Why are US elite universities afraid of this scholar’s work?

When the Palestinian human rights lawyer Rabea Eghbariah arrived at a Manhattan cafe on the afternoon of Thursday 6 June, he had just learned that his article had been reinstated in the Columbia Law Review. After a week-long censorship controversy, the prestigious journal’s website was back online, too, writes Jonathan Guyer for The Guardian.

The law school journal’s faculty and alumni board had shuttered the website for most of the week rather than publicise 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 centre of a new legal conversation.

Eghbariah, a Harvard Law School doctoral candidate, reflected on an extraordinary week that saw his legal theories – ordinarily the stuff of arcane law school debates – ignite emotive conversations about the legitimate bounds of debate about Israel and Palestine. What’s more, it wasn’t the first time his ideas were deemed too dangerous to publish by the Ivy League.
Full report on The Guardian site