Sally Rooney’s luxury loathing for Israel

Reading that soppy Sally Rooney op-ed in Saturday’s Irish Times, it suddenly struck me: the UK government’s proscription of Palestine Action is one of the best things that’s happened to her. And to all the other keffiyeh-adorned poseurs in the bourgeois cult of Israelophobia. For at last, these people get to disguise their morally conformist abhorrence for the Jewish State as something radical. As something daring, sexy, possibly illegal, a thing you might even be arrested for. Courtesy of Keir Starmer’s clampdown on Palestine Action, these privileged spouters of the conventional wisdom of blind hatred for Israel have been gifted the thing they so sorely lacked – a frisson of revolutionary defiance.

Rooney’s piece has got the digital left squealing into their keffiyehs with delight. Puffing herself like some Boudicca of the anti-Israel set, she says she will continue to cheer and even fund Palestine Action. That’s the middle-class movement that loved making a spectacle of its virtuous animus for the Jewish State by carrying out infantile and sometimes dangerous stunts. It was proscribed as a ‘terrorist’ organisation in July, meaning you can get 14 years in the clink just for expressing support for it, never mind funding it with some of the royalties from your naff novels. Our hero Sally doesn’t care, though: I’ll still back them, she says, and ‘if this makes me a “supporter of terror” under UK law, so be it’.

Is anyone else dying from second-hand embarrassment? Here we have a rich novelist, the darling of the literary establishment, cosplaying as a modern-day Bernadette Devlin. It’s giving radical chic, to borrow Tom Wolfe’s phrase, where the patrician classes cosy up to ‘street politics’ in the hope that some of its hustle and glamour might rub off on their otherwise plain, bourgeois lives. My favourite bit is when Rooney says she even intends to fund Palestine Action using the ‘residual fees’ she gets from the BBC for its ‘two fine [TV] adaptations’ of her novels. Shorter version: I’m successful and moral! She thinks she’s getting one over on the BBC, blissfully unaware that it is packed with Israel-haters like her who’ll be clinking their Prosecco glasses when they hear that their favourite novelist plans to give Beeb money to Palestine ponces.

Rooney has deluded herself into thinking she’s a dangerous author, akin to those valiant writers of the GDR who carried on publishing in defiance of the Stasi. Will WH Smith continue to stock my books, she wonders? (Answer: Yes, of course. There’s a pretty penny to be made from middle-class commuters who love a bit of chick lit for people with PhDs.) She says she is one of ‘an increasing number of artists and writers [who] can no longer safely travel to Britain to speak in public’. You’d think she was Thomas Paine circa 1792 unable to travel to Britain because of the ‘seditious libel’ of his revolutionary ideals. In truth, she’s the penner of the most middle-class novels that every bookshop stocks and every arts institution would give half their annual budget to hear her gab about.

It is an indictment of the proscription of Palestine Action that it allows even someone as drab as Ms Rooney to masquerade as a cultural insurgent. This is a woman who’s never once expressed an opinion that wouldn’t win a giddy round of applause at a New Yorker soiree. Knock me down with a feather, she’s anti-Brexit. (‘I was Remain, like any sensible person’, she told the actual New Yorker, with superb haughtiness, in 2018.) Even her performative Marxism is more likely to make the ruling classes smile than tremble. Indeed, her Marxist-themed novels – kill me now – have become cash cows for bourgeois publishing houses desperate for that Gen Z dollar. Her anti-capitalism is a capitalist’s wet dream.

And, yes, her anti-Israel agitation – a veritable obsession of hers – chimes precisely with the blather and bigotry of the cultural establishment. Hating Israel is all the rage in influential circles. Go to any Ivy League university and you’ll see swarms of the privileged decked out in keffiyehs. It is in the leafiest suburbs that you will encounter those strange people who bow down to BDS and forcefield their entire lives against the produce and ideas of the unholy state of Israel. Palestine Action itself was a collection of the plummiest loathers of the Jewish State. The posh bent to Israelophobia is summed up in the kind of folk who’ve been arrested for saying they support Palestine Action: surgeons, professors, even a former adviser to King Charles III, for heaven’s sake.

My feeling is that Ms Rooney, at some level, was aware of just what a high-status, self-congratulatory opinion Israelophobia has become. After all, she’s witnessed her audiences of well-heeled millennials rattle their jewellery in vivid agreement with her denunciations of Israel’s ‘genocide’. But now, finally, she can doll up her entirely unsurprising, literary-clique loathing for Israel as a super-risky political position, thanks to the ban on Palestine Action. Overnight, she went from being just another artsy moaner about evil Israel to being the anarchist she always fantasised she was, wondering out loud in the Irish Times (LOL) whether she’ll be locked up like Oscar Wilde. Chill, Sall: you won’t.

It’s the ban on Palestine Action that allows Rooney and trustafarian leftists and the time-rich retirees of the Home Counties to play-act as magistrate-dodging Chartists. Fraser Myers has made the primary case for unbanning Palestine Action: because it’s profoundly illiberal to punish people for expressing support for an organisation that is certainly irritating and occasionally criminal but not terroristic. Now I want to make the secondary case: because this ban makes martyrs of moral conformists. It’s a reminder of yet another of censorship’s sins: it lets people with dumb ideas pose as edgy, alluring, a menace to society, when in truth they’re merely a menace to common sense. Yes, I’m saying Palestine Action should be unproscribed because it’s the right thing to do – and because it will save us from yet more stupid Sally Rooney columns.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy