"Cringeworthy Hypocrisy"

Censorship Replaces Debate at a Literary Journal

The online literary magazine, Guernica, retracted last month an essay by British-Israeli peace activist, Joanna Chen, only days after it was published. What was so terrible in Chen's essay about struggling to find a balance for coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians in the aftermath of October 7? Chen, herself a lifelong pacifist who volunteers to help Palestinian children get healthcare in Israel, had written about her post-October 7 struggle. Her “heart was in turmoil,” she said, and “I wondered if the Israeli hostages underground, the children and women, had any way of knowing the weather had turned cold, and I thought of the people of Gaza, the children and women, huddled inside tents supplied by the UN or looking for shelter.”

Empathizing with Israeli hostages was too much for Guernica. Co-publisher Madhuri Sastry resigned in protest saying the essay was a contravention of the magazine’s “anti-imperialist spirit” and in a since deleted tweet, condemned it as “a hand-wringing apologia for Zionism and the ongoing genocide in Palestine.” The magazine’s foreign editor, Ishita Marwah, resigned in a tweet and blasted the essay as “rank piece of genocide apologia” and as “a pillar of eugenicist white colonialism masquerading as goodness.”

That prompted more than a dozen other resignations from Guernica’s staff. When the article was deleted from the site, the magazine put up only a short, curt statement: “Guernica regrets having published this piece, and has retracted it. A more fulsome explanation will follow.” 

No surprise there has been no “more fulsome explanation.”

The Guernica censorship is not even about offensive speech. Chen made no passing defense of Netanyahu or the right-wing West Bank settlers. Instead, her carefully written essay ran afoul of a wave of activist journalists and editors who believe they must demonstrate solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza by boycotting Israeli writers.

Not everyone on the left agrees with the new activist censorship. Guernica’s editor-in-chief, journalist Jina Moore, had the integrity to step down in protest.

And the preeminent U.S. progressive journal, The Nation, criticized the heavy handed censorship, noting that “a group of supposedly left-wing, humanistic, intellectually engaged editors at Guernica outdid themselves in craven groupthink this week.”

Author Sasha Abramsky, in a piece titled “The Cringeworthy Hypocrisy of Guernica, wrote, “If this is what passes for the left today, God help us. Guernica’s cringeworthy backpedaling is redolent of the self-denunciations of Stalin’s purge victims or the coerced linguistic self-flagellations of academics during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. There’s no effort at genuine debate, no room for competing opinions, no space for historical nuance or complexity; there’s simply a demand that the party line be followed and that those who don’t be immediately censored.”

Abramsky noted that this “behavior wouldn’t be so loathsome and hypocritical” if the magazine at the center “had a different name. say Free Speech Sucks or Too Lazy to Think the Issue Through.” But, as she noted, it is named after Picasso’s artistic appeal against war and militarism.

It is heartening to see the rebuke from The Nation and the resignation of Guernica’s editor-in-chief. But it is a small pushback in a wave of censorship that has assumed the veneer of political sanctity over Israel and Gaza.

I am tired of people proclaiming themselves as "free speech absolutists" and then jumping ship the instant the person censored is expressing some opinion they do not like.

You do not get to pick and choose when it comes to free speech. It requires a defense of speech that not only aligns with your own beliefs but also occasionally with speech with which you totally disagree and may even consider repugnant. If you do not do that, you might as well be an administrator at some overpriced Ivy League university, where you can pay lip service to protecting robust diversity of thought but in reality, crush anything that runs counter to a laundry list of progressive ideologies.

Former editor-in-chief, Jina Moore, had given the Chen essay a green light for publication. She noted that since Guernica “had a long history of publishing Palestinian writers,” she thought mistakenly it would “be able to hold space for such conversations.” In a blog post, Moore said, ““[I]t has become clear to me that Guernica’s commitment to writing on war, injustice, and oppression has evolved. The magazine stands by its retraction of the work; I do not. Guernica will continue, but I am no longer the right leader for its work.”

Anyone who believes in free speech and honest and vigorous debate is also not the right leader for Guernica and a growing list of activist literary journals that put ideology ahead of honest journalism.