The website of the Columbia Law Review today features a slide saying: Website is under maintenance. The website was taken down on Monday by its board of directors after its editors published an article that claimed:
“The law does not possess the language that we desperately need to accurately capture the totality of the Palestinian condition. From occupation to apartheid and genocide, the most commonly applied legal concepts rely on abstraction and analogy to reveal particular facets of subordination.”
The article, titled, “Toward Nakba as a Legal Concept,” was written by Rabea Eghbariah, a PA Arab human rights lawyer and a doctoral candidate at Harvard.
In a letter addressed to the student editors of the publication, the board stated that it “traditionally is not involved in selecting or determining the content of the Law Review—that is the student editors’ job.” However, in this particular case, the board acknowledged “serious lapses in good governance that we are attempting now to redress.”
The board emphasized that many of the Review’s student editors were unaware of the existence of Eghbariah’s article until shortly before its publication. “The secrecy that surrounded this article’s editing and substantiation review is unacceptable,” the board wrote. “It is also unprecedented, in that every piece is either worked on by, or available on request to, all student editors during the editing process.”
The board’s letter highlighted the highly irregular nature of the situation, deviating from the established norms and practices of the publication’s editorial process. The lack of transparency and limited access to the article raised concerns about potential governance issues that required immediate attention and rectification.
The article “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. Considering the limits of existing legal frameworks, this Article goes on to analyze the legal anatomy of the ongoing Nakba. It positions displacement as the Nakba’s foundational violence, fragmentation as its structure, and the denial of self-determination as its purpose. Taken together, these elements give substance to a concept in the making that may prove useful in other contexts as well.”
I scanned all 105 pages of the article, and it appears to include every anti-Zionist study and statement from the past 100 years, including an amusing accusation of Israel as an Apartheid state by the “architect of Apartheid,” South Africa’s Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, after Israel voted in 1961 at the UN to condemn his regime. Which proves my point that the authors exercised “researcher’s glee” and poured in everything, kitchen sink and all, that’s been heaped on Israel’s head since the Pharaoh complained about his brutal treatment by the Moses gang at the Red Sea.
In an official statement, the board of directors, comprising faculty members and alumni, announced its decision to suspend the website on Monday. This move came after learning two days prior that not all students on the Law Review staff had read the essay before its publication.
The board condemned the unusual secrecy surrounding the handling of the article, deeming such practices as “unacceptable.”
The 12-member board includes prominent figures such as Gillian Lester, the law school dean, Gillian Metzger, a renowned constitutional law scholar at Columbia, and Ginger Anders, an alumna and former assistant to the US solicitor general.
According to the board, they had initially requested the editors to withhold the article until June 7, allowing ample time for others to review it. However, the editors chose to publish the article on Monday instead. Consequently, the board decided to temporarily take down the website “to provide time for the Law Review to determine how to proceed.”
Rabea Eghbariah, whose S.J.D. dissertation depicts the Israeli legal system as a highly orchestrated apartheid mechanism distinguishing different groups of Arabs for different treatment under the law, is the recipient of the Irving Oberman Memorial Prize in Legal History, and the Michel Halpérin Bâtonnier Prize.
Any other rich Jews looking to give money to a brilliant, new ideologue vindicating Jew murders?
