{"id":90106,"date":"2021-10-14T17:00:15","date_gmt":"2021-10-14T15:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=90106"},"modified":"2021-10-14T09:53:29","modified_gmt":"2021-10-14T07:53:29","slug":"23-00-63","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=90106","title":{"rendered":"Beautiful World, Where Are You? Best-Selling Author\u2019s Israel Boycott Is Hypocritical and Antisemitic"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>Beautiful World, Where Are You? Best-Selling Author\u2019s Israel Boycott Is Hypocritical and Antisemitic<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/h5>\n

Rachel O’Donoghue<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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Author Sally Rooney in an interview with \u201cPBS NewsHour.\u201d Photo: Screenshot<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

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Sally Rooney is undoubtedly one of the biggest names in the literary scene right now.<\/span><\/p>\n

The 30-year-old Irish author\u2019s 2017 debut novel, \u201cConversations With Friends,\u201d was an international success and is currently being turned into a TV series that will air on the BBC and the streaming platform Hulu.<\/span><\/p>\n

Her second book, \u201cNormal People,\u201d debuted at number 3 on\u00a0The New York Times<\/em>\u00a0bestseller list; it was also long-listed for the prestigious Man Booker Prize, and its 2020 television adaptation received critical acclaim.<\/span><\/p>\n

Rooney\u2019s first two novels sold more than one million copies in the United States alone.<\/span><\/p>\n

Her latest offering \u2014 \u201cBeautiful World, Where Are You?\u201d \u2014 was released in September, and promptly became one of this year\u2019s best-selling novels.<\/span><\/p>\n

But if Israelis were hoping to read it in their native language, and printed at home, they will be sorely disappointed, if not angered.<\/span><\/p>\n

Modan Publishing House, which released Rooney\u2019s first two novels in Hebrew, revealed that she will not allow her third book to be published there, because she advocates a boycott of the Jewish state.<\/span><\/p>\n

The decision by Rooney, who is publicly supportive of the\u00a0racist BDS movement<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0signed an open letter<\/a><\/strong><\/span>\u00a0alongside other artists this year that denounced Israel as an \u201capartheid\u201d state and claimed \u201cunarmed and unprotected Palestinians\u201d were being lynched \u2014 has been widely reported in the UK press (see\u00a0here<\/a><\/strong><\/span>,\u00a0here<\/a><\/strong><\/span>\u00a0and\u00a0here<\/a><\/strong><\/span>).<\/span><\/p>\n

Such news reports have characterized her position as a boycott of Israel. However, it is more than that. And little has been said about the sheer hypocrisy of the move.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Rooney\u2019s<\/strong> moral stance, it seems, does not extend to preventing her works from being published in Communist China, which, among other things, has been accused of human rights abuses, including operating\u00a0internment camps for Uyghur Muslims.<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Chinese language versions of \u201cConversations With Friends\u201d and \u201cNormal People\u201d have both been released by the\u00a0Shanghai Translation Publishing House<\/a>,<\/strong><\/span> but her agent has yet to announce that she will boycott this lucrative market in protest against the actions of Xi Jinping\u2019s government.<\/span><\/p>\n

In Russia, a\u00a0translation of her latest novel<\/a><\/strong><\/span>\u00a0is already in the pipeline; Moscow-based Sindbad publishers distributed her earlier works. Again, Rooney appears not to mind her books being released in a country that illegally annexed the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine in 2014 and has been\u00a0accused by Amnesty International<\/a><\/strong><\/span>\u00a0of persecuting religious and sexual minorities, along with other human rights abuses.<\/span><\/p>\n

In a statement released by Rooney on Tuesday, after details of her boycott had already been widely disseminated, she acknowledged this double-standard:<\/span><\/p>\n

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Of course, many states other than Israel are guilty of grievous human rights abuses. This was also true of South Africa during the campaign against apartheid there. In this particular case, I am responding to the call from Palestinian civil society, including all major Palestinian trade unions and writers\u2019 unions.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

She also claimed that when she can find a BDS-compliant way to publish in Hebrew, she will be \u201cpleased and proud to do so.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

However, whether Rooney admits it or not, her decision not to publish in Israel is antisemitic. There is no other explanation \u2014 because she\u00a0singles out the Jewish state<\/a><\/strong><\/span>\u00a0and holds it to a standard of behavior that is not expected of any other nation.<\/span><\/p>\n

And her promises that she will release her novel in Hebrew \u2014 once she has found a publisher that satisfies \u201cthe BDS movement\u2019s institutional boycott guidelines\u201d \u2014 ring hollow.<\/span><\/p>\n

It would be surprising if any Hebrew-language publisher would ever be BDS-compliant, because \u2014 to its core \u2014 the\u00a0movement is antisemitic<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong><\/span>and Hebrew is the language of the Jewish people.<\/span><\/p>\n

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The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias \u2014 where a version of this article\u00a0first appeared.<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/em><\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Beautiful World, Where Are You? Best-Selling Author\u2019s Israel Boycott Is Hypocritical and Antisemitic Rachel O’Donoghue Author Sally Rooney in an interview with \u201cPBS NewsHour.\u201d Photo: Screenshot Sally Rooney is undoubtedly one of the biggest names in the literary scene right now. The 30-year-old Irish author\u2019s 2017 debut novel, \u201cConversations With Friends,\u201d was an international success […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90106"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=90106"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90106\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":90123,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90106\/revisions\/90123"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=90106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=90106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=90106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}