 Best-selling author Sally Rooney has refused to sell the rights to her latest book to an Israeli publisher. It's a decision she made in solidarity with Palestine. The move has been welcomed by the boycott divest and sanction movement, which pressures Israel to end apartheid. As is often the case in these situations, her standing up for Palestinian rights initially led to Sally Rooney being misrepresented and smeared. That's because it was initially reported in the pro-Israel press as being not a boycott of a country, Israel, but a boycott of a language, Hebrew. Based on a news article in Haaretz, the website Forward published an opinion piece titled Why Won't Sally Rooney Allow Her Latest Novel to be Translated into Hebrew by an Israeli Publisher? That piece was then boosted by a number of high-follower Twitter accounts in the British commentary. Ben Judah tweeted, depressing and unpleasant that Sally Rooney won't allow her new novel to be translated into Hebrew. That was quote-tweeted by David Aronovich of The Times who says, it's sad when you're unfounded. Prejudice is about someone turn out to be correct, a rather nasty response. And then Jonathan Greenblatt also tweeted this article. He is CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, which is the biggest organization committed to fighting anti-Semitism in the United States. He said, shameful hashtag Sally Rooney is embracing BDS's hateful tactics by refusing to publish her latest book in Hebrew. Literature is a space for opening minds, not closing them. She should reverse this decision and find constructive ways to promote coexistence. At first sight, you could think they're reasonable. I'm in favor of BDS as a tool to apply pressure on Israel to end apartheid. I do, however, think that boycotting a language would be problematic. Languages don't belong to states or governments. They belong to cultures. And to ban your book being translated into Hebrew would therefore seem rather anti-Semitic. The problem here though, that's not what Sally Rooney did. We've been 24 hours of her being castigated online in the controversy appearing on news shows in the UK and the United States. Rooney made the following clarification. Earlier this year, the international campaign group Human Rights Watch published a report entitled A Fresh Hold Crossed, Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution. That report, coming on the heels of a similarly damning report by Israel's most prominent human rights organization, Bet Salem, confirmed what Palestinian human rights groups have long been saying. Israel's system of racial domination and segregation against Palestinians meets the definition of apartheid under international law. She went on to say, the Hebrew language translation rights to my new novel are still available. And if I can find a way to sell these rights that is compliant with the BDS movement's institutional boycott guidelines, I will be very pleased and proud to do so. In the meantime, I would like to express once again my solidarity with the Palestinian people in their struggle for freedom, justice and equality. Darlia, this is a familiar story, isn't it? Absolutely. I think that you are totally right to point out the incredibly unfair and misleading way in which this was already originally reported. The headline, as you said, was that she wouldn't allow her book to be published in Hebrew, which she had already had her book translated into Hebrew. It was clearly a way to undermine solidarity with Palestinian people by imposing slippage between Israel and the actions of the Israeli state with the entirety of Jewish culture and history, which is of course absurd. But by creating that slippage, they were able to confuse what was actually quite a clear stance. I don't think you even needed her position, her terrifying statement in order to understand that her gripe was with the fact that the publisher was not BDS compliant. It wasn't because of the inherent worth of translating a book into Hebrew. But this is the literary establishment and I find it so cringy when people try and justify these kinds of things by saying, oh, literature should be a space where minds are opened and things like literature cannot be in a political space. It cannot be a space where people, if you want to find a group of people that don't take strong positions on things, you really can't look towards fiction writers, particularly fiction writers whose work is so political but not in an explicit way like Sally Rooney's. This whole debacle really actually reminds me of in the 1970s when the late John Berger won the Man Booker Prize and donated half of his winnings to the Black Panther Party and used his speech. I'd recommend everyone go and look at that speech. It was absolutely incredible. He used it to actually point out the colonial wealth upon which the Booker Prize Foundation was built. He was similarly, hopefully this won't happen to Sally Rooney, but he was absolutely ravaged by so much of the literary establishment and media establishment who found his politicizing of the pure art of literature to be so improper and uncouth. This is always the battle between the liberal art institutions and the often more radical artists. It just really reminded me of that incident in history and I'm really glad that like John Berger, Sally Rooney stood fast and didn't allow her actions to be misrepresented and stood by what she originally made clear, which was that this was about being BDS compliant, which is absolutely her right to do so.