Rabea Eghbariah

Rabea Eghbariah (ربيع إغبارية) 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 socio-legal aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In an article called "The Ongoing Nakba: Towards a Legal Framework for Palestine," he proposed a new way of understanding the lives of Palestinians under Israeli rule. The article was censored by elite American universities.

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.

Career
Eghbariah worked as an attorney at Adalah, where he argued civil and political rights cases involving Palestinians.

The Israeli Criminalization of Foraging (za'atar and akkoub)

In January 2019, Adalah initiated a legal correspondence with the Attorney General, Minister of Environmental Protection, State Prosecutor, and NPA arguing against the ban and demanding lifting the criminalization of za'atar, akkoub, and maramiya. Research by Eghbariah found that in all criminal cases presented before Israeli courts involving za'atar and akkoub, defendants were Palestinian citizens of Israel. A few months later, the Minister asked the NPA to re-evaluate its policy. The NPA later (around August 2019) publicly declared they are reformulating their enforcement and prosecutorial policy to allow limited foraging.

Cyber Unit
On November 26, 2019, Eghbairah filed a case with Fady Khoury against the Israel government’s Cyber Unit, which monitors and censors social media content.

In 2021, Eghbariah commented following the Israeli Supreme Court authorized Cyber Unit to continue to operate:

"The Israeli Supreme Court has just authorized the state to continue to use its Cyber Unit to conduct quasi-judicial censorship proceedings in cooperation with private corporations, without allowing social media users to defend their rights or even to know that the state has been involved in removing their online content.”

Family reunification
In 2022, Eghbariah, Dr. Hassan Jabareen, and Adi Mansour filed a petition to the Israeli Supreme Court challenging a law that bans Palestinian family reunification. The ban would not have even past in apartheid South Africa. Eghbariah argued before the Court on behalf of the petitioners. He emphasized that the “law creates two separate legal tracks, based on ethno-national identity; one, mainly for Jewish-Israeli citizens and the other for Palestinian citizens and residents of the state who wish to unite with their spouses who live in the Occupied West Bank.”

The Ongoing Nabka
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.

Reaction
Multiple editors of the Harvard Law Review signed a statement dissenting from the decision not to publish the article. They said: "'Days before the finalized piece was to be posted, at a time when the Law Review was facing a public intimidation and harassment campaign, the journal’s leadership intervened to stop publication. The body of editors—none of whom are Palestinian—voted to sustain that decision.

We are unaware of any other solicited piece that has been revoked by the Law Review in this way. This unprecedented decision threatens academic freedom and perpetuates the suppression of Palestinian voices. We dissent.'" Several law professors signed an open letter expressing concern over the potential impact on academic freedom of refusing to publish the essay.

Aftermath
On June 3, 2024, the Columbia Law Review (CLR) published an expanded version of Eghbariah's original essay, titled "Toward Nakba as a Legal Concept." The article aimed at creating an international legal framework for the Nakba similar to genocide and apartheid. Within hours, the CLR board of directors took the CLR website offline. Subsequently, "Toward Nakba as a Legal Concept" was allowed to appear in the Columbia Law Review (Vol. 124, May 2024, No. 4). CLR Toward Nakba as a Legal Concept