When “Genocide” and “Apartheid” Just Don’t Quite Explain It: A Review of “Toward Nakba as a Legal Concept” by Rabea Eghbariah

Abstract

It is an inevitability that, after enduring the test of societal changes throughout the years, the inadequacies of established legal concepts and frameworks in serving the interests of the society which they are intended to govern are revealed. Such is the case when it comes to the existing international legal concepts of genocide, apartheid, and, to a lesser degree, occupation. In relation to the high purpose of (a majority of) the international community to alleviate the suffering endured by one of its most prominent constituents, the people of Palestine, the paper being reviewed places them under impeachment, exposing how their utilisation in describing the Palestinian experience of suffering in the Nakba has resulted in an  incomplete picture of the Nakba, an à la carte, and, ultimately, obfuscatory, view of it. This then resulted in the limiting of options, under international law, for Palestinians who wish to see to it that the tree of their intergenerational suffering be cut down to its roots.