The Columbia Law Review suspended its website after publishing an article on the Nakba...The article, "Toward Nakba As A Legal Concept," was written by Harvard Law School student and Palestinian human rights lawyer Rabea Eghbariah.
What Columbia Law Review's website looks like now Seven editors involved in the article disclosed that over the weekend, members of the journal's board of directors urged the leadership of the law review, which consists of students, to delay or potentially retract its publication.Upon the editors' rejection of this request, the board opted to shut down the entire website. The editors who opposed the directives of the board of directors have reportedly been asked to step down now.
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. This Article introduces Nakba as a legal concept to resolve this tension. ... This Article proposes to distinguish apartheid, genocide, and Nakba as different, yet overlapping, modalities of crimes against humanity.
The target of the article is really Zionism itself. And the author is not above comparing Palestinians fleeing in 1948 to the Holocaust - and saying Zionism uses the Holocaust to justify the fictional genocide of Palestinians.
Historically and conceptually, the 1948 Nakba has existed at the juncture of the Holocaust and Apartheid South Africa. The concept of Nakba thus provides an opportunity to generate an independent framework that structures the legal questions at play and moves beyond simple analogy. Recognizing Nakba not only bestows a belated recognition upon its primary victims and allows us to imagine liberatory, egalitarian, and just futures but also reinforces, rather than undermines, the universal lessons of the Holocaust by recognizing the grave dangers of situations in which victimhood is used and abused to victimize others.
...Zionism must be understood in terms of the Nakba it generated. Destructive ideologies mirror the calamities they produce and often become defined from the perspective of their victims. Just as Nazi ideology produced the Holocaust and Afrikaner nationalism generated apartheid, Zionism similarly birthed the Nakba.
Indeed, the entire article is an exercise in Holocaust jealousy. The subtext is that if Jews have a unique term to describe the Nazi mass-producing murder machine, then Palestinians - who are the ultimate victims of all historical wrongs - certainly must lay claim to their own unique framework, one that international law must recognize as a distinct and particularly heinous crime.
Just for context, more Jews were deliberately murdered every single month during the four years of the Holocaust then the number of Palestinians killed since 1948, including the current war. His comparison is obscene, ahistorical, false and antisemitic.
And what, exactly, is the crime of "Nakba"? It is Zionism itself.
Against this background, this Article advances an understanding of Zionism as Nakba. Typically, Zionism is recognized primarily as a movement of Jewish self-determination without attending to its key material consequence. The Nakba, which is the material corroboration and culmination of the ideals espoused by Zionism, leaves no room for doubt as to Zionism’s key feature. If before 1948 one could still arguably distinguish between Zionism and its commitment to expulsion or consider the tensions between the colonial and national facets of the movement, then after 1948—and certainly since then—this attempt cannot be understood as anything but an excuse for Zionism and an attempt to salvage Zionism from the atrocities it has committed. To recognize Zionism as Nakba is to take seriously the magnitude and mechanisms of Palestinian displacement as well as to situate that process within its historical context, namely European antisemitism, the destruction of European Jewry, and the supremacist claims made by European Zionists on Palestinian land. The Nakba has emanated from Zionist praxis and provided an irrefutable material instantiation of Zionist ideology that must inform how we define it.
Nakba is Zionism, and Zionism is, according to Eghbariah, the ultimate form of displacement of a people.
He brings pages of evidence that Zionism is inherently committed tothe ethnic cleansing of all non-Jews from the river to the sea. But footnotes do not prove a point - a single counterexample is enough to disprove this thesis.
Such as the fact that Israel has offered Palestinians a state numerous times on the very lands that Jew claim as their historic homeland. It is impossible to make that fact fit in with this definition of Zionism as inherently eliminationalist - was Ben Gurion not a Zionist?
Or, for example, the large amount of documentation that Jewish leaders pleaded with Arabs not to flee Haifa in 1948. It wasn't the Jews who expelled them - they all left because their leaders abandoned them and their fellow Arabs told them to leave so they could return, victorious. If Zionism is defined as displacement, how could Zionists try to stop Arabs from leaving?
The huge number of footnotes obscure more than they reveal. Holocaust revisionists like to use footnotes, too. But when you ignore all counter-evidence that counters your argument, you are not writing in good faith to begin with.
This article wants to create an entirely new legal concept, just against Jews. Doing that requires an extraordinary amount of proof. The author, instead, cherry picks what he wants and doesn't address the truth. It has no business being published anywhere, let alone in a prestigious Ivy League law review.
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