Explained: the row over Sally Rooney’s Israeli translation boycott

Sally Rooney has labelled Israel an ��apartheid state” while defending her decision not to sell the translation rights to her latest novel to a publishing house based there.

The Irish author’s third novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, shot to the top of book charts in the UK and US after being released in early September. But Rooney refused an offer from the Israeli publisher that translated her two previous novels into Hebrew - a decision that has divided opinion.

Book-cott, divestment and sanctions

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The row began after Israeli newspaper Haaretz last month revealed that Rooney had rejected a translation bid by her previous publisher, Modan.

After facing a barrage of criticism, Rooney released a statement yesterday that said her decision was based on Israel’s “system of racial domination” and her support for Palestinian causes. The writer was backing a “cultural boycott of Israel” to show her “solidarity with the Palestinian people”.

Modan “does not publicly distance itself from apartheid and support the UN-stipulated rights of the Palestinian people”, the statement said.

Although Rooney had “chosen not to sell these translation rights to an Israeli-based publishing house”, she was “very proud” to have had her previous novels published in Hebrew. But so long as Israel remained an “apartheid state”, her “solidarity” remains “with the Palestinian people in their struggle for freedom, justice and equality”.

The “Hebrew-language translation rights to my new novel are still available”, Rooney added, and if “if I can find a way to sell these rights that is compliant with” guidelines set out by the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, “I will be very pleased and proud to do so”.

A spokesperson for the Israeli Foreign Ministry claimed that Rooney’s “narrow-minded” decision “impedes peace, dialogue, or meaningful change”.

The spokesperson told The Telegragh that “literature is a tool to promote dialogue and conversation” and that “there is something inherently flawed with an intellectual who refuses to engage in conversation, and instead supports the silencing of opinion”.

But others defended Rooney’s decision to back the BDS movement, which was “inspired by the South African anti-apartheid movement”, according to the group.

The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel tweeted that Palestinians “warmly welcomed” her book boycott. Modan is “an Israeli publisher complicit in Israel’s regime of apartheid, occupation & settler-colonialism that killed more than 240 Palestinians in May this year alone”, the group of academics wrote.

But Israel’s Diaspora Minister Nachman Shai tweeted that “the cultural boycott of Israel, anti-Semitism in a new guise, is a certificate of poor conduct for her and others who behave like her”.

Calming tempers

Much of the anger surrounding her decision to reject Modan’s bid stemmed from the belief that Rooney was refusing to have her novel translated into Hebrew at all, and was targeting all Hebrew speakers with her campaign rather than just the state of Israel.

In an opinion piece for Israeli news site The Forward published before Rooney issued her statement, Gitit Levy-Paz, a fellow at the Jerusalem-based Jewish People Policy Institute, wrote: “The very essence of literature, its power to bring a sense of coherence and order to the world, is negated by Rooney’s choice to exclude a group of readers because of their national identity.”

After Rooney clarified her position, The New Statesman’s US editor Emily Tamkin said that while it remained “unclear” whether the novel will ever be published in Hebrew, the author was clearly not boycotting the language, which is “taught, read and spoken around the world”.

However, Haaretz columnist Anshel Pfeffer tweeted that the book “won’t be published in Hebrew because there’s no such thing as a ‘BDS-compliant’ Hebrew publisher”.

“To be that a publisher would have to agree to not selling its books in Israel and to Israelis who are the overwhelming majority of the Hebrew-reading market,” he added.

New York-based foreign policy writer Ben Judah, a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council, tweeted that since Rooney had “clarified her position on translation into Hebrew”, he would be “happy to help her find a left/non/anti-Zionist Hebrew translator myself”.

“I’m strongly opposed to cultural boycotts of publishers in Russia, China, Iran or Israel because this effectively leads to books not becoming available in those languages,” Judah wrote. But “many of the most famous figures in the Palestinian national movement have been published in Hebrew and for good reason”.