SALLY ROONEY NOVELS PULLED FROM ISRAELI BOOKSTORES IN BOYCOTT ROW

Sat 06 November 2021:

Sally Rooney’s novels will no longer be offered in two Israeli bookstore chains, after the acclaimed author’s choice not to sell translation rights to an Israeli publisher for her most recent work.

This week, a social activist Yoseph Haddad has been organizing a campaign to convince Israeli bookshops to boycott Rooney’s books. He has been urging Israelis to contact the two bookstore chains and request that they stop selling Rooney’s books as a result of her refusal to accept Modan’s offer.

Rooney’s novels were originally accessible through Steimatzky and Tzomet Sefarim, but they have since been taken off from their websites and will be removed from physical stores as well. The retailers have a total of more than 200 branches.

Last month Rooney had turned down an offer from the Israeli publisher Modan to translate her book Beautiful World, Where Are You into Hebrew, she got both praise and criticism.

In a statement, she explained that while she was “very proud” to have had her previous novels translated into Hebrew, she would not sell translation rights to an Israeli-based publishing house for now, in order to support the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement (BDS), a campaign that works to “end international support for Israel’s oppression of Palestinians and pressure Israel to comply with international law”.

She could not, she said, “accept a new contract with an Israeli company that does not publicly distance itself from apartheid and support the UN-stipulated rights of the Palestinian people”.

Apartheid was a policy of racial segregation and discrimination enforced by the white minority government against the black majority in South Africa from 1948 until 1991.

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