Colin Sheridan: There comes no pleasure in writing critically about Sally Rooney

Allowing 'Intermezzo' to be published in Hebrew through an Israeli publisher deemed compliant with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement raises a question larger than Rooney herself: What do we validate when we make exceptions?

Sally Rooney has never boycotted Hebrew. She has boycotted Israeli cultural institutions complicit in apartheid. File picture

There comes no pleasure in writing critically about Sally Rooney. 

I have long admired her work and her courage, and I expect I will continue to do both. 

Rooney has been among the few Irish cultural figures of international stature willing to speak plainly about Palestine, Israeli apartheid, and the moral necessity of boycott. 

She has accepted professional risk for that position. She deserves credit for it.

But admiration should not exempt anyone, least of all those who take boycott seriously, from interrogation. 

Rooney’s decision to allow Intermezzo to be published in Hebrew through an Israeli publisher deemed compliant with BDS (the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement) raises a question larger than Rooney herself: What do we validate when we make exceptions?

The answer from +972 Magazine, November Books, and Rooney’s defenders is that this is not an exception at all. 

It is, they argue, BDS in action: A distinction between language and state, between readers and institutions, between identity and complicity.

Rooney has never boycotted Hebrew. She has boycotted Israeli cultural institutions complicit in apartheid.

November Books, we are told, takes no Israeli state funding, does not operate in settlements, and recognises Palestinian rights. 

All of that may be true. It may satisfy the letter of BDS. It may be carefully, even admirably, argued. And still it may be wrong.

Susan Abulhawa, writing in Mondoweiss, puts the discomfort sharply. 

The issue, she argues, is not whether the deal “technically threads a needle” through boycott guidelines, but why this project, this book, this author, and why now. Her central question is devastatingly simple: who is served?

That is the question solidarity movements must never stop asking. Not what can we justify? Not what can we finesse? Not what can be made technically compliant? 

But who is served by this act, in this moment, while Gaza’s writers are dead, its libraries and universities pulverised, its cultural life deliberately attacked alongside its hospitals, schools, and homes?

The danger is not that Rooney has betrayed Palestine. I do not believe she has. 

The danger is that the Israeli state, and the broader system that sustains it, is extraordinarily skilled at metabolising dissent. 

It can absorb critique, domesticate it, translate it, package it, and sell it back as proof of pluralism. 

It can point to the publication of an anti-apartheid novelist in Hebrew and say: Look, there is debate here; look, there is culture here; look, this is a normal country with complicated conversations.

But Israel is not a normal country having complicated conversations. 

It is a state committing war crimes in full public view, protected by American power, European cowardice, and a global architecture of euphemism. 

The question is not whether individual Israelis should be able to read Rooney. 

The question is whether any cultural transaction that gives oxygen to the appearance of normality is morally defensible while the state continues to annihilate Palestinian life.

Boycott at its most powerful

Boycott was not invented as a branding exercise.  It was born in Mayo, the same county that gave us Rooney. 

In 1880, Charles Cunningham Boycott, an English land agent in the Lough Mask area, became the object of organised social and economic isolation after local tenants, backed by the Land League, refused to work for him, serve him, or deal with him. 

The point was not dialogue. The point was pressure. The point was to make business as usual impossible.

That is what boycott means at its most powerful. It is not hatred. It is not purity. It is not a refusal of human complexity. It is a disciplined withdrawal of cooperation from systems of violence.

And boycotts work. They do not work magically or alone. They work when they are collective, sustained, and attached to wider political demands. 

The anti-apartheid movement understood this. 

The Montgomery bus boycott understood this. 

The Bristol bus boycott understood this. 

Boycott is a way of saying that when institutions refuse justice, ordinary people will remove consent.

Ireland should understand this better than most. 

Yet our own State has perfected the art of rhetorical solidarity without material rupture. 

Ministers speak movingly about Palestinian suffering. 

Ireland recognises Palestine. 

Irish diplomats use sharper language than many of their European counterparts. 

And still we remain deeply entangled in trade with Israel.

Survival through normalisation

This is the hypocrisy that makes the Rooney controversy feel bigger than one novel. 

Ireland congratulates itself for being pro-Palestine while maintaining the commercial plumbing that helps Israel function as a normal member of the global economy. 

We are told that our Government is doing all it can, that measures must be lawful, limited, carefully scoped. 

We are told to applaud legislation that targets a narrow band of settlement goods while the much larger economic relationship remains untouched. 

We are asked to celebrate symbolism while material complicity continues.

This is how liberal states launder their conscience. 

They become fluent in the language of Palestinian rights while preserving the structures that deny those rights meaning. 

They deplore occupation, then trade around it. 

They condemn violence, then protect the economic relationships that make violence sustainable. 

They insist they are on the right side of history while ensuring history has no cost.

The same logic applies culturally. A BDS-compliant Hebrew edition may be, on paper, a clever distinction. 

But the Israeli state does not survive only through government ministries, arms exports, and military alliances. 

It survives through normalisation: Through the idea that life can continue, culture can continue, commerce can continue, so long as the correct disclaimers are attached.

Changing the moral weather

That is why I struggle with this decision. Not because Hebrew is illegitimate. It is not. 

Not because Israeli readers are collectively guilty. They are not. 

Not because Rooney is insincere. She plainly is not. 

I struggle because genocide changes the moral weather. 

It makes certain gestures impossible to receive innocently. It turns nuance, however carefully intended, into oxygen.

There will be those who say this is unfair. They will say that refusing a BDS-compliant publisher collapses the distinction between state and people. 

They will say it punishes dissident Israelis. They will say it narrows the space for anti-Zionist Jewish and Israeli voices. 

These concerns are not trivial. But they cannot be the centre of an anti-colonial movement. Palestinians must be.

That is Abulhawa’s most important provocation. Too often, even in solidarity spaces, the moral drama is recentered around Israelis: Their dissent, their discomfort, their courage, their need to be reassured that boycott is not aimed at them as Jews. 

But the purpose of BDS is not to comfort Israelis. It is to help end Palestinian dispossession.

There is no clean way through this. Rooney’s decision may meet the criteria. It may even be defensible within the internal logic of BDS. 

But I cannot shake the feeling that something essential has been conceded: The refusal to let Israel have normal cultural life while it destroys Palestinian life.

Nothing can heal that rift. Not time. Not money. Not opportunity. Not the beauty of translation. Not the sincerity of those involved.

A boycott either interrupts normality or it becomes another form of it. Mayo taught the world that lesson once. We should remember it now.