[orig to FB]
I rarely read the Intercept these days, because over time its various agendas and tendencies seemed to become more and more tangled. Their story about the Columbia Law Review suffers from a bit of that, but it’s well worth reading (paywall-circumventing link in comments).
tl;dr: a Palestinian legal scholar, Rabea Eghbariah, has been trying to publish an article arguing for “Nakba as its own legal concept in international law…a legal framework…similar to genocide and apartheid, which were concretized as crimes in response to specific atrocities carried out by Nazi Germany and white-ruled South Africa, respectively.” Harvard Law Review agreed to publish it last fall, so it went through the full editorial process, but they spiked it at the last minute. Columbia Law Review “solicited a new article from the scholar” that “significantly expands on Eghbariah’s argument for Nakba as its own legal concept in international law,” and put it through a similar process. Then things get…complicated.
OT1H: “the text was more widely circulated among a greater number of people” than any article before. OT2H, the editorial process was unusual (understandably, imo): one editor said, “there was some additional work put into it, but in general, it was the same steps of production” — editors are normally randomly assigned but in this case were it was “volunteer-based…given the fraught nature of the subject matter”; drafts “were only available on a drive shared between the opt-in committee directly working on it, rather than all editors.”
Whether the article actually, formally passed muster isn’t clear from this story, and the Intercept article dances around whether the final steps of the editorial approval process were normal: “The students who spoke with The Intercept said that in their time at CLR they had never received a request from the board to distribute the text of an article to the entire membership of the review.” That may be because (a) the story is badly written, and/or (b) the process was unusual (I have a theory…). Either way, when the “opt-in” editors feared the article’s text had been leaked, they decided to run it.
When word leaked that they planned to do do, they were met with a serious pressure campaign. Some editors were told to resign from the law review’s editorial board (which for law students is a big deal); and two heavyweights on the review’s Board of Directors (one prof “who also serves in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel,” another who’s a “former Assistant to the U.S. Solicitor General Ginger”) tried to, at the very least, impede publication — first, by insisting the entire editorial board should see it, and then that the review’s entire 100+ member Board of Directors see it. They may have been motivated by scholarly diligence, but anyone who’s risen to such heights knows perfectly well that those requests are the federal equivalent of an offer you can’t refuse: if you comply your project will go nowhere, if you don’t you’re in trouble.
Rather than comply, the “opt-in” editors ran the piece on the review’s website; and when the Directors found out, they asked the editors to pull the entire May issue. Unless they were arguing that every article in it was fatally flawed, that approach — collective reprisal — was obviously an effort to hide their intent, which was to suppress Eghbariah’s article. Not a good look, as they say. And when the editors said no, the Directors pulled the plug on the review’s entire website, archives included.
Having spent years street-fighting in alleys like this, I assure you the path that process took is both crooked and straight: it runs straight through the president’s, general counsel’s, and dean’s offices, and it’s crooked in the sense of corrupt, a pure power play. Given the context — not just the university that set the template for using police violence to quell student dissent, but that university’s law school and indeed even its law review — that indiscriminate approach to censorship is astonishing.
If I said it’s the editorial equivalent of Israel’s approach to Gaza, some will react by dismissing that as bombast. Sorry, people, that analogy is not just precisely and substantively correct, but it also drives an important point home. This war is driven by the criminal Netanyahu, whose policies in turn are driven by Israel’s extreme right, which itself is steeped in criminality. That in itself is problematic enough, but when those policies extend to international efforts to (a) suppress historical and legal analyses of those policies, by (b) mobilizing power networks in ways that undermine scholarly and civil institutions abroad, that’s a whole other level. I’ll say it again: What Israel is doing in Gaza is ethnic cleansing, but what it’s doing outside of Gaza — systematic, sustained, and often sub rosa campaigns to suppress free expression and debate about the histories, theories, and possible futures of Palestinians and Palestine — is arguably genocidal.
In much the same way that everything Trump touches turns to shit, everything Netanyahu does backfires. His pandering to sociopathic settlers has put Israel in an untenable position. His sustained support for Hamas as a “strategic” alternative to the PA created, we’re told, a definable existential threat to the country. His reaction to 10/7 has done more to legitimize the Palestinian cause than decades of advocacy. And these efforts to meddle in and control debates abroad have turned entire generations against Israel.
In case it isn’t obvious: suppressing scholarly debate like this is corrupt, foolish, and dangerous.