It’s only right to now boycott Sally Rooney
Jews are the only minority the Left doesn’t mind insulting in a whole variety of ways – from the repetition of your classic, Nazi-grade tropes about nefarious control, special interests and amoral money-grubbing machinations, to the subtler but hardly less unsavoury commitment to mocking Israel’s right to exist.
They may not actually mean to mock Israel’s right to exist, but among the more respectable – indeed, the arty elites – of the Left, the commitment to bashing Israel is certainly strong. Now, to be clear, being anti-Israel is not the same as being anti-Semitic, and it is certainly not my intention to cast aspersions on the personal views towards Jews of bestselling authors and famous film-makers. Be that as it may, many Jews who support Israel (and that is many Jews) are made uncomfortable by the sheer degree of anti-Israel sentiment that we encounter throughout society, including among the great paragons of the arts.
Last week, I was one of many who felt taken aback and indeed somewhat wounded by the decision of Sally Rooney, the bestselling global phenomenon and author, to decline to let her latest novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, be published by an Israeli publishing house.
Rooney is committed to BDS, whose mission is to “boycott, divest from and sanction” Israel and only Israel. She believes, as do all BDS-ers, that Israel has “a system of racial domination and segregation against Palestinians” that amounts to apartheid. (Never mind that a quick trip to Israel would confirm how insulting this is to those who actually survived South African apartheid.)
People are, of course, entitled to such views: it’s just wearying, as someone in favour of fair treatment of Israel, to have to sit by while they are espoused by, among dozens of other prominent people, an author considered the very zenith of millennial political morality.
Her previous novels – Conversations with Friends and Normal People – were published by Modan, the firm she has now declined. Rooney seems to have become more committed to the BDS cause since the summer, when Israel retaliated against an onslaught of Hamas rocket fire. Then, she was one of thousands of artists and authors who signed a letter demanding the end of all relations with the Jewish state. As well as demanding the cutting-off of international aid to Israel, a country home to 250,000 Palestinians (not counting the West Bank or Gaza Strip), they want all “trade, economic and cultural” relations cut, too.
Those who signed the letter, then, do not only want to boycott Israel: they want to boycott a great number of Israelis, or at least those who work in universities or the arts or sciences or pretty much anything else that might lead to “cultural” relations.
Many Jews like me, who have family in, and strong feelings invested in Israel, find this position deeply hurtful – especially those who, like me, have bought and read Rooney’s previous novels. In protest, I won’t be reading this one.
Rooney and her gang of respectables do not apply their morals evenly. For instance, she publishes in China, a communist dictatorship systematically killing and torturing 10 million Uyghurs. I say this aware that even raising the objection of such double standards has, for some reason, become instantly mockable by the Left, as if it’s laughably obvious why Israel should be singled out for special and obsessive condemnation. I don’t find it so.
Following the buzz created by her announcement, Rooney magnanimously sought to clarify her position: she would be “honoured” to have the book translated into Hebrew, just not by an Israeli publishing house.
The thing is, the Hebrewlanguage publishing industry is concentrated in Israel, as you might expect. Israel is where Hebrew-speakers live. Saying you don’t mind a book being published in Hebrew, so long as it isn’t published by an Israeli publishing company, is like saying you don’t mind someone eating, they’re just not allowed to eat food.
As Anshel Pfeffer, a Left-wing pundit who supports the boycotts of the settlements, noted: “Sally Rooney’s book won’t be published in Hebrew because there’s no such thing as a ‘BDS-compliant’ Hebrew publisher. To be that, a publisher would have to agree to not selling its books in Israel and to Israelis, who are the overwhelming majority of the Hebrew-reading market.” Quite: Rooney no doubt means well, but her choice is deeply problematic.
Rooney is one of a great many in the arty tradition of Israelboycotting; a list that includes Mike Leigh, Brian Eno and Arundhati Roy, all of whom are signed up to BDS. Again, boycotting Israel does not make you an anti-Semitic person. But the tried and true test for locating anti-Semitism within antiZionism is the “three Ds”: delegitimisation, double standards and demonisation of Israel. Regardless of the individuals e involved, BDS has been hotly debated and criticised, largely as it is considered to veer dangerously close to violating the rule of the “three Ds”.
Unlike the Enos, Roys and Leighs of the world, Rooney is no deluded oldster forged in the Swinging 60s: she’s a pale-faced, sober, rich and wily chronicler of millennial sex, and the most right-on writer of our time. She is the very summation of the millennial moral elite, and this uncomfortable business has only increased her respectability. On the upside, her novels are dreary and monochrome, so Israelis will at least be spared that.