Last week I got an email from a colleague I respect on another magazine, prefaced with the assertion that it concerned “a matter we feel will be of importance to you as an artist, writer or journalist” and inviting me to subscribe my name to an open letter in support of the Irish novelist Sally Rooney. The issue in question, in case there are any readers of this who missed the news story, is that Rooney’s publisher Faber has announced that with the full support of their author they are withdrawing all Rooney’s novels from publication in the UK. 

Governments shouldn’t, if they can possibly avoid it, put themselves into the position of being arbiters of hermeneutics. The absurdities proliferate fractally

Governments shouldn’t, if they can possibly avoid it, put themselves into the position of being arbiters of hermeneutics. The absurdities proliferate fractally

That’s a big deal. Sally Rooney sells a lot of books. At the heart of it is Rooney’s steadfast support for Palestine Action – the activist group proscribed in the UK as a terrorist organization after, in its enthusiasm for the Palestinian cause, its supporters have committed a campaign of criminal damage and intimidation against companies and institutions they deem supportive of Israel.

I have mixed feelings about all this, and I think – though the reaction has lined up semi-predictably across the left/right (or at least pro-Israeli/pro-Palestinian) divide – most of us should. By way of a statement of interest, I’m no fan of Palestine Action. I’m also, in a way that my more red-blooded colleagues and readers will tend to disapprove, to say the very least uneasy about the proportionality of Israel’s behavior in Gaza. But none of that is particularly relevant here. You can think Sally Rooney is a monstrous anti-Semite or a heroically principled speaker-of-truth-to-power, without that affecting the issues at stake. 

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