Why we published Sally Rooney in Israel

The publication of Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo in Hebrew has understandably attracted attention at a moment of profound political catastrophe: when the decades-long occupation and apartheid imposed on Palestinians have spiralled into a full-blown regional war and what I and many others consider a genocide in Gaza.

At a moment like this, any cultural project connected to Israel inevitably raises difficult moral and political questions. Some will ask whether cultural exchange should continue at all. Others will wonder what it means for a writer publicly associated with the long-standing Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement to publish in Hebrew. These are serious questions, and they deserve serious answers.

Several years ago, comrades at the binational media outlet +972 magazine approached my wife and me with a proposal: would November Books be interested in publishing a Hebrew translation of Sally Rooney’s work if a way could be found to do so in accordance with the principles Rooney had publicly supported since 2021?

In practice, this means distinguishing between cultural institutions that are materially or politically implicated in maintaining Israel’s system of occupation, and those that are not. November Books was considered compatible with BDS guidelines because it publicly opposes Israeli apartheid, supports Palestinian rights as defined under international law, receives no Israeli government funding and does not operate in settlements in the occupied territories.

We immediately said yes.

November Books is a small independent publishing house which has, since its founding, opposed Israel’s occupation of Palestine. We publish one or two books each year; books we believe are important for the Israeli public to encounter, even when they challenge dominant assumptions or are considered politically or commercially risky.

Over the years, we have published works including Colum McCann’s Apeirogon and Ilan Pappé’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine when other Israeli publishers were unwilling to bring those works into Hebrew. The publication of Intermezzo emerged from the same political and moral framework.

For years, Israelis have been told that support for BDS is motivated by hatred of Israelis, Jews or Hebrew culture itself. The Israeli government and much of the media insist that when writers or institutions support boycott, they do so because they reject Israelis as people. The possibility that boycott might instead be a response to occupation is often dismissed before the argument is even heard.

As Rooney said in her interview with Samir Eskanda, an Irish Palestinian activist, for the Guardian: “For me, the act of translation is in itself a beautiful ideal. Though my refusal to work with complicit Israeli publishing houses made the contractual side of things more complex, I was, of course, never boycotting the Hebrew language or any language.” Her objection was to institutional complicity. That distinction matters.

The significance of this project is not that it proves literature can somehow transcend politics. It is that it demonstrates, in practice, that Rooney’s position was never a rejection of Hebrew or of Israelis as individuals, but a refusal to engage with institutions she considered complicit in crimes against Palestinians.

For us, the publication therefore became an opportunity to make visible inside Israeli society something that is often obscured or deliberately distorted: that international boycott is a political response to state policies and institutions, not an expression of hatred toward people because of their nationality or language.

Some people will still believe that publishing a major international literary novel in Hebrew risks restoring a sense of cultural normality during what we and they see as genocide. I understand that concern. But this project did not emerge despite Rooney’s support for boycott; it emerged because of it. The political conditions surrounding the publication are inseparable from the publication itself.

Indeed, the reaction inside Israel has itself revealed many of these tensions. Recently, an Israeli crowdfunding platform removed our fundraising campaign after we stated that we would not distribute the book to settlements in the occupied territories. The controversy generated public debate inside Israel not only about the book, but about occupation, boycott and the political conditions attached to the project. We have since been able to crowdfund for the book through different channels. That matters.

I do not believe that a novel by itself changes political reality. A Hebrew translation of Intermezzo will not end Israel’s occupation or war crimes. But neither do I believe that every form of cultural exchange necessarily weakens political solidarity.

The framework here is the Palestinian-led BDS call itself, which defines boycott in terms of institutional complicity rather than language or identity. The point of this publication was not to restore normality, but to confront Israeli readers with the reality that boycott exists because of what the Israeli state is doing to Palestinians.

The point is also to broaden the path of BDS, allowing and encouraging more and more writers, artists, academics and others to join the movement in solidarity with Palestinians, while still keeping in touch with Israeli dissidents, who are not complicit and who actively oppose their entire regime.

People will continue to disagree about the scope and strategy of cultural boycott. That disagreement exists within every political movement. But if Israelis are now debating whether boycott is a response to Israel’s actions, rather than simply hostility toward Israelis or Jews, and if we are being approached by more authors asking to join the movement – as we have been – then something meaningful has already happened beyond the publication of a single novel.

[Further reading: World War III is here]