The editor said they found “substantive flaws” in the piece that were exacerbated by a fear among editors that they would have their names and faces plastered on billboard trucks around campus accusing them of being Hamas supporters — something that happened to pro-Palestine Harvard students who signed a controversial open letter.
The editor said substantive flaws are generally removed from pieces prior to publication, but they did not feel such edits would have been possible in this case because of the lack of agreement on underlying facts. “Reasonable scholarly debate couldn’t happen in that context,” they said. “Partly because we’re not at a point in time where that debate can happen without your face being put on a truck.”
Doerfler praised Eghbariah’s draft amid that climate of fear. “It is a forceful piece of legal scholarship,” he said, “and it articulates a position that takes real courage to put forward.”
Eghbariah’s article was published Tuesday night at The Nation, under the headline “The Harvard Law Review Refused to Run This Piece About Genocide in Gaza.”
Harvard Law Review editors vote to kill article about genocide in Gaza
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