Toward Nakba as a Legal Concept

Toward Nakba as a Legal Concept is a 2024 law review article by the Palestinian human rights lawyer Rabea Eghbariah in which the author proposes that the term Nakba (Arabic: نَكْبَة 'catastrophe') be adopted as a legal framework. The article identifies Zionism and the Nakba as mutually constitutive counterparts, analyzes the legal anatomy of the ongoing Nakba, and describes the foundational violence of the Nakba as displacement, its structure as fragmentation, and its purpose as the denial of self-determination for Palestinians.

The article was published by the Columbia Law Review (CLR) in June 2024 as an expanded version of an essay commissioned from Eghbariah in October 2023, edited, fact-checked, copy-edited, and approved for publication for the website of the Harvard Law Review (HLR), then blocked from publication in an unprecedented meeting of the journal body and emergency vote. That essay was published on November 21, 2023 in The Nation instead.

When the CLR published the expanded article, its faculty board of directors shut down the website, abdicating only when the majority of editors threatened to go on strike.