April Zhu: Let’s start with the charges. UnHerd columnist Kat Rosenfeld wrote that we editors who resigned in protest had reached with our “hot little hands” for “the censor’s pen.” According to Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple, we were outraged by “the humane reflections of a Jewish woman seeking reconciliation and recovery in her community.” And in The Atlantic, journalist and novelist Phil Klay alleged that by resigning, we had bent our literary magazine to “the narrowest polemical and moralistic approaches to literature.”

Sarah Khatry: It’s worth clarifying that each of us chose to resign from our volunteer positions because we believed that Guernica should not have published the piece in the first place. We learned of the essay only after it was published and had no part in its retraction, any more than we did in its solicitation and publication.

AZ: In any case, the media metabolized the upheaval of an online literary magazine into a culture war talking point.

SK: And as always happens, the controversy became an opportunity to stage the same old questions: Is good literature fundamentally apolitical? Do politics make for bad art? How could art that calls for empathy ever be a thing worth protesting? Is reading itself a fundamentally moral act, one that can “build bridges” through empathy in times of strife? And a new question, or at least one that felt and continues to feel deeply urgent: What are the political and ethical responsibilities of literature and literary institutions during genocide?

These questions were far above our paygrade—which was zero—as Guernica editors. But what was part of our job was weighing in on whether a nonfiction piece should be in the magazine or not.

AZ: The work of editing is, by design, not very visible, and the irregular way in which this particular process unfurled meant that our internal decisions were adjudicated very publicly. It also made clear that many people don’t understand what literary magazine editors do.

SK: In an interview with Ezra Klein last year, Adam Moss, the former editor-in-chief of New York, described editing as “a heightened level of sensitivity to reaction. . . And it’s not just an intellectual thing—it’s also very much an emotional thing.”

At first, a reaction along two dimensions: emotional, intellectual. An editor is supposed to examine that reaction, to find its source, and to evaluate it in the context of the magazine’s identity, its house style and purpose.

AZ: At Guernica, as at many other publications, the process of editing involved circulating a submission among many readers, each of them scanning for content and craft. Nonfiction essays were sometimes submitted directly to an editor, as Chen’s was, but more often they came in cold, from the slush pile. At least two readers read every slush submission and, if they endorsed it, would send it along with a brief memo to another round of editors, who would in turn write another memo framing the piece for discussion in an editorial meeting.

SK: So much of editing is about tapping into what’s already strong about an essay, even if some of that strength is still latent. Its veins of beauty, urgency, surprise; its capacity for insight. The work of editing is recognizing these remarkable qualities and bolstering them, while stripping away other qualities that may inhibit them.

AZ: Let’s say Chen’s essay came in and you had to write the memo for it. What would you have written?

SK: Maybe something like this:

This personal essay by Joanna Chen, an Israeli translator of Hebrew and Arabic, focuses on her difficulty “tread[ing] the line of empathy, to feel passion for both sides” (Israelis and Palestinians). Tonally, the essay is melancholic and generally restrained, with flashes of lyricism that do not, for me, tip into overindulgence given the weight of its subject. It begins and ends with the memory of Chen’s auntie Sheila, who instilled in Chen the significance of small but concrete acts of generosity, of “lending a hand when needed.” The essay tracks the arc of Chen’s ambivalent and often conflicting emotions in the weeks following October 7, after which she stops her volunteer work, driving Palestinian children from the border to Israeli hospitals for lifesaving medical procedures. In the midst of communal grief, Chen practices care, first for her neighbors who were victims of the October 7 attack and then also for Palestinians, by resuming her volunteer work and contacting a Palestinian friend. She reflects on what bridging both sides might look like, concluding that it feels ever more impossible during war, but committed to “still find empathy and love in this broken world.”

The memo would start like this, followed by a paragraph highlighting the essay’s shortcomings and its potential. In the paragraph I would have explained how the piece flinches from engaging with its larger historical and political context, because that context poses a threat to the neat arc of the author’s moral journey.

Then, in our next editorial meeting, we would have discussed the memo as a group and decided whether to move the piece forward to publication.

AZ: Our inquiry always boiled down to the following question: could this become a Guernica essay?

SK: Which of course is only answerable if you have a shared, distinct vision of what makes a Guernica essay in the first place. The magazine prided itself on having no “house voice”: you can’t recognize a Guernica essay from its first paragraph. For this reason, many writers sent us essays that they wanted to print fully in their own voice, ones they knew larger publications might ask them to change radically. As a small lit mag that paid our writers hardly anything, and our editors nothing at all, we survived and even thrived on our editorial reputation.

AZ: In fact, as I wrote in my resignation statement, it was a testament to the quality of Guernica’s editing that a critique of one of my early edits has become a lifelong lesson for me as a young editor. The top editor told me that an interview I’d edited had spent too much time trying to persuade readers that imperialism was bad and human rights good. Our readership already knows this, they said.

After Chen’s essay was retracted, and then republished in Washington Monthly, Chen gave an interview to New Republic editor Michael Tomasky, where she claimed apoliticality: “I do not think in terms of left and right, although I acknowledge their existence. I’m certainly grappling with the current situation, but staying on track is not a problem for me. I’m determined to retain my humanity.”

Chen did not set out to write a political polemic, Tomasky writes, and if we editors cannot tolerate writing that simply “attempts to look at a tragic and complex reality through a different and less crisply ordered lens,” then that itself is a tragedy. Why, he asks, are writers from other violent democracies afforded nuance but Israeli writing pressed into the un-artful form of the manifesto?

SK: So much of the drama around these events hinges on the idea that criticism of the essay was a refusal, as Phil Klay wrote in The Atlantic, to see “Israelis as well as Palestinians.” Are we saying that Israelis are not allowed to experience and express feelings like doubt, fear, grief, or distrust?

AZ: The foregrounded story of Chen’s essay, her arc from fearful ambivalence to her decision to “hold onto her humanity” and keep driving, is betrayed by what appears, unnamed but unambiguous, in the backdrop: the asymmetry of apartheid. Before October 7, as a Road to Recovery driver, Chen would arrive in 5:30 am darkness at the Tarkumia checkpoint near Hebron and see Palestinian workers queued up to cross from the West Bank to Israel, “hundreds of men on foot clutching plastic bags of food and walking along to the spot where minibuses awaited them.” The checkpoint is a universally legible motif of settler colonialism.  Chen inadvertently makes even more palpable that meaning of the checkpoint when she later observes how the queues have vanished after October 7, when Israel immediately barred entry.

Later in the essay, Chen describes a Parents Circle course in which Israeli and Palestinian citizens of Israel “learn[ed] each other’s narratives.” They tour both Yad Vashem, a Holocaust memorial and museum in Jerusalem, as well as Lifta, a Palestinian village abandoned by residents forced to flee the violence of the 1948 Nakba. At the end of this course, Chen senses that such exercises can never truly bridge the chasm:

In the WhatsApp group, we continued to talk, but there was always an undercurrent of suspicion. The Israelis talked about the Holocaust, about how the Jewish state was the only place they had; the Palestinians insisted that the Jewish state existed at their expense. There was goodwill but not enough to straddle the chasm that divided us.

Is there no fundamental difference between visiting a memorial to a historical genocide wrought by Europeans on European soil, and visiting the ground-zero site of an ongoing project of ethnic cleansing, one that secured the existence of the very state whose citizens were on this tour? A single catastrophe that made ruins of Lifta, just as it is making ruins of Gaza today?

Chen sees herself at the fulcrum of two equal sides, unwilling to bend towards the humanism she recognizes and values. She separates herself from more extreme views in Israeli society, for example, shrugging off complaints from Israeli friends that their Palestinian friends from volunteer work hadn’t reached out after October 7 (“The Palestinians in the West Bank were struggling with their own problems . . . . No one was safe”) or receiving admonishment from an Israeli friend in 2014 for having donated blood that, during the concurrent “Israel military operation in Gaza,” would go to Gazans.

In Chen’s essay, the systemic scale of Palestinian dehumanization is a mere backdrop to her own personal transformation. To create a humanist bridge able to hold up “both sides” equally, the essay implicitly demands that we separate the figure of the decent Israeli from the Zionist state—a distinction that collapses under the weight of Palestinians’ epistemic reality, which is that by the time of the essay’s publication, tens of thousands of Gazans had been slaughtered in Israel’s war, for the primary reason that they are Palestinian, and must pay.

SK: Chen claims to write about empathy, but stops short of engaging with a fundamental problem of empathy: who draws its perimeter, and who falls outside it? I find Chen’s essay most interesting as a document of complicity—of someone who badly wants to hold onto her self-perception as a good, empathetic person, who experiences turmoil due to the violence committed by her state, but who would also not go so far as to question the need for that violence. It is simply “war.” At the same time, Chen does not share the unabashed anti-Palestinian bloodlust that the Israeli right openly foments.

AZ: Lapses in thinking manifest on the page. Chen tried to imagine equal “empathy” for Israelis and Palestinians, but instead drew a protective border around her own moral decency—at best, a privilege of apartheid’s beneficiaries and, at worst, the settler’s epistemic blind spot.

SK: Chen says the following in the New Republic interview:

Some of the criticism I’ve received over the past week and a half suggests I ought to think exactly why there are inadequate medical facilities in the occupied territories and that I should do something about that. So what do you want me to do? Go demonstrate on street corners or sign petitions? These kids don’t have time for that. They need medical attention now. Any parent who has had to care for a sick child will understand this. I’m not going to stop driving them, I’m going to hold onto my humanity the best I can, person to person.

Chen makes clear that she is choosing to operate, in thinking and in writing, on a person-to-person scale. And this is exactly what she does when she picks up Jad, the three-year-old Palestinian she shuttled alongside his family to Sheba Medical Centre in Tel Aviv, when she resumes driving again. “This boy deserves medical treatment,” Chen writes. “He is not a part of the war.”

This is the moment in the essay most often cited by our critics to make our resignations, and the wider controversy around Chen, seem ludicrous. Who, after all, could object to the humanistic appeal to “any parent who has had to care for a sick child”?

AZ: Humanizing emotions, including empathy, have a scalar problem. They look very different as personal choices than they do in the collective. Most would see in Chen’s work cleaning the house of her new neighbors—an Israeli family relocated to her street after their daughter, son-in-law, and nephew were killed by Hamas militants on October 7—as a prototypical example of neighborly compassion. Yet it is apartheid, not discursive bridges of understanding, that shapes the life and death of Palestinians.

Little Jad, Chen emphasizes, “is not a part of the war.” But then where does “the war” end and begin? What about other Palestinians in Gaza, many of whom lived in refugee camps there because the villages they were driven from, like Lifta, are now within the borders of Israel? Are they “part of the war?” Is the Nakba, the precondition for the establishment of the state of Israel, “part of the war?” What does “empathy” look like if we reach back to 1948, or 1919? Rather than individual acts of kindness, empathy might come to resemble something else—like emancipation.

SK: Chen seems unable to address these structures at that scale. The imbalance of power in this “war” has been made objectively, obscenely evident by the profound asymmetry in casualties.

AZ: Needless to say, Chen is not the first to write from the morally complex position of a beneficiary of apartheid. The Afrikaner poet and journalist Antjie Krog led a radio team from the South African Broadcasting Corporation to cover the proceedings of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In her 1998 book Country of My Skull, Krog recounted the experience. A white South African from a conservative family with a farm in Free State, Krog listened to testimonies describing some of the most brutal acts one human could commit against another. The dehumanization was both visceral (burning, cutting, shooting, rotting) and total (not just “white-on-black” violence, but the entire matrix of violence engendered by European settler colonialism).

“How do I live with the fact that all the words used to humiliate, all the orders given to kill, belonged to the language of my heart?” Krog reflects. “At the hearings, many of the victims faithfully reproduced these parts of their stories in Afrikaans as proof of the bloody fingerprints upon them.” At one point, Krog interviews members of an Afrikaner paramilitary death squad, the Vlakplaas Five. Krog described using “all the codes I grew up with, and have been fighting against for a lifetime” to try to understand these killers, to write their story.

Krog’s Vlakplaas Five profiles drew harsh criticism from every side. But what haunted her the most was a question she later posed to herself, staring at her swollen, red skin in the bathroom mirror: “Why give evil a human face?” Her hair and teeth had been falling out, her face was covered in rashes, and she had suffered multiple breakdowns—all signs of the toll these testimonies took on her. Krog wondered about the difference between guilt and shame, and if only the latter is worth anything to a victim of apartheid.

Krog, like Chen, is a professional observer. During Chen’s fifteen years as a journalist at Newsweek, she “met people on both sides of the conflict,” she told TNR. Though she is “not a peace activist,” she said, her reporting work prevented her from falling into the dehumanization of Palestinians so common among her fellow Israelis. But unlike Chen, Krog confronts head-on the inextricable connection of her own position, and her racial and cultural identity, with the suffering of all the victims at the commission hearings who spoke, hour after hour, into the microphone.

SK: In The Atlantic, Klay suggests that empathy constitutes “a start,” a small but pivotal step toward recovery or reconciliation. Here he’s following Chen, who ends her essay with a similar gesture:

I think of my auntie Sheila a lot, how she taught me to reach out to neighbors near and far, how there is more to life than my own backyard. There is a very long way to go, but of one thing, I am sure: recovery begins now, at home.

Like so much of the piece, the passage’s tone is gentle, melancholic, yet tinged by an altruistic optimism. But “recovery” here puzzles me, and not just for its apolitical vagueness. (Recovery from what, for whom?) I feel whiplash between the endings of these sentences: “there is more to life than my own backyard,” yet “recovery begins . . . at home.” For a moment we seem to be nudged beyond the scope of the domestic, only to snap back to “home,” and home only.

AZ: In other words, Jad and his grateful family are part of the “life” beyond Chen’s “own backyard,” but not the conditions that made it so that Jad’s survival depends on the generosity of an Israeli citizen with a car. The larger the scale, the less useful become individual declarations of compassion. Yet those who point out the difference are deemed lacking in empathy.

SK: Yes. You’re making me think of Fady Joudah, a Palestinian American poet and the subject of an interview that was scheduled to be published in Guernica shortly after Chen’s essay. “Oh how good you are to the natives,” Joudah wrote sarcastically on X when he announced his decision to withdraw the interview. Chen’s piece, he said, was “humiliating to Palestinians in any time let alone during a genocide. An essay as if a dispatch from a colonial century ago.” Quoting Joudah’s words, Klay responds: “I find it hard to read the essay that way, but it would be a mistake, as Chen herself suggests, to ignore such sentiments”—before immediately moving on. That little comparison‚ “as Chen herself suggests,” subtly paints Joudah as the less charitable, indeed, the unempathetic one.

AZ: We should build bridges instead of writing mean words like Joudah! Klay takes for granted that to build a bridge is, if not inherently good, then at least useful. The big leap, though, is when he says empathy is itself “the task of literature.”

SK: And that the essay’s retraction and our resignations, he writes, were a “betrayal” of that task.

AZ: We’re haters and thus bad readers.

SK: Klay also describes Joudah as a “Texas-based Palestinian American poet”—as if to imply that Joudah is out of touch with realities on the ground, unlike Chen, who drives Palestinian children to the hospital. But look up Joudah online and you’ll quickly find that more than fifty members of his family had been killed in Gaza before Chen’s essay was published.

AZ: Are readers wrong to be enraged when the beneficiary of a system defined by its unequal distribution of humanity delimits her own empathy within a domestic sphere, while staking a flag of moral triumph—and while those on the other side are denied humanity and life itself? At best, Chen’s is an empathy on discount, what Klay calls “a start.” At worst, à la Herbert Marcuse in “Repressive Tolerance,” it legitimizes the views that power condones, in the name of a shallow rhetorical equality.

SK: There’s the liberal plea: Why can’t we all just get along? And Chen’s depoliticizing answer: Because we’re all hurting and we can’t see one another. “Seeing” becomes the prerequisite to material action, and maybe a material action in itself.

AZ: “Conversation,” Chen says, is likewise “a necessary step in order to break away from the vicious circle of violence and hate.” After the October 7 attack, Chen is reminded of Nuha, a Palestinian fixer she had worked with while at Newsweek, who had previously invited Chen to her home in Ramallah. The two had “broken bread together,” she says.

Nuha, how are you, my friend? I wrote, half-expecting her not to respond. But she did, immediately. Sad, sad, she texted back. We are all devastated in this unjust world.

Nuha has, to Chen’s honest surprise, engaged. Already Nuha’s “we” and “this unjust world” mark the asymmetry of their positions—but Chen is nonetheless “encouraged” by the possibility of dialogue. Until Nuha continues texting:

Ministry of Health

The water well and oxygen station in Al-Shifa Medical Complex were targeted

Dogs eat corpses dumped in a Shifa compound

The complex is subjected to continuous targeting

Chen is unsure “how to respond”:

Beyond terrible, I finally wrote, knowing our conversation was over. I felt inexplicably ashamed, as if she were pointing a finger at me. I also felt stupid—this was war, and whether I liked it or not, Nuha and I were standing at opposite ends of the very bridge I hoped to cross. I had been naive; this conflict was bigger than the both of us. Beyond terrible was inadequate; I was inadequate. A door had been slammed in my face, politely but firmly.

To be fair, Chen is ambivalent about her own position here. As an editor, how do you read this scene?

SK: The first thing I notice is that we have a pointing finger, a bridge, and a slammed door all conjured in just a few lines. Each is also invoked in a grammatically opaque way: “as if she were pointing a finger” (note the leap into the subjunctive); “a door had been slammed in my face” (passive voice, unnamed subject). And what about this “bridge” that Chen “hoped to cross” by talking to Nuha, who Chen only now seems to realize is “standing at the opposite end” from her and thus can’t be reached—even though the very purpose of a bridge is to, you know, connect two sides?

I’m picking on these elements because as craft they’re obviously bad—unclear and full of clichés. Such a sudden and concentrated breakdown of language signals to me that a writer is struggling. Over the years I’ve come to recognize moments like this, when the writer is on the brink of what they’re not ready to confront.

AZ: When Chen writes, “I felt inexplicably ashamed,” the “inexplicably” slides our mind away from what otherwise is rather explicable.

SK: The question of that shame and what it risks revealing to Chen about her own beliefs is what the “inexplicably” and the clichés obfuscate. If I were editing the piece, I’d mark this passage as the point where the real, gnarly work of a personal essay begins. Instead, we see Chen’s thinking stutter to a stop, and scramble for safety in cliché after cliché. To be the “brave and lyrical essay” that Nation writer Sasha Abramsky claims it is, her piece would need to address, among other things: What is it about Nuha’s texts that makes Chen end the conversation?

AZ: Specifics.

SK: Exactly. What seems to hurt about Nuha’s words, and what Chen refuses to acknowledge, is that Nuha hasn’t shut the conversation down. She’s sharing intimate and painful realities of life in Gaza. Most good writing lives in details like these. But the details refuse to conform to the narrative Chen wants to affirm for herself in texting her old friend. Chen seems to believe that grief can only be said to recognize the humanity of “both sides” when it is broad and indistinct enough to validate them equally.

Specifics are dangerous in an essay like this, because they rig internal monologues to external realities. They compel an otherwise inward-facing mode to turn outward, in a larger inquiry into the world. Reading Nuha’s details, one suddenly sees dogs eating corpses in Al-Shifa. We are challenged: What are you going to do with that information? Chen turns back toward herself.

AZ: She turns away, in fact.

SK: Yes! The clichés are a kind of rhetorical turning away. At its most extreme, this becomes far more than an aesthetic concern. Famously, Hannah Arendt centered the politics of the cliché in Eichmann in Jerusalem. Speaking to a Jewish police examiner, Eichmann kept repeating the same stock phrases: that he enjoyed “pulling together” with Jewish allies, that Jews would “unburden their hearts” to him, how he felt he was working to “do justice to both parties.” Arendt concluded that Eichmann was “genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché.” “The longer one listened to him,” she wrote, “the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected to an inability to think . . . he was surrounded by the most reliable of safeguards against the words and presence of others.” Clichés formed a buffer against “reality as such,” which finally rendered him incapable of empathy.

AZ: Yet clichés are also a cheap shortcut to universality. I noticed that in Chen’s essay, any encounter with a real, live Palestinian is followed not long after by a section break and poem excerpts. Just when the reader approaches the work of the essay—engaging someone with a different “narrative”—we are whisked away, toward disembodied verse. An ellipsis.

SK: Chen finds a kind of safe harbor in these poetry excerpts, in other people’s words, by poets whose names are provided only in a note at the end of the essay.

AZ: Even that note raises questions. Although the Arabic poetry that Chen excerpts was co-translated by herself, an American, and a Palestinian, the name of the Palestinian—poet and translator Mosab Abu Toha—was inexplicably omitted, something that would have been corrected had Guernica’s normal editorial process been followed.

SK: Right. So if you’re reading Chen’s essay continuously, you first encounter these texts as anonymous fragments, stripping the writers of context, including whether they are Palestinian or Israeli. These fragmented poems feel in effect neutralized, rendered purely aesthetic, weightless. Their primary function, outside what you called the turning away, seems to be simply to prove her credentials to write this essay. The translated poems “bridge” the disparate sections just as her translations “bridge” the linguistic chasm between Hebrew and Arabic—though ironically, these selected translations are all in English, oriented toward yet another audience.

AZ: I find it confounding that Chen, a translator who believes in the gospel of what we could call translation for peace—that legibility is a precondition for empathy—has given so little thought to what she has “translated,” not just in the poetry but in her own essay.

Translation for peace is one, limited way of seeing translation. There are more capacious ones. In the interview that Fady Joudah withdrew from Guernica, later published in the New Inquiry, Boris Dralyuk asks Joudah about “I Seem As If I Am,” a series of ten “maqams” in Joudah’s new book [ . . . ]. The maqam is a melodic mode in Arabic music that, Joudah says, aspires to Tarab, a “state of ecstasy, even if sorrowful, that one reaches through music or song.” Neither the microtonal scales of maqams nor the full meaning of Tarab can be translated into Western European musical notations or languages. Yet Joudah refuses to languish either in the exoticism of the untranslatable word or the didacticism of reducing Arabo-Islamic concepts to ethnography. “I am not compelled to explain it,” Joudah says. “Instead, I join the conversation through art. . . . As a Palestinian in English, I am not a cultural bridge between the vanquisher and vanquished.” We are very far from Chen’s “bridge” to Nuha, which she builds only to then shy from crossing.

SK: At the essay’s triumphant conclusion, Chen calls Nuha. They talk, Chen summarizes, about “our kids, and work, and the whole situation,” though the call is “a few minutes.” The only exchange of dialogue from this phone call that is included in the essay is written as: “I’m going through a process, she said. We both are.” The way it’s formatted, I can’t tell if the “We both are” is spoken by Nuha to Chen, or Chen in response to Nuha, or even, cynically, given how it’s presented in italics, if it’s Chen speaking to the reader in a kind of homily. Either way, this final interaction remains, at best, too elliptical to constitute real progress. “A process” is just another empty cliché (as vague as “the whole situation”). As a conclusion to the essay’s moral arc, it primarily acts to transform Nuha into a mirror image of Chen—as if “both sides” have now grimly determined their only common language is one sanded of all specificity.

Earlier in the essay, Chen admits that her attempt to respond to Nuha over text is “inadequate,” but rather than interrogate that reaction, she retreats behind clichés. She seems to want to cling to her own good intentions, in a situation where good intentions alone can’t achieve much. Their meagerness serves largely to secure our sympathies for Chen herself—not, in that moment, for Nuha, or for the dead of Al-Shifa. Her account feels almost engineered for us to say back: You’re being too hard on yourself. At least you’re trying.

This is why, had I been given the chance to read it, I would have regarded the essay as ultimately unpublishable. Its literary invocations of empathy are a hollow performance meant primarily to assure the writer’s own respectability, to herself and her readers.

AZ: When challenged by critics to engage critically with the root causes of Palestinians’ systematic dehumanization and their armed attempts to resist it, Chen instead acquits herself of any responsibility to even name it. The essay fails on its own terms.

SK: Put another way, the problems we’re naming could not have been edited away. Publishing the essay meant bending the standards that Guernica had set, in both craft and politics. It was a breach of the magazine’s mission as we understood it, and since it was that mission for which we volunteered our labor, we resigned.

In his interview with Joudah, Dralyuk describes several poems from [ . . . ] as “in dialogue with or apostrophe to ‘the aggressor.’” He asks, “Do you believe the attempt to understand can ever be mutual?” Joudah reflects on the “action” of understanding:

“Aggressors also grieve,” I write in another poem . . . . Yes, understanding is not meaningful if it happens in a void. It must involve others, and requires touch. The timing of understanding is another story. When will I understand you, as you need me to understand you? How long will it take? Will you subjugate me through this process or will you rise toward equality?

I see this choice—between understanding that “subjugate[s]” and understanding that “rise[s] toward equality”—as a sort of challenge to Klay’s idea of empathy as “a start.”

AZ: Or, even more pointedly, if understanding can be “mutual” only when one side is subjugated, is it really understanding at all?

SK: What is the weight of calling for mutual understanding while the subjugation of Palestinians is ongoing? This emphasis on mutual understanding slips into an argument for mutual accountability: a sleight of hand that primarily exists to disguise the colonial paradigm. Must the oppressed forgive the oppressor before the oppression can stop?

From an editorial standpoint, it would have been absurd to see Chen’s essay and Joudah’s interview side by side on the Guernica homepage. Open Joudah’s new book and the first thing you encounter is the author pushing against form, through a sprawling, multi-page dedication. To quote just the first few lines:

To those whose memory, imagination, and bodies are my memory, imagination, and body. From the collective to the one under the same assault, no matter our location on Earth. “Our bodies have different ways of knowing, but our bodies know.” To the martyrs who witness from above, and the living who witness on the ground. To those who will be killed on the last day of the war. To those who will be killed on the first day after the war ends. To those who succumb in the humanitarian window of horror. An hour before the pause, a minute after. To those who die of a broken heart during and after the war. To those who gather their families to die together so that no survivor suffers survival alone. To those who scatter their families so that they’re not all wiped out from the civil record . . .

This dedication is a litany. It is a list that attempts the impossible task of corralling every form of hurt and love experienced in, about, and through Palestine by Palestinians, wherever they are, including in diaspora, including “Texas-based” Fady Joudah. It joins individual and collective and separates them again. It refuses the mediation of distance, pointing towards the persistence of this collective “no matter our location on Earth,” and the families who have “scatter[ed]” so “they’re not all wiped out.” It weaves between living and dead, histories and futures. Its extent draws our attention to its unavoidable failure. The list could go on and on, but it must end, so it does: “To those, to those, to those. We are not afraid of love from the river to the sea.”

There’s one more moment in Joudah’s New Inquiry interview that I find myself returning to: “there is a solidarity whose horizon is assimilation,” he says, “and there is a solidarity whose horizon is liberation.” This is what I sense in the refusal, whether by Chen or others, to go further than calls for shared humanity or the recognition of pain on “both sides”: it’s an assimilatory empathy. It prioritizes retaining one’s own humanity, but shrinks from fighting the forces that dehumanize others.

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