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Program Lead: Global Health Initiative, Human Rights Watch | Lead: Political Education, Fight Inequality Alliance | Visiting Scholar, Birzeit University
Columbia Law Review's decision to shut down its website after Rabea Eghbaria's article, "Toward Nakba as a Legal Concept" was published, exposes the Palestine exception to academic freedom. I'm therefore sharing a copy of the article--all 104 pages and 427 footnotes of incredible legal research and analysis. The article argues that the question of Palestine can best be understood, "through the concept of ongoing Nakba, an egregious crime against humanity that intersects with the crimes of apartheid, genocide, and indefinite occupation but stands apart as its own indelible tragedy composed of a distinctive foundation, structure, and purpose." Eghbaria asserts that: "As Arab fragmentation became all the more entrenched, the Nakba became all the more Palestinian. It grew to encapsulate the totality of the Palestinian experience: an overarching frame that encompasses the individual and collective subjugation of the Palestinian people and can be traced to the constitutive violence of 1948." And finally, "If Apartheid taught us about the dangers of racialism and the possibility of reconciliation, and the Holocaust taught us about the banality of evil and warned 'Never Again,' the Nakba can complicate our understanding of these lessons by reminding us that group victimhood is not a fixed category, and that a victimized group may easily become victimizers. That once the abuses of the Nakba are redressed, Palestinians will also have to transcend their own victimhood. That we must ensure we always stand in solidarity with the oppressed, the vilified, and the dehumanized. That people need not always be perfect victims to qualify for freedom, dignity, and fundamental rights. Only once we realize these hard truths, Palestine will set us all free."
