Draft:Rabea Eghbariah

Rabea Eghbariah is a Palestinian human rights lawyer and academic. He is currently completing his J.S.D. at Harvard Law School, where he focuses on the legal fragmentation arising from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Education
Eghbariah earned his B.Sc. from the University of Haifa in 2012. He then attended Tel Aviv University, where he earned an LL.B. in 2015. He began his doctoral studies for his J.S.D. at Harvard Law School in 2019 and has since completed the requirements for his LL.M.

Censorship
On October 15, 2023, online editors working on behalf of the Harvard Law Review contacted Eghbariah, asking him to write a piece for the online blog. The essay, titled "The Ongoing Nakba: Towards a Legal Framework for Palestine," would have been the first piece by a Palestinian author published by the Harvard Law Review. After writing and submitting the essay in early November 2023, the Harvard Law Review met and voted to stop publication of the article. While no explanation was given, the Harvard Law Review posted a statement:

"'Like every academic journal, the Harvard Law Review has rigorous editorial processes governing how it solicits, evaluates, and determines when and whether to publish a piece.  An intrinsic feature of these internal processes is the confidentiality of our 104 editors’ perspectives and deliberations.  Last week, the full body met and deliberated over whether to publish a particular Blog piece that had been solicited by two editors.  A substantial majority voted not to proceed with publication.'"

The essay was subsequently published in The Nation.

Multiple editors of the Harvard Law Review signed a statement dissenting from the decision not to publish the article.

Several law professors signed an open letter expressing concern over the potential impact to academic freedom.

On June 3, 2024, the Columbia Law Review published an expanded version of Eghbariah's original essay, titled "Toward Nakba as a Legal Concept". " Within hours, the Columbia Law Review website went offline.