“We have reported Sally Rooney to the Terrorism Police,” is the type of thing you’d imagine reading on Twitter in 2020, hours after the Hulu and BBC adaptation of Normal People dropped and everyone was reckoning with Paul Mescal’s thighs for the first time. The sentiment, however, is not born out of pandemic horniness or even frustration with the Irish author’s refusal to use quotation marks, but an ongoing escalation in the conservative media battle against Rooney for speaking out in favor of Palestine Action, a U.K.-based direct-action network founded in 2020 that takes part in “non-violent but disruptive” protests. On Saturday, August 16, Rooney published an op-ed in the Irish Times in which she reiterated her support and pledged to use royalties to fund the network. Rooney’s fiction is often met with a degree of critical frenzy and public scrutiny, but this op-ed — though consistent with her political beliefs — has been subject to an outsize response, labeling her a terrorist and deriding her for using government money (via the BBC) to support Palestine Action.
Earlier this summer, the U.K. government banned Palestine Action, labeling the group a “terrorist organization.” More than 400 people were arrested at protests on August 9, with the most arrests in a single operation in the past decade. What Rooney took issue with in particular was the lone detention of Irish citizen Marie McNally for wearing a Palestine Action T-shirt during a protest in Belfast, despite the fact that Ireland itself has been relatively outspoken on the atrocities in Gaza. Northern Ireland, while a part of the United Kingdom, is not subject to all of the U.K.’s laws. “When our citizens are arrested under authoritarian regimes elsewhere, the State and its consular services tend to spring into action, or at least purport to, in order to defend the human rights of Irish passport holders,” Rooney wrote. “Now that the jurisdiction in question is located next door — and indeed closer still — our leaders seem curiously unwilling to act.”
The passage that has created the most tension, however, comes later in Rooney’s op-ed as she writes that if the British state considers her support of Palestine Action to be terrorism, then “perhaps it should investigate the shady organizations that continue to promote my work and fund my activities, such as WH Smith and the BBC.” What she’s saying, in a dark and almost funny way, is that the companies that pay for her books and adaptations are now implicated in her support of Palestine Action — the money she’s made with the platform they’ve given her has now been used against them. In the aftermath of her op-ed, the Telegraph published an essay claiming that fame does not “give her the right” to fund terror. Campaign Against Antisemitism, a U.K.-based charity, is responsible for the tweet claiming to have reported Rooney to the terrorism police — presumably in its country, where Rooney does not live. A spokesman for the prime minister did not speak directly to Rooney’s comments, but he did say that there is a difference between supporting a cause and supporting a banned group.
Part of why Rooney drives a particular kind of news columnist insane is that she refuses to take her literary success as a means of enjoyment and luxury. A self-described Marxist and feminist, she has written in support of abortion rights and the BDS movement. When an Israeli publisher offered to translate Beautiful World, Where Are You?, she refused. The longer Rooney is in the public eye, the more outspoken and plain-stated she’s become, not so much indulging the fruits of her labor but turning them outward. The outsize response to Rooney’s comments are in line with ongoing media disagreements over semantics — what does (and doesn’t) constitute terrorism — but seem to completely disregard that Rooney’s politics are baked into her books.
It’s perhaps easy to see her novels as marriage-plot-adjacent romances, but her characters frequently discuss politics and social inequality (they just happen to do so while flirting). With an author like J.K. Rowling, who promotes anti-trans beliefs and legislation, her fiction can often feel like an entirely different entity. Though there are politics in the world of Harry Potter, there are plenty of fans of her series that choose to separate her views from what they love about those books. Rooney’s work has never made that separation very easy; she doesn’t want it to be easy. Those who might feel betrayed by her words (and actions) haven’t been reading her very closely.