Opinion | Why did Guernica retract an essay about the Israel-Hamas war?

The wave that Guernica generated with a March 4 essay on the Israel-Gaza conflict, however, has threatened to crush the magazine itself. “From the Edges of a Broken World” was written by Joanna Chen, a translator of Hebrew and Arabic who moved from England to Israel as a teenager. Though the piece sought to narrate Chen’s attempts to “tread the line of empathy” in the ongoing war, it was met with so much antipathy on X and from Guernica editorial staff that the magazine retracted it.

And it hadn’t published anything since — until Friday.

In a note to readers, Guernica founder Michael Archer wrote that the “piece felt jarring in both its timing and its approach” and took responsibility for its retraction. Change is afoot, he declared: “Moving forward, we will ensure that our decision-making processes are more transparent, our editorial engagement is more collaborative; and our accountability practices are clearer.” The magazine also announced new publisher, Magogodi aoMphela Makhene.

Publication of the note rounds out the picture of a magazine in panic mode, cleaved by the most divisive conflict on the world stage and discovering how far it can venture from the orthodoxy of its core audience. Answer: not far at all. Guernica may be a small, niche publication, but its struggles here are universal because every other media outlet is agonizing over how to write about Israel-Gaza, who’s qualified to write about it and precisely what context gets loaded into the mix. Err on one side or the other, and your publication could be facing an X revolt, a staff revolt or some other crisis. This a conflict, after all, in which proportional polemic responses are becoming extinct.

Whereas the Guernica masthead in January listed about 50 people, it now lists about a dozen, thanks at least in part to staff dismay over Chen’s essay. Some staffers wrote impassioned posts on X outlining their rationales for turning in their passcodes. They left behind a labor of love: Guernica is run entirely by volunteers. Jina Moore Ngarambe, who took over as editor in chief in 2021, resigned her post on April 5: “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,” wrote Ngarambe.

The idea behind the essay, Chen tells me, was to write something that “didn’t step away from the horrors of war but that offered an honest and nuanced perspective.” Ngarambe edited the story, which discussed the difficulty of Chen’s transition to life in Israel, her refusal to enlist in the Israeli military, her reaction to the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, among other experiences. A theme of the essay is Chen’s sense of duty — she gives blood, participates in a volunteer program called Road to Recovery that transports Palestinian children from the West Bank to Israeli hospitals, and assists a Jewish family reeling from Oct. 7. “Their daughter, son-in-law, and nephew had been murdered,” Chen writes. “Their house had been torched, and they were evacuated to my village, where they were temporarily living at the end of my street.”

It all took a toll: “My own heart was in turmoil,” writes Chen. “It is not easy to tread the line of empathy, to feel passion for both sides. But as the days went by, the shock turned into a dull pain in my heart and a heaviness in my legs.”

“Both sides,” huh? Those are fighting words for thinkers in a certain precinct of American thought. As it happened, some of the toughest commentary came from Guernica staffers. In a resignation note posted to X, senior nonfiction editor April Zhu commended Guernica’s “interiority,” which means that the magazine’s writing proceeds from shared beliefs and principles. “To wrestle with universal humanity across the gap of apartheid — which, by definition, distributes humanity unequally — without calling for its obliteration is to violate the precious ‘shared interiority’ that set Guernica apart,” wrote Zhu, in a polemic that doubles as an accounting as to why literary magazines don’t get more readers.

Another departing staffer wrote, “I’ve drawn profound meaning from the stated direction that what constitutes a Guernica piece is resistance to imperialism. This essay documents uncritically how one yields to it.” And another:

Amid the resignations and denunciations, a note on the Guernica site — from “admin” — said, “Guernica regrets having published this piece, and has retracted it. A more fulsome explanation will follow.” Three sources tell me that staffers didn’t mount a campaign for the retraction. That step received serious consideration among Guernica leaders after Chen herself opened the door to such a step; she didn’t respond to a question about the matter. In his note to readers, however, Archer wrote that the retraction occurred at the “invitation of the author.” Though it was Ngarambe who entered the retraction in the site’s publishing system, she said in her parting note that she opposed it. That leaves Archer, who said that the site’s “response” would address such issues.

Ngarambe sent an email to staffers apprising them of the step, writing, in part, “In addition to the concern, the anger, and the pain I have heard on social media, I’ve heard privately from writers I have worked with and deeply respect. Any one of the notes I received would have signaled a need to reflect; together, they are a clear call that I missed something fundamental.”

As it turns out, Ngarambe did miss something fundamental: the reality that her staff believe there is one version of this story that’s fit for publication, and it certainly doesn’t encompass the humane reflections of a Jewish woman seeking reconciliation and recovery in her community. It encompasses colonialism, militarism and oppression. Archer wrote in his note, “Rather than mine the personal to expose the political, individual angst was elevated above the collective suffering laid bare in the extensive body of work Guernica has published from the region.” That’s a smart critique of the piece — though it falls woefully short of a rationale for retracting it.

Not only did Chen bypass that formula, she used forceful language in discussing the atrocities of Oct. 7. After the terrorist attack, for instance, she paused her work with Road to Recovery: “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 admit, I was afraid for my own life.”

Perhaps passages such as that one doomed the piece, a possibility that Chen considered in an interview with the New Republic. “My essay is uncomfortable and inconvenient to readers because it considers the incredible suffering of both Israelis and Palestinians.”

Reverse-engineering the backlash, however, is an imprecise undertaking owing to the ineffable forces governing such things. Following the Guernica retraction, the Washington Monthly picked up the essay and published it with an italicized explanation dissenting from all the critiques. How did it land? “The reaction was overwhelmingly positive from left, right, and center,” noted Matthew Cooper, the Monthly’s executive editor for digital.