December 8, 2023 - Hundreds of people gathered in Guernica, Basque Country, to form a human flag in solidarity with the Palestinian people, as air raid sirens filled the air.
The town of Guernica became symbol and a rallying cry against war crimes and the slaughter of civillians after German and Italian planes bombed the town for Franco's fascists in 1937, during the Spanish civil war, killing hundreds of innocent civillians. [video]
Almost as soon as the piece appeared online, it began drawing criticism from within the Guernica staff. Founded in 2004 partly in response to the Iraq War and named after Pablo Picasso's famous anti-war painting, the nonprofit magazine has long married literary bona fides and left-wing politics.
Joshua Gutterman Tranen, an anti-Zionist Jewish writer who has published in Guernica in the past, specifically pointed out a passage he found objectionable in which Chen briefly pauses her volunteer work after October 7, writing, "How could I continue after Hamas had massacred and kidnapped so many civilians, including Road to Recovery members, such as Vivian Silver, a longtime Canadian peace activist? And I have to admit, I was afraid for my own life."
"The moment in the Guernica essay where the Israeli writer – who never considers why Palestinian children don't have access to adequate healthcare b/c of colonization and apartheid – says she has to stop assisting them getting medical support because of 'Hamas,'" Tranen tweeted. "This is genocidal."
Chen's essay is not the first time progressive Jews and Israelis have been condemned for being insufficiently critical of Israel. The official movement to boycott Israel, for example, called for a boycott of Standing Together, an Israeli-Palestinian coexistence group that opposes the war, saying that the group promotes "normalization" of Israel. And when Haymarket Books, a left-wing publisher, recently announced a book co-authored by longtime leaders of the anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace, it drew sharp criticism on Instagram – in part because one author, who supports boycotting Israel, is married to an Israeli and has family members in Israel.
For some Jews who have questioned their place in progressive and literary spaces since October 7, Guernica's retraction offered new evidence of a toxic discourse in which no Israeli or Jew can pass muster.
"THIS is what was beyond the pale? This essay of nuance, lived experiences, fears, hopes, and continuing to strive in her own way for peace?" tweeted Sara Yael Hirschhorn, a historian of modern Israel who has written about her own struggle to sustain her liberal Zionist outlook after the attack, after reading the retracted piece. "Obviously this is just a bigoted decision about an Israeli and Jewish author … This virtual burning of books is bareknuckled antisemitism."
Emily Fox Kaplan, a Jewish writer who had shared the essay before it was retracted, wrote that she saw the criticism of Chen's essay as part of a much wider dynamic.
"The problem, when it really comes down to it, is that it presents an Israeli as human," she tweeted. "The people who are losing their minds about this want to believe that there are no civilians in Israel. They want a simple good guys/bad guys binary, and this creates cognitive dissonance."
Some non-Jewish writers also lamented the piece's retraction.
Matt Gallagher, a war correspondent who is also a veteran and who opposes the Israel-Hamas war, said his own work had benefited from reading thoughtful authors whose perspectives were different from his own.
"If you want the war in Gaza to end, as I do," he tweeted, "shouting down calm Israeli voices mulling the ruin of it all isn't going to help."