Sally Rooney and boycotting Israel
JVL Introduction
Author Sally Rooney has been a consistent critic of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians under occupation, but when she chose not to allow her Israeli publishers to translate her new novel all hell broke loose.
In The Intercept Robert Mackey reviews the predictable reactions from those who immediately accused her of antisemitism or double standards for allowing translations into the languages used in other authoritarian states.
An app used by Israel’s government to coordinate the outrage of its supporters on social networks, we learn, directed its supporters to like a Facebook comment “saying that her decision reflects her antisemitic behaviour!”
Rooney answered her critics cogently – and Mackey puts her support for BDS into a long Irish struggle against land dispossession (she comes from Co Mayo where the term boycott originated!) and in solidarity with others.
This article was originally published by The Intercept on Sat 16 Oct 2021. Read the original here.
Lies Are Being Told About Sally Rooney Because She Refuses to Ignore Israeli Apartheid
Baseless claims of antisemitism and allegations of hypocrisy have been leveled for decades at anyone who rejects the fiction that Israel is a normal state.
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Full of admiration for Sally Rooney. My forebears were cleared of their land in 1853 and shipped to Nova Scotia and other maritime provinces so many MacVarish in Canada but I have never met another in UK. Right of return for Palestinians must be struggled for
Ireland is NOT ‘formerly colonised’. The 6 counties are occupied by the British State
Fascinated to discover that the boycott of SA was started by 28 Irish playwrights.
The abyss beckons.
I’ve always been amazed that Israel is actually in Europe. I guess it must be as its football team competes in the European Cup and Israel always has an entrant in the European Song Contest. Where’s my atlas?
Good for you, Alasdair. I think it is John Prebble who records that at about that time the Duchess of Sutherland who both oversaw the HIghland clearances and sponsored a welcome celebration for Harriet Beecher Stowe (‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’) refused even to meet spokesmen for the expelled crofters.
As for the IDF’s ‘moral philosopher’ chaplain’ – a MORAL philosopher? word fail me.
Any US Administration will have to make a choice, sometime, in the near future.
On the one hand they want to side with Israel, in their battle of wills, with Iran.
Part of that alliance includes siding with Israel – and Israeli settlers – in their apartheid annexation of Palestinian land, while, simultaneously, tut-tutting these Israeli actions.
Domestically, there’s ‘the Jewish Vote’. That’s important to them.
On the other hand – there’s the ‘Irish Vote’. That’s equally important to any US politician.
Now, with the Irish ‘throwing their cap in the ring’, on the side of the Palestinians, the US Administration find themselves in a quandary.
What to do, what to do? Whose votes are most important? Irish or Jewish votes?
They can’t afford to lose, either. Time for the US to re-visit Human Rights, and what that means to every human on the planet.
No one can afford to ‘wing-it’, any longer.
Solidarity, with the Palestinians and all human life, everywhere!
‘English settlers’………..not a Scot among them? My father’s family are Irish Catholic Gypsies, they have spent many generations being cleared off land. Solidarity Sally Rooney.
At this rate it won’t be too much longer before the WHOLE world is full of ‘anti-semites’ and ‘self-hating Jews’!
The complete ignorance of Irish history among contemporary Zionists is particularly ironic considering how much Irgun borrowed from the IRA’
In the readers’ comments which followed this story in the Independent, I said that the reactions of the defenders of Israeli state policies increasingly reminded me of those of apartheid’s supporters when we were campaigning against the apartheid regime in the 1970s and ’80s – whataboutery (‘Why don’t you crticise Idi Amin/Russia/China or wherever?’) and accusations of anti-white racism.
Predictably enough, the responses came thick and fast – more whataboutery, and accusations of anti-semitism. Some things don’t change!