This, from Sarah Ditum at the Free Press, is probably the best analysis yet of the whole wretched business of Sally Rooney and her “banned” books. A self-proclaimed Marxist, and uneasy about her success – and the hopelessness of trying to change the world through novels – she was inspired by October 7th.
She had always been pro-Palestine and anti-Israel in a reflexive leftish way (in Normal People, one of the signs of Connell’s mother’s “values” is that “she’s interested in Cuba and the liberation of Palestine”), but the Hamas massacre of Israeli civilians in October 2023 elevated that position to the heart of her politics. It did not, however, make her a better polemicist.
Her afterword to the book The Gaza Tribunal: Britain’s Complicity in Genocide treats Palestinians less like people, and more like tokens in a morality play. “Palestine may represent the tightest point of contradiction in the world geopolitical system,” she writes, stiffly. “The intrinsic violence of imperial relations—often spatially dispersed and devolved through non-state corporations and agencies—is laid bare for the world to see.” (Needless to say, the Israelis murdered, raped, and kidnapped by Hamas do not even attain the status of tokens for her.)
In 2021, Rooney turned down an offer for the Hebrew translation rights to Beautiful World, Where Are You on the grounds that the bidding publisher was not compliant with the BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) campaign against Israel: the first sign that she had recognized her work could be a bargaining chip. But Palestine Action’s program of demonstrations and property damage—including an activist’s sledgehammer attack on a female police officer that left the victim with a fractured back—clearly held more glamour for Rooney than anything she could do as a writer. Writing in The Irish Times in August 2025, after the UK had proscribed Palestine Action as a terrorist group, she proclaimed her intention to go on funding it with her royalties. In publishing that piece, she surely understood the consequences she had set in train.
It is not a wholly intellectually honest piece of writing. In it, Rooney both claims that all resistance is justified by the moral gravity of Israel’s actions (“Activists who disrupt the flow of weapons to a genocidal regime may violate petty criminal statutes, but they uphold a far greater law and a more profound human imperative: to protect a people and culture from annihilation”), and downplays Palestine Action’s violence: the group, she claims, “has never advocated the use of violence against any human being,” which may be surprising news to that female police officer. But the piece does not really exist to make a coherent argument. It exists to lay down a challenge. Once her position was on the record, Faber had limited room for maneuver.
The most effective thing she could do with her writing for the Palestinian cause was, it turned out, to withdraw it altogether—from the UK market, at least. By giving her royalties in the knowledge that they will be funneled to a proscribed group, her publisher would potentially be opening itself up to prosecution under the Terrorism Act 2000. It would take a braver company than Faber to be willing to test that point in court. It opted instead to pull her books from sale in Britain….
This has been presented by some of her fellow authors as a free speech issue: hundreds of them have signed an open letter in support of her. Rooney herself, however, does not sound particularly regretful to have been unpublished. “I have made every effort to be honest with the public about my beliefs and intentions, and I am wholly prepared to accept the consequences,” she told BBC News. She sounds, if anything, relieved.
Finally, she has found a way for her novels to have the political significance she has always desired for her writing but never been able to attain. Rooney’s success as a novelist is, within her own moral schema, the mark of her failure: a true political radical would never have been embraced by the system. Her predicament is, looked at from a certain perspective, a tragic one. Cursed with a talent for fiction that she cannot respect, Rooney is left with nothing she can offer but her silence.
The saddest part of this farrago, though, is that it has turned her novels into exactly what she always feared they were: commodities. Her books have not been banned because of their content. This is not a free-speech matter. The disputable part is whether support for Palestine Action should be proscribed, and whether that proscription should entail legal consequences for an organization like Faber, which is not directly or deliberately supporting the banned group; but, given Rooney’s express intention to give money to a group responsible for criminal acts, it is hard to claim this as an attack on art.
Rooney’s novels have been withdrawn purely because of their status as profit-making products. Rooney could be manufacturing plastic buckets or party hats, and she would face the exact same consequences for funding a terror group….
Her gesture does little to help Palestinians, who can hardly be said to benefit from violence on British soil; but it does, in one small way, absolve her of the terrible burden of her own unwanted talent.
That’s the important part. Her books have not been banned because of their content. This is not a free-speech matter. They’ve been banned because she decided that the profits would be given to Palestine Action, a proscribed group. That would entail possible legal consequences for Faber, her publisher. So here we are.
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