Columbia Law Review removes entire website over Nakba article

The Columbia Law Review suspended its website after publishing an article on the Nakba, marking yet another puerile attempt by a Western institution to clamp down on information related to the occupation of Palestinian land by Israel.

The article, "Toward Nakba As A Legal Concept," was written by Harvard Law School student and Palestinian human rights lawyer Rabea Eghbariah.

The latest development came amid Israel’s brutal war on Gaza that has killed over 36,000 people – most of them women and children – and devastated the besieged enclave.

The Columbia Law Review’s move was an attempt to censor “the legal scholarship shining light on the catastrophe of Zionism,” the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee (PSC) said on X.

“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 it fragments, displaces, and disempowers Palestinian society,” the committee said.

In an interview, seven editors involved in the article disclosed that over the weekend, members of the journal's board of directors urged the leadership of the law review, which consists of students, to delay or potentially retract its publication.

Upon the editors' rejection of this request, the board opted to shut down the entire website. The editors who opposed the directives of the board of directors have reportedly been asked to step down now.

Epicentre of solidarity

Founded in 1901, the Columbia Law Review is a student-edited and published law review affiliated with Columbia Law School.

Its board of directors consists of law school professors and alumni who oversee the student team responsible for its management.

Columbia University has been the epicentre of pro-Palestinian campus protests since April 17, when students erected tents in the campus greens and started rallying in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza.

They called for the university to divest from Israel in response to its genocide against Palestinians.

During the protests, hundreds of police officers entered Columbia's campus, responding to the university president's request, leading to the arrest of numerous students, some of whom faced suspension.

This crackdown was what fueled the expansion of protests to other campuses across the United States, eventually spreading to over 130 universities nationwide.

Over the last eight months, Columbia students have criticised the university administration for its lack of action in addressing the harassment and targeting of students and faculty.

They have faced persistent doxxing campaigns, threats of violence including death and rape, and hateful rhetoric both on campus and in the media only because voicing support for Palestine and advocated for the university to divest.

In the latest media release, the student coalition “CU Apartheid Divest” stated that they will release in the coming days and weeks “substantial evidence highlighting the dozens of instances since October where Zionists have harassed and physically assaulted Palestinian students and their allies on campus.”

Second censorship

“Nakba,” meaning "catastrophe" in Arabic, signifies the mass expulsion of around 700,000 Palestinians from their homes before and during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, which ensued after Israel's establishment.

According to Margaret Hassel, a former editor-in-chief of the journal, the banned article fills “a conspicuous gap in legal literature with doctrinal, historical, and moral clarity”.

This incident is not the first time Rabea Eghbariah, a Palestinian doctoral candidate at Harvard Law School and human rights lawyer, has encountered censorship.

In November, despite successfully navigating all stages of the journal's publishing process, Harvard Law Review also opted to request the essay at the last minute.

Eghbariah was to be the first Palestinian legal scholar published in both the Columbia Law Review and Harvard Law Review.

In the abstract of the article, the author says that the essay “proposes to distinguish apartheid, genocide, and Nakba as different, yet overlapping, modalities of crimes against humanity.”

“It first identifies Zionism as Nakba’s ideological counterpart and insists on understanding these concepts as mutually constitutive … It positions displacement as the Nakba’s foundational violence, fragmentation as its structure, and the denial of self-determination as its purpose.”