Anti-Israel Activists Turn on Sally Rooney for Bringing Novel to Israel With ‘BDS-Compliant’ Publisher

Irish author Sally Rooney, reversing her previous ban on translating her latest novel into Hebrew, will publish her book in Israel in a way that aligns with the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement — but her anti-Israel base is not happy about it.A Hebrew translation of Ms. Rooney’s 2024 novel, “Intermezzo,” will be available next month through a collaboration between an independent Israeli publishing house, November Books, and two left-wing Israeli news outlets, +972 Magazine and Local Call. November Books, which accepts no government funding and does not operate in the West Bank settlements, is the only Israeli publisher to have received a stamp of approval from the BDS movement.The executive director of +972, Haggai Matar, announced the news this week, saying the effort would be done in a way that “honors the principles of the boycott and stands in solidarity with the Palestinian demand for freedom, equality, and justice.” He explained that BDS exempts from its boycott Israeli groups that “do not conduct business in West Bank settlements nor receive funding from Israeli state bodies.”‘Intermezzo’ by Sally Rooney, 2024. Via Farrar, Straus and GirouxMr. Matar added that the project’s broader goal is to “bring the BDS guidelines into greater clarity” and “rectify” the false impression that the movement is “hostile, violent, and antisemitic.”However, those claims are now being challenged as a growing number of anti-Israel activists reject the project, arguing that nominal compliance with BDS guidelines is not enough.Palestinian-American writer Susan Abulhawa argued that no Israeli publishing house can be “independent” if it “pays taxes to the Zionist colony” or participates in mandated military service. “Every time we think an Israeli or Jewish group might truly be anti-Zionist, they go and prove us wrong,” she wrote on X.Palestinian journalist Mohammed El-Kurd dismissed the project as “ridiculous” and accused its backers of “creating loopholes to bypass sanctions.” He added: “The point of sanctions, including cultural, is to create conditions that lead Israelis to pressure their governments and leaders. God forbid the 10 anti-Zionist Israelis standing are slightly inconvenienced!”The pile-on continued: one user on X described the decision as a “disgusting, insulting betrayal”; another accused Ms. Rooney of harboring a “a burning desire for books to be published in Israel through a BDS loophole.” A media watchdog group, HonestReporting, took the backlash as telling of BDS’s true aims — that the movement is not about “criticizing Israeli policy” but “about rejecting Israel’s legitimacy altogether.” The group added: “And any attempt to present BDS as something more moderate, nuanced, or coexistence-oriented inevitably collapses under the weight of its own supporters’ rhetoric.” Ms. Rooney’s anti-Israel activism predates Hamas’s October 7 attack. In 2021, she embraced the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement and blocked an Israeli publisher from translating her third novel, “Beautiful World, Where Are You,” into Hebrew. In October 2024, Ms. Rooney joined some 1,000 writers and publishers in pledging to boycott Israeli cultural institutions they identified as “complicit in violating Palestinian rights,” including those engaged in “whitewashing and justifying Israel’s occupation, apartheid, or genocide.” Citing the war in Gaza as “the most profound moral, political and cultural crisis of the 21st century,” the signatories charge that they “cannot in good conscience engage with Israeli institutions without interrogating their relationship to apartheid and displacement.”

Anti-Israel Activists Turn on Sally Rooney for Bringing Novel to Israel With ‘BDS-Compliant’ Publisher

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