Thoughts: Guernica's scrub of "From the Edges of a Broken World"

Here's the LA Times story (the NYT, and major Israeli papers have also written about it), how Guernica Magazine hauled down a piece by Joanna Chen, "From the Edges of a Broken World," still available at the Internet Archive. (This also shows what bullshit that lawsuit against the Archive was.)

More than a dozen staff for the all-volunteer mag (about) resigned before it was taken town, on grounds it was too Zionist. Here's what fueled the outrage:

I phoned friends to find out how they were doing. Some had sons serving in the army in the south; others were struggling to keep going. A neighbor told me she was trying to calm her children, who were frightened by the sound of warplanes flying over the house day and night. I tell them these are good booms. She grimaced, and I understood the subtext, that the Israeli army was bombing Gaza.

Italics (reversed here) about "good booms" are in the original. (No idea if that was Chen's original idea, or an editorial decision.)

Thoughts below.

I've read the piece. It's arguable it has some degree of Zionism. I think the intensity of the reaction was over the top, but the reaction itself, I do not. To me, I don't see the problem so much in what's in the story itself as what's missed in the framing. In other words, Chen talks about working for "Road to Recovery," but says nothing, at least in this piece about how and why the government of Israel has made Road for Recovery necessary. She does later note "harassment by Israeli settlers" of West Bank Palestinians, at least, which is not nothing. But, I have no idea where she stood on BDS. (More on that below.) I have no idea if she had any involvement with protests against the Israeli government.

So, I think I would have to more agree than disagree, at a minimum, with this:

In her critique of the essay, April Zhu, former senior editor for interviews, wrote the essay starts “from a place that ostensibly acknowledges the ‘shared humanity’ of Palestinians and Israelis, yet fails or refuses to trace the shape of power — in this case, a violent, imperialist, colonial power — that makes the systematic and historic dehumanization of Palestinians ... a non-issue.”

That's not a strident reaction. Maybe others are more so, but hers is not.

I do see, per Twitter links at the LAT piece, a bigger problem — and a greater degree of Zionism — in the smears launched against the protestors.

Other writers accused activists who attacked Chen’s essay of “bareknuckled antisemitism” and Guernica of “taking its cue from Joe McCarthy and MAGA book burners.”

McCarthyite? Really? No, that would be Bari Weiss and a fair percentage of other signers of the infamous Harper's letter. Ditto on a fair chunk of that fair chunk being MAGAts.

That said, per this Atlantic piece, Guernica's hands aren't free of past blood itself, even if it didn't run the particular offensive Alice Walker items in its pages. On the other hand to that, author Phil Klay seems to decry only one side of intolerance on the issue, and not the tweets I saw.  And, there's no claim that any of Walker's seemingly anti-Semitic poems or thoughts were run by Guernica. So, a partial red herring, or hand-waving, even if not total. And, if you want to go there, anyway, Phil Klay and others? Have you stopped reading T.S. Eliot? I did a decade ago.

(Update, March 29: Yesterday, Klay penned a new Atlantic piece, titled: "U.S. Support for Israel's War Has Become Indefensible." As Jeet Heer said on Twitter, if you've lost The Atlantic [tho not all The Atlantic is lost, I know], who's left?)

Speaking of poems, she has published four books of translation. All are from Hebrew, from Israeli Jews. So, while she translates both Hebrew and Arabic for conversational and other needs, she's only done it in Hebrew for book-length professional reasons. (She has one book since then, and the Jewish Book Council has more, including noting her Hebrew translation to English. So, any Arabic translating is only Arabic → Hebrew and daily conversational level? If not sold a bill of goods, maybe I've been mispresented one?

Contra Chen not serving in the IDF as a badge of bona fides? Lots of Israelis dodge IDF service, not even counting the ultra-Orthodox types that get exempted. Nowhere that I have read are we told WHY she didn't serve.

And, contra Jonathan Adler at Reason, this is not cancel culture, certainly not compared to original cancel culture queen Bari Weiss. Adler's a never-Trumper type Republican business libertarian, Federalist Society guy, etc. Anti-BDS. Clearly anti-BDS and wrong about it being wrong.

"They'll know you by your enemies" is not always a cliche.

And, per Idries Shah's twosider quote?

Many things in life don't have "complete" solutions, no matter if someone with a utilitarian "view from nowhere" sees every side. And, sometimes, while there are more than two sides, the additional sides get squeezed. Maybe, to look at it fractally, the third and additional sides are only 0.25 sides or something.

Finally, this also reinforces the thoughts I wrote a week ago about "Didn't you used to be David Rieff?"