The Columbia Law Review‘s board of directors temporarily shut down the prestigious legal journal’s website on Monday following its publication of an article arguing for the establishment of the Nakba – the ethnic cleansing of Arabs from Palestine to establish and expand the state of Israel – as a novel legal concept.
The Intercept reported that Rabea Eghbariah, a Palestinian human rights lawyer and Harvard Law School student, initially tried to publish an article in the Harvard Law Review on the Nakba as a legal concept amid the backdrop of Israel’s Gaza genocide and apartheid in the illegally occupied West Bank of Palestine. The piece was fully edited and ready for publication when it was canceled. The Nation published the essay in November.