What’s Nakba? It is a pro-Palestinian framing of the forever conflict in the Middle East between Israel and the Palestinians. Nakba refers to the beginning, when the United Nations announced its two-state resolution of the Palestine conflict with Israel getting one of them, and the Arab states along with the Palestinians attacked the new Israel territory with the objective of making the Israeli state a single Palestinian state. Israel won, and that historical episode is referred to as Nakba, “the disaster,” by the Palestinians.
I view it as the equivalent of the die-hard Confederacy fans in today’s South calling the Civil War “the war of Northern aggression.” It’s a false and biased framing that justifies everything the Palestinians do and try to do to Israel (like wiping it off the map), including terrorism. It is the reverse of the more correct and honest Israeli framing, which is that Palestinians could have had their state in 1948, tried to wipe out Israel instead, and now reside in the mess of their own making.
Soon after Hamas’s October 7 terrorist attack (the hostages appear to all be dead by the way, which should have been assumed by now), the Harvard Law Review asked Rabea Eghbariah, a Palestinian doctoral candidate at Harvard Law School and human rights lawyer, to prepare a scholarly article taking the Palestinian side of the latest conflict. Eghbariah, who has tried landmark Palestinian civil rights cases before the Israeli Supreme Court, submitted one, a 2,000-word essay arguing that Israel’s attack on Gaza following the Hamas act of war should be evaluated through the lens of Nakba, and within the “legal framework” of “genocide.”
“The Ongoing Nakba” was fact-checked, copy edited, and approved by the student editors in the usual process for the Journal. It would have been the first from a Palestinian scholar it had published, but at the last moment it was rejected. It seems that the full membership and leadership of the Journal were worried that in the climate of conflict on the Harvard campus over the Israeli response to the Hamas terror attack (which, you will recall, started the chain of events that led to Harvard’s DEI President having to resign) the article would create an uproar that the students on the staff did not want to cope with. In one of his responses to the editors, Eghbariah condemned this as an outrage and a betrayal of the publication’s mission, saying, “This is discrimination. Let’s not dance around it — this is also outright censorship. It is dangerous and alarming.”
Eventually student editors from the Columbia Law Review solicited a new, obviously similar Nakba article from the Eghbariah: you will recall that there are more Jew-haters and Hamas fans among Columbia students than at Harvard. They got it, and prepared it for publication. Eghbariah’s paper was published on the Columbia Law Review website at the beginning of this week, despite the CLR’s board of directors, consisting of professors and prominent alumni, demanding that it be withheld. When the board saw that the article was online, it took down the entire site! What remains is what you see above.
(You can read the censored essay here.)
Naturally, the anti-Israel and pro-Hamas Left are freaking out over the sequence, but one doesn’t have to be an anti-Semite to figure out what’s wrong here. These are scholarly journals. Eghbariah is a scholar. If his articles met the standards of the journals, and by all accounts they did, then they should have been published. It shouldn’t have to be explained that even contrarian, controversial, devils’ advocacy and misguided opinions need to be read, not suppressed out of fear and avoidance of conflict at universities supposedly devoted to inquiry and critical thought.
Eghbariah may be dead wrong to conclude that the war on Gaza is Israeli genocide, but he is absolutely right that censoring his work is “dangerous and alarming.”
Harvard and Columbia have disgraced themselves.
Again.
Ethics Alarms 
“the Harvard Law Review asked Rabea Eghbariah, a Palestinian doctoral candidate at Harvard Law School and human rights lawyer, to prepare a scholarly article taking the Palestinian side of the latest conflict.”
I find it revealing that the HLR only requested the Palestinian side of the conflict. A constructive teaching exercise would have been to publish articles advancing both sides of the conflict. The fact that the HLR and Columbia Law Review didn’t and then censored the article speaks volumes. Both reviews showed their bias by requesting an article that addressed one side of the conflict. Then fearing backlash, they pretend the incident never existed.
I have more respect for people who are stalwart in their positions than cowards who hide who they are.
I believe you mean United Nations in the first paragraph, not League of Nations.
But, you are correct, this issue could have been resolved decades ago had the Palestinians been willing to live beside Jewish neighbors. They weren’t.
I read a book recently on the Jews that chose to remain in Germany during the 1930s before Kristallnacht made it evident where the anti-Semitism was headed. Part of the book explored the problem of the British mandate of Palestine which had been handed over to the League of Nations by the Ottomans in 1919 and given to the British to administer. The fear of violence by Muslim Palestinians gave the British pause when it came to opening the Mandate to Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution. The Mufti of Jerusalem, during the war, called for the death of Jews and met personally with Adolf Hitler.
These are not good people.
Yeah, I’ll fix it. Once upon a time, I could distinguish between Wilson’s failed, toothless, inert international diplomacy body and the supposedly superior UN back when it actually intervened to stop the bad guys. Now the two organizations have become indistinguishable.”X” and Twitter have less in common.
I’ve long been an advocate of a US led “united nations” style organization of countries that closely reflect our political values and political system. It wouldn’t be perfect since no nation can exactly match us (and frankly the direction we’re going doesn’t exactly match us either). But maybe it’s an organization of countries that are 70% percent “like us”.
Because the United Nations is a fetid organism occupied by cancerous clots of countries ran by the most wretched regimes, it can never be relied upon to make and enforce good decisions in support of a globe safe for commerce and interaction – there must be an organization like I describe that does do that.
Almost a NATO-like organization (minus the guaranteed mutual defense) but more expansive than a Euro-centric one.
But – I begrudgingly accept that the UN serves a single purpose of slowing the forces leading to polarization. Without the UN, I have no doubt that the slime of the ruling parties of the world would rally to central miscreants like Russia and China. At least inside the UN they feel like they have some sort of voice and rapport with better countries and so don’t need to actively align in formal arrangements with our enemies.
But – lacking the better organization (led by us) – it is also difficult to gain an true consensus on actions that should be taken globally.
Possibly largely digressive post follows:
1. The late historian Robert Conquest advocated that the USA and the UK and some other countries distance themselves from the UN system and form some loosely united “Anglosphere” association as an alternative to working within the UN.
He expanded his argument in one of his later books. Perhaps _Dragons of expectation_ or _reflections on a ravaged century_.
= – = – =
I am also reminded of a different topic with a similar “narrowing of the useful political boundary,” as follows.
2. For what it’s worth, the Roman Catholic priest and historian Adrian Hastings asserted that the European Union is an association that receives the most visceral and automatic support from a definable subset of national elites. If I recall correctly, he said that to be really gung-ho about the EU it helped to be Roman Catholic by faith / origin, Social Democratic by political leaning, and to have come from a part of Europe that at some point was within the borders of the Holy Roman Empire.
I’m almost certain this is in his 1997 book _The construction of nationhood_.
= – = – = – =
3.
There is some obvious general principle. It is possible to form an association that is so large and diverse that it has trouble taking effective action.
The blogger Arnold Kling mentions this general issue about large countries. Most large countries are hard to govern internally.
https://arnoldkling.substack.com/p/swiss-watching
= – = – = – =
4. Getting back to the more narrow issue, the UN was reportedly founded “not to raise the world to heaven but to save them from hell.” If the UN prevents major powers from having all-out wars among themselves, that’s an accomplishment. Some of the various UN agencies may reflect a certain amount of “wishful thinking.” I disqualify myself from useful opinions on the various agencies.
The _Economist_ writers once reported that OECD data was better than UN data because the UN was simply mandated to accept nationally reported data from individual member states. The OECD has a different and more stringent system for collecting data, and thus the OECD statistics are far more useful.
charles w abbott
rochester NY
The phrase “Nabka” is more disgusting than may be obvious.
The Jewish word for the “Holocaust”, the World War II genocide of Jewish peoples is the “Shoah“.
Holocausts are a good and holy thing in Judaism, holy sacrifices made to G-d. Abel offered his firstborn flock as holocaust in Genesis. Issac was offered as a holocaust by Abraham (and at the last minute a lamb was substituted). Up until the destruction of the Temple in AD 70, thousands of lambs were sacrificed as holocausts in memory of the Passover.
To the Jews, there was nothing holy or honorable about the genocide, thus they refer to it as the “Shoah“, or “disaster”. For the Palestinians to refer to their postwar status after attempting to eradicate the State of Israel as the “Nabka” just 3 years after the Shoah ended could only be a deliberate attempt to mock and provoke.
“I view it as the equivalent of the die-hard Confederacy fans in today’s South calling the Civil War ‘the war of Northern aggression.’ ”
Hopefully, there aren’t too many of those fans around these days, but I’m not sure that’s a great analogy, considering it was the north that didn’t want to allow the existence of the neighboring state, and invaded to reclaim it.
I think Lincoln’s justification was legitimate.
To preserve the union, I assume? Wasn’t one of the main reasons that no Confederate was ever tried for treason the more-than-slight fear that courts would rule that secession had been legal?
(I should probably drop this; it could only go down a not really relevant to the main issue rabbit hole.)
No, the main reason was that it was obvious to even the Radical Republicans that if the nation was ever going to recover from that horror, punishing the “rebels” had to be minimal. Reconstruction was punishment enough., and by 1876, even that was abandoned.
Why are Palestinians getting doctoral degrees at Harvard? Why not at Gaza University? The University of Tehran? Saudi Arabia University? Bagdad Tech? Kabul University? The Middle East is such a treasure trove of higher learning. Why go to an apostate institution in the Mother of All Evils?
Perhaps the actual story is a little different:
So… some editors at the Columbia Law Review subverted the normal editorial process to publish a trash anti-Israel propaganda piece. Before they could publish it, students excluded from the process objected, the faculty board of directors found out about it, and asked the editorial cabal to hold off until some semblance of normal process was restored, at least allowing other law review members to provide input. The offending law review editors agreed, and then reneged, publishing the piece on the law review’s website. The BOD then pulled the plug on the website. The editors retaliated by leaking a story making themselves out to be the victims of “censorship.” The BOD caved in and allowed the editors to publish the article, but only on condition that they add a disclaimer allowing students who were excluded from the process to say so in print.
In response… the journal’s editors, believe it or not, announced a “strike,” refusing to do any work.
https://freebeacon.com/columns/the-real-story-behind-columbias-controversial-law-review-article-and-why-it-matters/