New York, June 5 (RHC)-- The board of the Columbia Law Review journal – made up of faculty and alumni from the university’s law school – shut down the review’s website after editors refused to halt publication of an academic article by a Palestinian human rights lawyer that was critical of Israel.
The Associated Press (AP) news agency reports that the student editors of the journal say they were pressured by the board to not publish the article which accused Israel of carrying out genocide in Gaza and implementing an apartheid regime against Palestinians.
The review’s website was taken down after the article was published on Monday morning and remained offline on Tuesday evening, a static homepage informing visitors the domain is "Under maintenance.”
Several editors at the Columbia Law Review described the board’s intervention as an unprecedented breach of editorial independence at the periodical.
In a letter sent to student editors Tuesday, the board of directors said it was concerned that the article, titled “Nakba as a Legal Concept,” had not gone through the “usual processes of review or selection for articles.” The editor involved in soliciting and editing the piece said they had followed a rigorous review process.
The author of the article Rabea Eghbariah, a Harvard doctoral candidate, said the suspension of the journal’s website should be seen as “a microcosm of a broader authoritarian repression taking place across U.S. campuses.”
