I have a question for Sally Rooney. Why are you perfectly happy to engage with cultural institutions in the UK, despite the various mad wars us Brits have waged in recent years, but you dodge like the plague cultural institutions in Israel because Israel is fighting a war in Gaza?
Rooney, the celebrated Irish author of chick lit for people with PhDs, has reportedly put her name to a letter calling for a boycott of Israeli cultural institutions that are ‘complicit in genocide’. Hundreds of other writers with virtue to advertise have apparently signed too. Arundhati Roy, Percival Everett, Rachel Kushner and others all say they will forswear Israeli ‘publishers, festivals, literary agents and publications’ that are ‘complicit in violating Palestinian rights’.
I am just curious as to why they always single out Israel
And yet these people will still clink glasses of Cabernet at literary soirées and book launches in Britain and America, even though the death toll from our misguided ventures in the Middle East dwarfs that of the war in Gaza. Indeed, just last month Rooney launched her latest novel, Intermezzo, at the Southbank Centre in London, which gets money from the government. So it’s cool to swish around art hangouts partly funded by the state that helped to make a bloody mess of Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, but you refuse to grace with your haughty presence any institution linked to the state that’s fighting against the army of anti-Semites that attacked it on 7 October?
Rooney’s Southbank gig captured the cant and sanctimony of the fashionably anti-Israel set. She opened the event by denouncing Israel’s ‘mass murder’ in Gaza. And of course the attendees whooped and rattled their jewellery in agreement, for hating Israel is the luxury belief du jour, the vogue credo that grants one access to all the right dinner-party circles. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of those present had a keffiyeh, the uniform of the self-righteous, draped over their vintage blouses.
There they were in an opulent arts centre whose work is part-funded by a state that has done many dumb and reckless things in the Middle East these past few years, booing Israel for targeting a terror outfit that killed more than a thousand of its people last year. It could be the opening scene to a satire of the turbo-smug chic radicals of the upper classes who are so blinded by their own righteous brilliance that they lose sight of the huge holes in their moral thinking.
Do I think Rooney and the other signatories should go the whole hog and boycott every nation that’s guilty of military misdeeds? Of course not. Britain is great! Just because some of our leaders did bad things overseas doesn’t mean we should be treated as a morally diseased nation best avoided. Also, where would be left for the literary set to go to signal their rectitude and sell their books? Switzerland?
No, I am just curious as to why they always single out Israel. I just want to know why this country, more than any other, gets their hearts pounding in fits of fury. Why do its military manoeuvres bother them so much more than ours, or America’s, or France’s, or Turkey’s, or Iran’s, or China’s? (This list endless.) Why does the Jewish State live rent-free in the heads of the right-on?
The boycotting frenzy against Israel has always left me cold. There are people for whom avoiding Israeli culture and wares has become a kind of religious obsession. They’d rather go hungry than eat an orange from Jaffa. They will expel you from their social circle if you have a Soda Stream. Some have even stormed into supermarkets and thrown the Israel-grown foodstuffs to the floor, as if they were poisons, devilish items to be destroyed.
It’s the cultural boycotts that are the worst. The sight of puffed-up Palestine activists booing an Israeli conductor at the Proms a few years ago was nauseating. Protesters have also disrupted Israeli dance troupes touring the UK. They’ve agitated for the censorship of Israeli-made films. How does any of this help Palestinians? It doesn’t. It is more about demonstrating the Israel-free moral purity of privileged westerners than it is about assisting people in the Palestinian Territories. It’s more about raising awareness of oneself, and how wonderfully socially aware one is, than it is about raising awareness of Palestine.
And now literary bigwigs promise not to attend Israel-linked book festivals or write for Israel-linked publications. Is this activism or bigotry? To treat one nation – and one nation alone – as so immoral, foul, violent and despicable that all interaction with it must cease surely belongs more to the realm of prejudice than politics, of emotionalism more than rationalism. I’m just going to say it: if you devote yourself to making your life Israel-free, while happily buying Chinese-made things or holidaying in Turkey or letting your books be republished in Iran, then you might not be the good person you think you are. Quite the opposite.
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