Sally Rooney is wrong to boycott Israel. Here’s why

Sally Rooney is the most successful of the younger generation of Irish writers. Her second novel Normal People was adapted for television and its explicit yet tasteful and romantic sex scenes have added to her fame. Now, however, Ms Rooney has acquired a different kind of notoriety: she has refused to allow her latest novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, to be translated into Hebrew. 

Justifying herself, she claims that Israel’s “system of racial domination and segregation meets the definition of apartheid under international law” and she supports the Boycott, Divest and Sanction (BDS) movement. Hence her refusal to allow her books to be published in Israel.

Why, you may ask, should anyone care? The BDS campaign has failed to isolate Israel, either economically or politically. British trade with Israel, for example, has quadrupled in the past decade. Unlike apartheid South Africa, which BDS supporters claim as their model, Israel has not been ostracised in sport or culture either. So far, by any measure, the BDS campaign has been a failure.

Yet this failure does not mean that gestures such as Ms Rooney’s cannot do considerable harm. Her claim that Israel practises apartheid against Palestinians is palpably false. Since its inception in 1948, all Israelis have enjoyed equal rights, including the 20 per cent who identify as Arabs or Palestinians. The main Israeli Palestinian party, the United Arab List or Ra’am, is now an important part of the Government. Israeli Arabs take a prominent part in public life and have held high offices of state, such as judges on the Supreme Court. The only legal difference is that Israeli Arabs are exempted from conscription, although a number, especially in the Druze community, do volunteer to serve in the Israel Defence Force. Palestinians who live on the West Bank or in Gaza are not Israeli citizens, but have autonomy, under the Palestinian Authority and Hamas respectively. However, Israeli Palestinians, whether Muslim, Christian or Druze, enjoy the best-protected human rights of any Arab people in the world. Many are critical of aspects of Israeli politics but, unlike almost all minorities elsewhere in the Middle East, Israeli Arabs are emphatically not second-class citizens.

So to call Israel an apartheid state, as Ms Rooney does, is a lie. When a respected author gives currency to such a lie, it is bound to lend credence to the edifice of mendacity that we call anti-Semitism. This affects not only Israelis, but — and even more painfully — Jews in the Diaspora. Wherever they live, most Jews feel a strong attachment to the state of Israel and libels against it, such as the accusation of apartheid, are deeply hurtful. The demonisation promoted by BDS and other enemies of Israel is used as a stick to beat Jewish citizens in Europe and elsewhere.

Ms Rooney should be ashamed of herself for many reasons, but I will mention only one. Irish literature has a proud history of acknowledging and celebrating the country’s small Jewish minority, even when it was suffering hostility and discrimination. The Irish President Eamonn de Valera might have paid his respects to Adolf Hitler even after the Führer’s suicide in April 1945, but James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and many other writers represented a very different Ireland. As against the dire legacy of Catholic and nationalist anti-Semitism, there is in Dublin the splendid institution of Bloomsday on 16 June, which is named after Joyce’s Jewish character Leopold Bloom. Admirers of Joyce trace the route taken by Bloom around Dublin to commemorate the writer, thereby implicitly endorsing his philosemitism.

Sally Rooney has, it seems, set herself against this tradition by her stance. She should be proud to be published in the language of the Bible. There is something deeply distasteful about her repudiation of any Hebrew publisher who does not distance themselves from the Jewish state. She is apparently quite happy for her novels to appear in 45 other languages, regardless of what crimes may have been perpetrated by those who speak them. But the people against whom the worst crime in history was perpetrated are singled out for condemnation. Israelis, ans by extension Jews, are not, it seems, what Sally Rooney means by “normal people”.

She could do worse than to ask Ireland’s greatest living woman writer about her boycott of Israel. Edna O’Brien, now 90, married a Jewish writer, Ernest Gébler, and has been a friend of Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, JD Salinger, Norman Mailer and many other Jewish literary luminaries. Some, of course, have been critical of Israel. I once witnessed an argument between two great writers, Harold Pinter and Amos Oz: a British Jew and an Israeli. Both of the Left, they differed over the politics of Israel. But they would never have boycotted it; indeed, Pinter visited Israel in the 1970s and was deeply impressed by what he saw. Edna O’Brien would set Sally Rooney straight — but would the princess of Irish literature have the humility to listen to its queen and then have the courage to make amends?

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