Sally Rooney’s anti-Israel intolerance

This week, more than a thousand authors and publishing professionals announced their intention to boycott Israeli cultural institutions deemed to be ‘complicit in the dispossession of the Palestinian people’. Among the signatories are several heavyweights of contemporary fiction – most notably, Sally Rooney, the author of Normal People and the most successful novelist of the millennial generation.

‘The declaration amounts to the largest boycott of Israeli institutions in history’, the Palestine Festival of Literature (PalFest) boasts on X. The letter itself goes on to state: ‘To work with these institutions is to harm Palestinians, and so we call on our fellow writers, translators, illustrators and book workers to join us in this pledge. We call on our publishers, editors and agents to join us in taking a stand, in recognising our own involvement, our own moral responsibility, and to stop engaging with the Israeli state and with complicit Israeli institutions.’ The letter captures the intolerance and hypocrisy of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which seeks to isolate and demonise Israel.

As it happens, this is not Rooney’s first foray into BDS activism. In 2021, she infamously refused to sell the Hebrew translation of her third novel, Beautiful World Where Are You, to an Israeli publisher, citing her stance on Israel-Palestine. Yet she has been more than happy to have her novels translated into Mandarin, Russian and Persian. It would be no easy task to summarise the crimes of the CCP, the Iranian mullahs or Vladimir Putin, or the collective misery they have wrought. And yet it is always Israel that’s singled out for special opprobrium.

Worse, BDS doesn’t just target the Israeli state, as its supporters like to claim. The signatories consider any Israeli publisher, literary festival, publication or literary agent to be ‘complicit’ if they haven’t explicitly denounced what they describe as ‘Israel’s occupation, apartheid or genocide’. In other words, an Israeli literary agent could be a staunch critic of the Israeli government and of its treatment of Palestinians, but if she refuses to repeat the bigoted lie that Israel is carrying out a ‘genocide’, then she is deemed complicit and beyond the pale.

Clearly, Israeli cultural institutions are held to a different standard to all others around the world. Many Western literary festivals will have received some state funding. But they do not face boycotts if they fail to denounce their government’s policies. They are not considered ‘complicit’ in their nation’s military misadventures or abuses of rights.

The letter is also a tremendous blow to the spirit of international literary exchange. Israel has a flourishing literary scene. It boasts an array of highly successful female novelists who have made an inordinate contribution to the Western canon. Yet Rooney and Co have turned their backs on these voices.

Meanwhile, Hamas actively thwarts the education of girls and restricts their ability to travel. It throws gay people off buildings. Iran, Hamas’s chief sponsor, beats and sometimes kills young women who refuse to wear the hijab. Would Rooney be praised if she boycotted the Iranian publishing industry, or refused to allow her novels to be translated into Persian? More likely, she would be branded Islamophobic.

These anti-Israel authors may think they’re parading their virtue. What they’re really displaying is their intolerance – and ignorance.

Hugo Timms is an intern at spiked.