Columbia University took down its law website after it sought to publish an article from a Palestinian scholar about the Palestinian Nakba.
The Nakba, or catastrophe, is a term coined by the Syrian Christian intellectual Constantin Zurayk to describe the expulsion of roughly 750,000 Palestinians following the Arab defeat in the Israeli war of independence. Columbia Law Review sought to publish an essay from Palestinian scholar Rabea Eghbariah, titled “The Ongoing Nakba: Towards a Legal Framework for Palestine,” arguing for establishing the Nakba as a legal concept.
Columbia Law Review’s board of directors, run by professors and alumni, objected to publishing the 105-page article. When the website published it anyway early Monday morning, the board of directors took the website down, the Intercept reported.
As of Tuesday, the Columbia Law Review website simply displays the message, “Website is under maintenance.”
The article was published at 2:30 a.m. after the editors feared a draft would be leaked online. The Columbia Law Review is technically independent of Columbia University but run by students and overseen by the Columbia Law Review’s board of directors.
Eghbariah slammed the taking down of the website as stifling academic freedom.
“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 but are also a testament to a deplorable culture of Nakba denialism,” he said.
Editors of the Columbia Law Review complained that the article was subject to undue scrutiny for months.
“I don’t suspect that they would have asserted this kind of control had the piece been about Tibet, Kashmir, Puerto Rico, or other contested political sites,” professor Katherine Franke said.
A similar series of events played out in November when an essay from Eghbariah was prevented from being published in the Harvard Law Review after the intervention of Harvard’s president.
Eghbariah said he had worked with the Columbia Law Review’s editors for five months on the article. Aside from the “recognition” of the “ongoing Nakba,” the article argues for the return of Palestinian refugees displaced in 1948, the payment of reparations, and a “reconstitution” of international law.
Controversially, he draws direct parallels with the Nakba, Holocaust, and apartheid, arguing that a recognition of the Nakba is a natural conclusion of the two previous tragedies allowing for international recognition and condemnation of genocide and racial caste systems.
“This is precisely what makes Palestine a possibility that is all the more important to pursue,” Eghbariah wrote. “Palestine and the Nakba offer rich universalist lessons to the world. If apartheid taught us about the dangers of racialism and the possibility of reconciliation, and the Holocaust taught us about the banality of evil and warned ‘Never Again,’ the Nakba can complicate our understanding of these lessons by reminding us that group victimhood is not a fixed category and that a victimized group may easily become victimizers.”
Comparisons of the actions of Nazi Germany and Israel are vehemently denounced by Jewish groups as a primary example of antisemitism. The Antisemitism Awareness Act of 2023, passed by the House last month, would recognize comparisons between the two as antisemitism.
Israeli and Palestinian historiography view the events of 1948 much differently, and debate over the events serves as a central point of contention in negotiations between the two. Israel passed a law in 2011 pushing financial punishments for organizations that commemorate the Nakba. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas signed a decree in May 2023 making the denial of the Nakba punishable by two years in prison.
Israeli historians often portray the expulsion of Palestinians as a necessity, with the alternative being another Holocaust at the hands of the Arabs.
“There are circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing. I know that this term is completely negative in the discourse of the 21st century, but when the choice is between ethnic cleansing and genocide, the annihilation of your people, I prefer ethnic cleansing,” Israeli historian Benny Morris told Haaretz in 2008.
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Palestinians view the Nakba as central to their identity and an injustice on par with major genocides of the 20th century.
The United Nations began annually commemorating the Nakba in May 2023.