Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

When will Sally Rooney boycott Britain?

Sally Rooney (Getty Images)

I have a question for Sally Rooney. Why are you perfectly happy to engage with cultural institutions in the UK, despite the various mad wars us Brits have waged in recent years, but you dodge like the plague cultural institutions in Israel because Israel is fighting a war in Gaza?

Rooney, the celebrated Irish author of chick lit for people with PhDs, has reportedly put her name to a letter calling for a boycott of Israeli cultural institutions that are ‘complicit in genocide’. Hundreds of other writers with virtue to advertise have apparently signed too. Arundhati Roy, Percival Everett, Rachel Kushner and others all say they will forswear Israeli ‘publishers, festivals, literary agents and publications’ that are ‘complicit in violating Palestinian rights’.

I am just curious as to why they always single out Israel

And yet these people will still clink glasses of Cabernet at literary soirées and book launches in Britain and America, even though the death toll from our misguided ventures in the Middle East dwarfs that of the war in Gaza.

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