toward Nakba as a Legal Concept” is appearing as many millions across the globe are horrified and enraged by Israel’s depraved genocide in Gaza. Students across the country, including at elite universities, are awakening to the real history of the Palestinian people and the nature of the state of Israel. South Africa and other governments around the world have charged Israel with violating conventions against genocide. 

The Columbia Law Review is one of the oldest, most prestigious and most influential law reviews in the U.S. Such publications have a disproportionate impact on an important section of the population (intellectuals, lawyers, journalists and others who work with ideas), who in turn have a disproportionate impact in society overall (and often globally).⁶

Defend Those Standing Up to U.S. and Israeli Bullying and Suppression 

It is tremendously important that Rabea Eghbariah has stood up to the censors and continued to fight for the actual history of the Palestinian people, and the crimes committed against them, to be recognized. And it is also very important that the law student editors of the Columbia Law Review stood up—and continue to stand up—to the pro-genocide bullying of its board of directors. 

Everyone who believes in truth and justice—and wants to stop Israel’s ongoing U.S.-backed genocide in Gaza—needs to stand behind Eghbariah and the courageous Columbia law students!