US Columbia Law Review website shut down over article critical of Israel

The board of directors at the Columbia Law Review (CLR) has decided to take down the entire website after editors refused a request to halt the publication of an article criticizing Israel by a Harvard Law School student and Palestinian human rights lawyer.

The student editors of one of the United States’ most prestigious student-edited law journals reported that they faced pressure from the journal's board of directors to cease the publication of the academic article titled "Toward Nakba As a Legal Concept," penned by Rabea Eghbariah.

The article said Israel was perpetrating genocide in Gaza and maintaining an apartheid regime.

“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 is fragments, displaces, and disempowers Palestinian society,” the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee (PSC) said on the X social media platform.

Since Tuesday evening, individuals accessing the website of the 123-year-old journal have been greeted with a blank page along with the notification stating, “Website is under maintenance.”

Eghbariah collaborated with editors from the Columbia Law Review for a period exceeding five months to finalize the text, which spanned over 100 pages.

“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.”

Seven editors who contributed to the article disclosed to The Intercept that, over the weekend, the board of directors pressured the law review's leadership to delay or retract publication.

The majority of CLR editors spoke to The Intercept anonymously, citing concerns about potential backlash for supporting Palestine.

The Nakba, known as Catastrophe in Arabic, denotes the widespread forced displacement of Palestinians during the war surrounding the creation of Israel in 1948.

Israel has persisted with its ruthless genocide in Gaza, despite a UN Security Council resolution calling for an immediate end to hostilities, which was prompted by an attack by the Palestinian resistance group Hamas on October 7, 2023.

The number of Palestinian casualties has reached a staggering figure, with at least 36,550 fatalities, predominantly comprising women and children, and more than 82,900 individuals sustaining injuries in the territory.

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