If you go to the March 4th edition of Guernica, an online publication for arts and politics, a headline reads, “From the Edges of a Broken World.” Underneath it, the following: “Guernica regrets having published this piece and has retracted it. A more fulsome explanation will follow.”
The fulsome explanation has yet to appear.
At the end of every article in Guernica, there is a plea for donations: “At Guernica, we’ve spent the last 15 years producing uncompromising journalism. … If you value Guernica’s role in this era of obfuscation, please donate.”
Well, no donations from me.
Before going on, maybe you should read the essay that Guernica retracted. It is wonderful in all the best ways — beautifully written, deeply felt, intensely personal, and agonizingly conflicted. Of course, that’s just my opinion. Read it for yourself: From the Edges of a Broken World – Guernica (archive.org)
One might assume that it was retracted because it was plagiarized or factually untrue and, therefore, was hardly “uncompromising journalism” or only served to further obfuscate a difficult subject. However, no one is accusing the article’s author of plagiarism or inaccuracy. On the other hand …
Perhaps, in fact, it does serve to obfuscate a viewpoint that Guernica wants to maintain clarity on, namely, that Israel is deliberately committing genocide in Gaza, that it is a war in which the Palestinians and Hamas are innocent victims and all Israelis, the wicked villains. The fact that the author feels deeply conflicted about the war and wonders how to bridge the divide between Israel and Palestinians (something she has been trying to do for years) would only confuse Guernica’s readers. As an Israeli, she is, by their definition, a victimizer and, therefore, not worth listening to or simply a liar.
Twenty volunteer staff members (including editors), quit the magazine when the article was published. Many of their objections, obviously part of the motivation for retracting the piece, were Tweeted, but most have been deleted by now. Fortunately, some of them have been published in a more lasting form. In Phil Klay’s article about this incident in The Atlantic (“The Cowardice of Guernica”), he quotes a former editor who said that by publishing the essay, Guernica had revealed “a pillar of eugenicist white colonialism masquerading as goodness.”
Forgetting Guernica in particular, it is the last statement, the idea that Israel is a white settler-colonial state, interests me most because it is an idea that has seemed to gain acceptance in American academia and among many writers and other intellectuals. Indeed, it is being used to describe America as well.
When pro-Palestinian protesters cry, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” that is, in part, justification for its subtext: Israel should not exist. When some declare that Hamas was justified in the horrors it perpetrated on October 7th because it was against the “occupiers.”
In the context of settler-colonialism, “occupiers” has a double meaning: Those who occupy or control Palestinian territories and those who occupy what is currently the state of Israel, which Hamas claims is also Palestinian territory. That Israel should cease to exist is not only Hamas’ view but that of Iran and all its proxies and, apparently, those on the far left of America.
Guernica seems to have established itself firmly on the side of the illegitimacy of Israel. Those who feel similarly think theirs is the only legitimate way to view the Israel-Hamas war and are disinterested in hearing any other viewpoint, and, to the extent they are able, they will ban all other viewpoints from the pubication.
The intolerance of other viewpoints by the extreme left is not a new phenomenon. I have lived through three versions of the Left in my lifetime. There was the Old Left (or what remained of it) in the 1950s when I was in elementary and high school. I went to a “progressive” high school in which several of the teachers had been fired from public school positions because they refused to sign loyalty oaths.
It was a school in which America could do nothing right, and the Soviet Union could do nothing wrong. Do I exaggerate? Probably, but not by much. But the views of many were as much guided by the Soviet’s Comintern and/or The Daily Worker (the same thing, really) as they were by their own malleable conscience.
Nothing exemplified these people's intellectual journey more than the seesawing of views leading up to World War 2. Prior to the Stalin/Hitler nonaggression pact, the American Communist Party and its followers were staunch anti-fascists. They quickly turned around when the treaty was announced and then turned on a dime once again when Hitler invaded the USSR.
In the late 1960s and 1970s, the New Left formed in the wake of the anti-Vietnam War, civil rights, women’s Liberation, and so-called free speech movements. The cries of “Down with the system” never said what should replace it, but that didn’t matter as much as just getting rid of it, whatever it was.
And now, today, we have what I’d call the Neo Left. It seems composed of some Black activists and their white followers who, by illuminating the sins of everyone who is white who owned slaves (e.g. just about all of the Founding Fathers) and adopting the view that America owes its existence and position in the world solely to slavery joined with the now current academic buzzword of “settler colonialism,” seem (inevitably) to question the legitimacy of America as a nation, at least morally.
Among all these three groups, at least one thing is abundantly clear. Historically, divergent viewpoints are not welcome and are banned by group pressure, if nothing else. But sooner or later, there is always something else: a someone. If there are divergent views, there is always a fight over ideas and methodologies that is inevitably resolved through a fight over who will be the someone else. However the intellectual ideas play out, in the end, there is always a someone. Martin Luther King Jr, for example, did not become the leader of the Civil Rights Movement without their being serious competition from others.
The style was set in motion by Lenin during the Bolshevik Revolution when it was established that there could be only one position, that of the Party, something that quickly evolved to being his position alone that mattered, enforceable by any and all measures, including death. Stalin did not invent these methods but merely refined them and carried them out to greater extremes. In today’s Russia, Putin (former KGB man that he is) learned his lessons well from his forbears.
If authoritarianism on the extreme Left tends to evolve from a somewhat collectivist impulse of necessity on the part of a minority of people that evolves to become embodied in a single individual, authoritarianism on the extreme Right seems to start off with a single individual who gathers followers who are obedient to his or her dictatorial demands and pronouncements.
In today’s political arena, the extreme left has not coalesced around a single leader and is a relatively small part of the Democratic Party (although it is large enough to influence the more centrist members). On the other hand, on the extreme Right, there is Donald Trump, who assumes that power flows down and outward from the very top and has captured almost the entire body of Republican politicians. Sooner or later, both extreme left and right demand the same two things of their followers: obedience and loyalty to the top.
With specific regard to America in the context of this article, it should be noted that the extremes of both left and right reach almost the same point. The left questions the legitimacy of America with the combination of its racial history and the moral illegitimacy of settler colonialism. So does the Right, with its willingness to dispense with the Constitution as an unnecessary encumbrance on power.
And neither the extreme Left nor Right are interested in divergent views about Israel or just about anything else. Freedom of Speech has become just a rhetorical device that is used to toss accusations across the divide, which only means my speech but not yours. Similar divides can be found when it comes to transgender, LGBTQ, and other hot-button issues, issues that were not so hot-button until (primarily) Republican politicians decided to make them so.
Thankfully, the views of the extremes are not the only views that exist. There is a very broad center from left to right that still sees America quite differently, that sees it, still, as an imperfect but perfectible union.
And that is true of Israel as well. Yes, there are certainly extreme views about Israel and the war with Hamas at either end of the political spectrum in America, although I would say that, except for a tiny group of people, the questioning of Israel’s right to exist is relatively new. Not surprisingly, extremes exist in Israel as well. I don’t know of any Israelis who are arguing for the dismantling of the Jewish state, but there certainly is a peace-now-at-almost-any-price camp on the extreme left, and on the furthest edge of the fight, there are figures like Smotrich and Ben-Gvir along with some ultra-Orthodox rabbis (empowered by Bibi Netanyahu) who would like to send all Palestinians to some other country. Or worse.
For us in America, there is much to listen to and much to say. The more we do both, the better off we will all be. Guernica did not serve itself or its readers well by banning one person’s viewpoint. They reveal themselves as being as biased and bigoted as those they accuse of the same thing.
Joanna Chen, the author of the banished article, said in an interview with The New Republic, “The essay considers how to remain human in a situation where each side in the conflict dehumanizes the other and refuses to see others and their needs and aspirations.”
We should all take that to heart, not just when it comes to the Israel-Hamas war but to everything that goes on in our country and, in fact, our world.
Thank you, very explicit, and well thought. 🙏