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In October 2023, the Harvard Law Review (HLR) reached out to Rabea Eghbariah to ask if he would write a short piece for the journal's blog. Eghbariah is a Palestinian legal scholar finishing his doctorate at Harvard Law School, and a human rights lawyer who has brought a number of Palestinian rights cases before the Israeli Supreme Court. (2/6)

Eghbariah's essay, titled "The Ongoing Nakba: Towards a Legal Framework for Palestine," would have been the first by a Palestinian scholar to be published by HLR. But after being edited, fact-checked, copy-edited, and approved, the piece—which argued that the genocide in Gaza was a manifestation of the Nakba-was blocked by an unprecedented emergency vote of HLR's editors. (3/6)

Eghbariah was informed that the internal discussion revolved not around the essay's quality or content, but around editors' fears of causing offense, risking their professional futures, or potentially being doxxed and harassed—a textbook unfolding of the Palestine exception to free speech. (Eghbariah published the piece in The Nation instead.) (4/6)

Not long afterward, the editors of the Columbia Law Review (CLR) contacted Eghbariah: They wanted to commission an expanded version of the piece. Eghbariah worked intensely with them for five months, producing a 106-page article that argued for the development of the Nakba into a legal concept. But recent history repeated itself, and within hours of Eghbariah's article being posted online, CLR's board of directors took the entire website down. (5/6)