What are the limits of empathy in war?
That's the question Joanna Chen, a liberal writer and translator who is Jewish and lives in Israel, posed in an essay about her struggles since October 7 to connect with Palestinians.
“It is not easy to tread the line of empathy, to feel passionate about both sides,” he wrote in the literary magazine Guernica, explaining that he briefly left his volunteer work taking Palestinian children to Israeli hospitals for life-saving medical care.
“How could it continue after Hamas has massacred and kidnapped so many civilians?” he asked, noting that among the dead was a fellow volunteer, a longtime peace activist named Vivian Silver. “And I admit, I feared for my own life.”
Palestinian children look at damaged buildings after an Israeli attack on a residential area in Rafah, Gaza Strip, on December 14.
(Hatem Ali / Associated Press)
The essay, titled “From the Confines of a Broken World,” caused a stir in the activist literary world. Over the weekend, more than a dozen members of the publication's staff resigned in protest, and Guernica removed the essay from its website.
“Guernica regrets having published this article and has retracted it,” the magazine said in a statement. “A more complete explanation will follow.”
Among those who resigned was co-editor Madhuri Sastry, who wrote in X that the essay was “a distressing apology for Zionism and the ongoing genocide in Palestine.”
Sastry also called for the resignation of the editor-in-chief, Jina Moore Ngarambe, a veteran foreign correspondent. Ngarambe did not respond to requests for comment.
In a statement to the Times on Tuesday, Chen said: “Eliminating any story and silencing any voice is the opposite of progress and the opposite of literature.”
“Today, people are afraid of hearing voices that do not perfectly reflect their own,” he said. “But ignorance breeds hatred. “My essay is an opening to a dialogue that I hope will emerge when the screaming subsides.”
The retraction of the essay comes as a new generation of activists in the literary world frame the conflict in the Middle East as a black and white battle between two sides – oppressor and oppressed – and pressure institutions to boycott Israeli writers or Zionists.
In January, protesters from Writers Against the War in Gaza disrupted a PEN America event in Los Angeles featuring actor Mayim Bialik, who supports Israel and opposes a ceasefire. Last month, the Jewish Book Council, a nonprofit that promotes Jewish writers and stories, launched an initiative for authors, editors, agents and others to report anti-Semitic incidents in the publishing world, from “receiving negative reviews because their “book includes Jewish content.” ” to “threats of intimidation and violence.”
For many activists, giving voice to opposing views or conveying empathy for Israeli victims of Hamas amounts to bipartisanship that disguises power imbalances. Israel says Hamas killed about 1,200 people on October 7, sparking an invasion that Gaza authorities say has killed more than 31,000 people.
In X, former Guernica fiction editor Ishita Marwah it crashed Chen's essay called it “a piece of genocide apology” and condemned Guernica as “a pillar of eugenicist white colonialism disguised as goodness.”
Grace Loh Prasad, a Taiwanese-born writer living in the Bay Area who published an excerpt from her new memoir in Guernica last week, wrote: “I am alarmed and upset because my writings have appeared alongside an essay that attempts to convey empathy for a colonizing and genocidal power.”
Hua Xi, former Guernica interview editor, indicated a passage in which Chen describes a neighbor who tells him that she tried to calm her children who were frightened by the sound of military planes flying over their house: I tell you these are good booms.
Chen writes: “She grimaced and I understood the subtext: that the Israeli army was bombing Gaza.”
For Xi, quoting an Israeli who calls the bombs “good booms” undermines Guernica’s “premise that they are reserving space for Palestinian writers.”
Rather than simply disagreeing, these activists are calling for silencing voices they consider harmful.
On social media, one activist accused Chen of “genocide on both sides.” Another condemned Chen, who was born in Britain and moved to Israel with her parents when she was 16, as “a settler who has genocidal settler friends and raised children of genocidal settlers.”
Founded in 2004 in the midst of the US invasion of Iraq, Guernica was founded as an unabashedly anti-war and anti-imperialist publication, according to one of its founders, Josh Jones.
The magazine took its name from a Lower East Side bar where two of the founders participated in a series of readings and from Picasso's iconic painting depicting the horror of the 1937 bombing of the Basque city in northern Spain.
Guernica leaders did not always agree on what it meant to be against the war, particularly as a growing wave of pro-Palestinian activists called not to support pro-Israeli voices.
Sastry wrote in They disagreed, he wrote, telling staff in an email that “Guernica's political projects can be found in what we publish.”
But Sastry did not always like what the magazine published. Even before this week, he said, he had raised concerns about a story by Chen published in the magazine's “Voices on Palestine” compilation.
At the same time, Guernica's editors received complaints that their magazine lacked complexity of voices and was too pro-Palestinian.
Palestinians line up for food in Rafah, Gaza Strip, in February.
(Fatima Shbair / Associated Press)
Emily Fox Kaplan, Jewish essayist and journalist who has written for Guernica since 2020, wrote in X that “the only mistake Guernica made was not publishing a wide variety of voices” on the Israeli-Palestinian question “since the first day.”
“The problem, at the end of the day, is that it presents an Israeli as a human being,” Kaplan wrote from Chen's essay. “People who are losing their minds over this want to believe that there are no civilians in Israel. “They want a simple binary of good and bad, and this creates cognitive dissonance.”
Other writers accused the activists who attacked Chen's essay of “barefoot antisemitism” and Guernica from “following the example of Joe McCarthy and the MAGA book burners.”
“God forbid anyone thinks that Israelis are complex human beings and not just demons.” saying Lahav Harkov, Jewish Insider senior political correspondent.
Chen said in her statement to the Times that she didn't realize the essay was drawing more criticism than usual until Saturday night, when a friend texted her to alert her that one of Guernica's editors had resigned. That night she contacted the editor-in-chief and they spoke briefly on Sunday morning.
“Since then, nothing,” he said.
“Guernica claims to be 'a home for singular voices, incisive ideas and critical questions' but apparently there is no longer room in this home for real conversation,” Chen said. “But I don't consider this a missed opportunity: my words are being read and, in fact, the door is still open.”
His essay, which is available in the Internet archive Wayback Machine, offers a personal account of life in Israel before and after October 7.
She wrote that she struggled to assimilate when she moved to Israel. Two years later, at 18, she decided not to serve in the Israel Defense Forces. In addition to her volunteer work with Road to Recovery, which provides transportation to Palestinian children to hospitals, she describes how she donated blood to the people of Gaza. She also translated and edited poems by Palestinian poets, believing that her voices were “as important” as those she translated from Hebrew.
After October 7, Chen wrote: “I listened to interviews with survivors; “I saw videos of atrocities committed by Hamas in southern Israel and reports of the increasing number of innocent civilians killed in a devastated Gaza.”
He described having a space in his mind for the victims in both Israel and Gaza: “At night, I would lie on my back in the dark, listening to the rain against the window. I wondered if the Israeli hostages underground, the children and women, had any way of knowing that the weather had turned cold, and I thought of the people of Gaza, the children and women, huddled inside tents provided by the UN or seeking refuge. “
When a fellow volunteer expressed anger that the Palestinians he had helped did not come forward after October 7, Chen did not take sides.
“Palestinians in the West Bank were struggling with their own problems: closure, inability to work, the threat of large-scale arrests by the Israeli army, and harassment by settlers,” he wrote. “No one was safe.”
Two weeks after October 7, Chen writes, he resumed his Road to Recovery volunteering, ignoring his family's fears for his safety, and took a Palestinian child and his father to an Israeli hospital. When they got out of her car and the boy's father thanked her, she wrote, she wanted to say: “No, thank you for trusting me with your son. Thank you for reminding me that we can still find empathy and love in this broken world.”
For activists who oppose Israel's very existence, Chen's liberal framework – and his refusal to take a stand – is inherently problematic: They say focusing on finding empathy and love in a broken world ultimately justifies the status quo. .
In her critique of the essay, April Zhu, former senior interview editor, wrote The essay begins “from a place that apparently recognizes the 'shared humanity' of Palestinians and Israelis, but fails or refuses to trace the form of power – in this case, a colonial, imperialist and violent power – that makes dehumanization systematic and historical of the Palestinians… is not a problem.”
Some argued that Chen's liberal outlook was more problematic than any conservative voice.
“I find open warmongering less nauseating than this kind of self-pitying, disingenuous bleeding-heart nonsense.” wrote an independent filmmaker from Los Angeles “The fascist propagandist is at least honest. The liberal propagandist never stops saying how tormented they are by the terrible *complexity* of it all. Superate yourself.”
