Colin Sheridan: Sally Rooney's critics are missing the point — our focus should be on Palestine
Sally Rooney's pledge to direct royalties to Palestine Action, proscribed under British terrorism legislation, has created circumstances in which Faber says it cannot pass on her UK earnings.
“The fools, the fools, the fools!” More than a century after Pádraig Pearse delivered his graveside oration for O’Donovan Rossa, the British establishment continues to provide occasions for its use.
Pearse was speaking in 1915, before the Rising and the executions that would demonstrate the political stupidity he understood so well. Suppressing a movement does not necessarily extinguish it. Sometimes, you merely supply its oxygen.
Nobody is proposing an equivalence between the execution of republican leaders and the withdrawal of a successful novelist's work, but there is something wearily familiar about a state so convinced of its own superior judgment that it cannot recognise the absurdity of where that judgment has taken it.
This week, that place was Sally Rooney. Not content with catapulting Kneecap to global fame, the British establishment has once more proven there is no Irish cause it can't help by trying to really, really hurt it.
Rooney and Faber have agreed that her publisher can no longer supply her books in the United Kingdom.
Her pledge to direct royalties to Palestine Action, proscribed under British terrorism legislation, has created circumstances in which Faber says it cannot pass on her UK earnings. Selling her work without paying her would, the publisher says, be unconscionable.
The government has not issued an order banning . The novels themselves have not been declared terrorist material. If old Catholic Ireland didn't do that after everybody saw Paul Mescal's penis a few years ago, the Brits never stood a chance.
But this development offers the Crown limited consolation when anti-terror legislation helps make the continued distribution of an Irish novelist’s work untenable. One imagines the realm sleeping more soundly.
Palestine Action’s proscription is the political decision at the centre of this. Repeating the designation “terrorist organisation” cannot substitute for examining whether it is justified. Criminal damage can be prosecuted as criminal damage.
Whether an organisation should be proscribed, with consequences extending far beyond those accused of committing particular offences, is a separate, much more serious question.
On Sky News, Adam Boulton described Rooney as taking an “anti-Israel and anti-Jewish stance”, placing her alongside “a lot of people in Ireland”. Consider the distance travelled in that sentence.
Support for Palestinians becomes opposition to Israel, which becomes hostility towards Jews. A novelist and an unspecified number of Irish people arrive together at an accusation of racial or religious prejudice.
What evidence supports that final step?
And yes, antisemitism is real. It deserves to be confronted seriously. Precisely for that reason, an accusation of it demands more than an airy progression through positions a commentator appears to regard as interchangeable.
Jewish people are not synonymous with the Israeli government. Palestinian solidarity is not evidence of hatred towards Jews. Intelligent, unbiased broadcasters ought to be capable of holding those thoughts without requiring a commercial break.
There is another familiar element to the hostility towards Rooney. I hear it in the irritation at her assurance, the fascination with her Marxism, the apparently inexhaustible discovery that a successful novelist earns money.
The champagne socialist prosecution has wonderfully flexible rules. If you are poor, your objection to capitalism is envy. If you prosper, it is hypocrisy. There is no acceptable income at which to question the arrangement.
Rooney now accepts a financial consequence for her politics. Even this appears insufficient to persuade some critics that she means what she says.
Perhaps the objection was never that her convictions cost her nothing. Perhaps it is that she possesses them at all.
My reading of some of this contempt is that her sex matters too. An incredibly intelligent young woman who can argue her position, appears unembarrassed by her abilities and declines to soften her politics for general consumption provokes a very particular irritation.
She is supposed to be what exactly? Grateful? Preferably charming? Certainly, less sure of herself.
Yet her fiction is full of uncertainty: People examining their motives, failing their ideals, recognising the compromises within their supposedly enlightened lives. The caricature of Rooney as an unthinking ideologue requires a delinquent indifference to what she actually writes.
Nor does she owe us an apology for using the occasions on which she speaks publicly to discuss something beyond herself. We spend enough time complaining that famous people stand for nothing.
Here is one prepared to stand for something at a cost. Apparently, she has misunderstood the assignment.
I have disagreed with Rooney in this column. In May, I questioned whether publishing through a BDS-compliant Israeli publisher risked contributing to normalisation. I acknowledged her sincerity, courage, and longstanding advocacy for Palestinians.
That disagreement did not require me to pretend she lacked any of those qualities. Admiration does not demand obedience. Criticism does not require contempt. Neither does defending her now require agreement with every judgment she has made.
But we should resist turning this entirely into the moral drama of Sally Rooney. Her prominence is why the consequences of this legislation have become international literary news.
What happens to people whose exclusion cannot command a headline? Palestinian writers should not need the intervention of a bestselling Irish novelist to make their lives, work and testimony worthy of attention.
The central obscenity remains the destruction and eradication of Palestinian life.
Rooney’s publishing arrangements matter because they expose something about the political order surrounding that destruction: the things it accommodates, the relationships it preserves, and the dissent it decides it cannot tolerate.
A state can maintain its military, diplomatic and economic relationship with Israel while discovering an urgent problem in the payment of a novelist. We are absolutely entitled to examine its priorities.
We are also entitled to notice when those demanding that Rooney face consequences have remarkably little to say about consequences for the powerful.
Pearse understood that authority could mistake its capacity to punish for proof of its wisdom.
Britain, sadly, will survive Sally Rooney’s novels. Its commentators will survive her Marxism. Irish readers will survive discovering that a woman from Castlebar is successful, politically committed and disinclined to ask permission.
Whether Palestinians survive the world’s indulgence of Israeli genocidal power is the question that should command our attention.
Rooney keeps directing us towards it. Her critics keep asking us to look at her. The same establishment that finds her solidarity intolerable will shortly insist you wear a poppy to demonstrate yours.
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