In early March, most of the all-volunteer staff of the leftwing political and literary journal Guernica resigned in protest of the publication of an essay by an Israeli woman about her struggle in the weeks after 7 October to “tread the line of empathy, to feel passion for both sides”.
What they objected to most in Joanna Chen’s essay, From the Edges of a Broken World, was what it left out: an explicit critique of Israel’s longstanding policies of apartheid, its violent occupation and the genocide it is currently committing in Gaza. Guernica’s former co-publisher called the piece “a hand-wringing apologia for Zionism”. Grace Loh Prasad, a Taiwanese-born writer whose memoir was excerpted in Guernica last week, tweeted: “I am alarmed & upset that my writing has appeared alongside an essay that attempts to convey empathy for a colonizing, genocidal power.” Chen’s essay was removed from the site.
In January the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, or PACBI – which is part of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement and complements its economic boycott – called for a boycott of the Israeli grassroots organization Standing Together, which it said seeks “to whitewash Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza”. In fact, the 5,000-member joint Palestinian-Jewish group is one of the only voices within Israel calling for ceasefire and an end to the occupation.
The retraction of Chen’s essay at Guernica and the boycott of Standing Together are parallel actions. They signal a split in the movement for Palestinian rights and liberation. Some of the differences are tactical, some philosophical. But beneath that split lies the difficulty of the western left in dealing with Israeli humanity. The difficulty is expressed obliquely, in a rigid political test, which is all too easy to fail. That severely undermines the allyship that is necessary to building a movement for Palestinian liberation, particularly inside Israel.
“Our ability to speak, act, or effect change under a fascist government is already severely limited,” Standing Together’s Palestinian leadership posted in a response to the boycott. It was “infuriating” that their putative comrades had decided to tighten the gag.
The word the resignation letters used for Chen’s wrongdoing, and PACBI used to describe Standing Together’s strategy, was “normalization”, which former Guernica senior editor April Zhu defined as “treating something deeply abnormal (occupation, apartheid, genocide) as a sad, even if complex, reality: immutable parameters within which we must negotiate one another’s humanity”.
This is similar to the definition guiding PACBI in determining what academic and cultural activities or products normalize, and therefore should be boycotted. “Examples of normalization include events, projects, publications, films, or exhibitions that bring together on the same platform Palestinians/Arabs and Israelis so they can present their respective narratives or perspectives, or to work toward reconciliation, ‘overcoming barriers’, etc, without addressing the root causes of injustice and the requirements of justice,” the guidelines read.
BDS does not boycott “individuals because of their Israeli or Jewish origin or identity”, they continue. It targets “complicity, not identity”. Still, people speaking or performing at a public gathering might be perceived as “representing their flags, regardless of what the individuals may think or want”. Putting them on the same stage “may constitute harmful politicization and therefore normalization”. To be safe, event organizers should move one of them to another part of the program. Airing unresolved or complex feelings in an unmediated public conversation might weaken the public resolve to end what is not a complex situation.
Standing Together risks precisely this kind of dialogue. Among its tactics is trying to persuade Israelis of their self-interest in ending the many forms of violence against Palestinians. The statement on X reiterated the organization’s theory of change: “The fate of Israelis and Palestinians will forever be linked, and we must forge a politics of multiethnic solidarity grounded in our common humanity, pain, and purpose.”
Chen does not have a theory of change, Zionist or otherwise. If she has any politics, she is a liberal. Her role model is her English Aunt Sheila, an inveterate home hospice and Citizen’s Advice Bureau volunteer, who “understood the intrinsic importance of person-to-person contact; she believed it was a two-way street, that she also benefited from it.”
Chen was a reluctant Israeli. Her parents moved her to Israel from the UK as a teenager. She refused to serve in the army. She became a translator of Arabic and Hebrew poetry. Literary translation, she wrote, “enables me to transcend borders and build literary bridges from source to target language, from one people to another”. She volunteers driving sick Palestinian children from a checkpoint near Hebron to an Israeli hospital where they can receive medical treatment of a higher quality than in the West Bank.
For two weeks after the Hamas-led attacks, however, Chen instead spent her time looking after an Israeli family whose daughter, a son-in-law, and nephew were murdered and their house torched. “How could I continue [volunteering] after Hamas had massacred and kidnapped so many civilians?” she asked. She referred only obliquely to the massacre of Gazan civilians that had already begun.
None of her good works exonerated Chen in the eyes of her detractors. Nor did she get a pass for being one of the few Israeli Jews still working to make common cause with her Palestinian neighbors. Going weekly to the checkpoint, Chen surely knows there are few two-way streets in the occupied territories. The checkpoint allows Israelis to go in and out, but its main purpose is to lock Palestinians in. She did not say this in her piece. Perhaps the Guernica staff also saw her two-week pause in driving as the imposition of a tiny, temporary form of collective punishment – taking out her anger and trauma on sick children. The staff’s philippics, penned 6,000 miles from where Chen was trying to reconstruct a compassionate and principled life, demanded purity, not mixed feelings.
“It is important, more than ever, to continue resisting the genocide and dehumanization of Palestinian people through effective actions of solidarity,” proclaims BDS in an update of its boycott of Hewlett-Packard, which provides the technology Israel uses to administer the bureaucracies of apartheid. Standing Together is also fighting “against the dehumanization and subjugation of Palestinians”.
There is no disagreement on the left that the economic boycott is a correct and effective tactic, as demonstrated in South Africa. The question that divides Standing Together from PACBI and Chen from her detractors at Guernica is more philosophical, thus less testable: how to end dehumanization?
Humanism, which underlies Standing Together’s and Chen’s practices, takes the equal value of all lives as its starting point, the germ from which to cultivate political equality and justice. For the anti-normalizers, any dialogue that does not foreground the greater power of the oppressor and the greater harm to the oppressed is a mere performance of equality that legitimizes a liberal fantasy and impedes Palestinian liberation.
Former editor Zhu sniffs at Chen’s “need to affirm ‘shared humanity’ in the first place”, as if anyone who does not already know this is not worth talking to. Unfortunately, inside Israel, where political officials speak of Palestinian children as animals to be slaughtered, shared humanity is not a universally accepted fact. One result of Israel’s tightening isolation of the occupied territories and its unofficial but almost complete segregation of Jewish and Arab Israelis in public schools, is that many Jewish children have never had a real relationship with a Palestinian and many Palestinian children have never met an Israeli except those who rough them up at the checkpoints or arrest their siblings. The nauseating truth is that Palestinian humanity needs affirmation, or the killing will not end.
People far wiser and more experienced than I insist that you have to do two things at once. Keep the subjugation of the Palestinians front and center. Demand a ceasefire now and a permanent end to occupation and apartheid. And at the same time, build a movement.
“Look, this is not only going to be about liberating Palestinians,” the Palestinian human rights activist and writer Iyad el-Baghdadi told Brooke Gladstone on NPR’s On the Media. “Ultimately, this is also about liberating Jewish Israelis … If you have to kill that many people in order to feel safe, that means you’re never going to feel safe.
“This decolonial movement should be led by the colonized, but this movement has to center both peoples, building a future for both peoples. This is not going to be something that we’re going to fix in 10 years or 15 years.” Building a movement means embracing every ally and listening to them speak.
Judith Levine is a Brooklyn journalist and essayist, a contributing writer to the Intercept, and the author of five books