Toward Nakba as a Legal Concept
Rabea Eghbariah, to my earlier question:
Legal theory still lacks an adequate analytical framework to describe the reality of domination and violence in Palestine. The law does not possess the language we desperately need to accurately capture the totality of Palestinian subjugation. Instead, we resort to a dictionary of misnaming, one that distorts our understanding of the problem, obfuscates its inception, and misplaces its spatial and temporal coordinates. From occupation to apartheid and genocide, the most commonly applied legal concepts rely on abstraction and analogy, revealing particular facets of subordination. While these concepts are certainly helpful, they risk distorting the variegated structure behind the Palestinian reality, and their invocation has often muted Palestinian articulations of their own experience.
There is a dire need for a new approach. This Article introduces the concept of Nakba to legal discourse to encapsulate the ongoing structure of subjugation in Palestine and derive a legal formulation of the Palestinian condition. Meaning “catastrophe” in Arabic, the term “al-Nakba” (النكبة) is often used—as a proper noun, with a definite article—to refer to the ruinous establishment of Israel in Palestine, a chronicle of partition, conquest, and ethnic cleansing that forcibly displaced more than 750,000 Palestinians from their ancestral homes and depopulated hundreds of Palestinian villages between late 1947 and early 1949. But the Palestinian Catastrophe—the Nakba—remains an ongoing and unrelenting ordeal, one that has never been resolved but rather managed.