Boycott

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,

I knew if we waited long enough, the United Nations would make itself useful. The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has produced a handy catalogue of companies that supporters of Israel can give their business to. Of course, this was not Michelle Bachelet’s intention. Bachelet is the commissioner and before that she was an exquisitely unpopular Chilean politician and head of UN Women, the all-girl Ghostbusters of UN agencies that fights global mistreatment of women by putting out hashtags and putting Saudi Arabia on its executive board. Now Bachelet has released ‘a database of all business enterprises involved in certain specified activities related to the Israeli