The Guardian: Why are America's elite universities so afraid of this scholar's paper?

Jonathan Guyer
Sun 9 Jun 2024

The Columbia Law Review website was temporarily shut down after it published a Palestinian human rights lawyer’s article proposing a new way to understand Palestinian life under Israeli rule

When the Palestinian human rights lawyer Rabea Eghbariah arrived at a Manhattan cafe on Thursday afternoon, he had just learned that his article had been reinstated in the Columbia Law Review. After a weeklong censorship controversy, the prestigious journal’s website was back online, too.

The law school journal’s faculty and alumni board had shuttered the website for most of the week rather than publicize Eghbariah’s 105-page article, titled Toward the Nakba as a Legal Concept. In it, he proposed a new framework to explain the complex, fragmented legal regimes governing Palestinians. He wanted to bring the word Nakba – which translates from the Arabic as catastrophe, and is better known for describing the displacement and dispossession of Palestinians in 1948 – to the center of a new legal conversation.

SNIP
One of Eghbariah’s advisers at Harvard Law School is the prominent academic Noah Feldman, author of the new book To Be a Jew Today. He has called Eghbariah “one of the most brilliant students I’ve taught in 20 years as a law professor”. He declined to provide comment on the law review article, but said he “certainly” stood by his assessment of Eghbariah’s talents.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jun/09/columbia-law-review-rabea-eghbariah-palestine-censorship-controversy