After the Irish author declined an Israeli deal for a recent novel, we saw a chance to help strengthen the boycott movement — and clarify its aims.
It was five years ago that the bestselling Irish author Sally Rooney first declared her support for the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement. At the time, Rooney had already published Hebrew translations of two of her novels with the Israeli publishing house Modan, but refused to translate a third.
A wave of reports by leading international and Israeli human rights groups were concluding that Israel’s regime met the legal definition of “apartheid,” echoing what many Palestinian groups and experts had argued for years. Rooney, strongly impacted by these growing voices, decided to join the Palestinian campaign to pressure Israel by non-violently boycotting cultural institutions considered complicit in these crimes.
In her 2021 statement, Rooney noted that she would still be “pleased and proud” to have her books translated into Hebrew, as long as it was done in a way that respected the principles of the boycott. The goal of BDS, as the movement stresses, is to target complicity not identity. So we at +972 Magazine, together with Local Call and the independent Israeli publishing house November Books, decided back then to take up that challenge.
After five years of deep dialogue with the author and with the various branches of the boycott movement, we can now make an exciting announcement: Next month, we will be publishing Rooney’s latest novel, “Intermezzo,” in Hebrew, in a way that honors the principles of the boycott and stands in solidarity with the Palestinian demand for freedom, equality, and justice. Pre-orders have begun and can be purchased here* (for now, only for readers in Israel-Palestine, with the exception of West Bank settlements).
Like Rooney’s previous books, “Intermezzo” is a wonderful, intelligent, and sensitive novel, and it is a great privilege to publish Debbie Eylon’s translation for Hebrew-language readers. But beyond its literary brilliance, our translation serves a larger purpose. We wanted this project to bring the BDS guidelines into greater clarity, and to strengthen the movement at a time when it is both expanding exponentially and being subjected to considerable repression. It also offers an opportunity to rectify false impressions — often propagated in bad faith — that the Israeli public and others have formed about the boycott movement: that it is hostile, violent, and antisemitic.
While the context on the ground has changed dramatically since we began working on this project, we still believe that releasing the book now serves the goals that we and our partners set out to achieve.
To understand how it is possible to publish a Hebrew translation in Israel in a way that doesn’t violate the boycott (as Rooney herself discusses in a conversation with Palestinian-Irish activist Samir Eskanda, published in the Guardian today), we need to return to a few basic facts.
Why BDS exists
The debate over BDS is often framed around how boycotts impact Israelis. But the movement must be understood by looking first at what Israel has done, and continues to do, to Palestinians.
Since Israel’s establishment in 1948, Palestinians have contended with lethal violence, expulsions, military rule, and discrimination. That includes a military occupation regime established since 1967 in the West Bank and Gaza that enforces two separate legal systems based on ethnic identity. (This occupation has been declared illegal by the International Court of Justice in The Hague, and there is broad international consensus that it must end.)
All Palestinians in the occupied territories, and especially those who try to advocate and struggle for their freedom, face daily violence at the hands of Israeli settlers and soldiers. This violence is ignored by most of the Israeli media and supported by the vast majority of the so-called political opposition.
All oppression inevitably leads to resistance, and over the years Palestinian resistance has taken various forms — some non-violent, others very violent; some recognized as legal under international law, others that intentionally target civilians and are entirely prohibited.
During the First Intifada, Palestinians used a wide range of popular resistance tactics such as tax refusal, strikes, and large demonstrations. Other tools have included the use of art in protest, international legal proceedings, and mobilizing diplomatic pressure. We have also seen years of suicide bombings against Israeli civilians, rocket fire primarily targeting Israeli communities near the Gaza fence, and of course the horrors of the October 7 massacre.
Yet regardless of the form of resistance adopted by Palestinians, Israel’s response has been the same: intensify the repression. We have witnessed the persecution of non-violent activists; the closure of human rights organizations and media outlets; the killing, wounding, or prolonged imprisonment of protesters; the labeling of Palestinian campaigns abroad as “legal terror” or “diplomatic terror”; and other mafia-style threats to thwart Palestinians and their allies.
That repression has taken even more licence for brutality following incidents of Palestinian violence, as we have seen throughout Israel’s military operations and wars — most acutely in the destruction and slaughter of Gaza after October 7.
As investigations by +972, Local Call, and others have shown, during the war in Gaza Israel wiped out entire families inside their homes, deliberately starved the population and killed those trying to reach food aid, targeted rescue teams and journalists, razed cities to prevent residents from returning, and more. And throughout the war, Israeli political and military leaders, as well as media commentators and soldiers, openly expressed their intention to destroy Gaza’s civilian population. It is no coincidence that a long line of scholars, legal experts, and human rights organizations, including in Israel, have defined these actions as genocide.
The boycott campaign must therefore be understood in this context: a response to occupation, apartheid, and now genocide.
Three basic demands
In the aftermath of the Second Intifada and the severe attacks that accompanied it, the Palestinian struggle turned to two main channels of non-violent protest: the popular struggle on the ground against Israeli settlements and the construction of the separation wall in the West Bank, and an international call to boycott Israel.
The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) was established in 2004, and a year later it became one of the founding organizations of the BDS movement. The movement brings together trade unions, women’s organizations, human rights groups, political parties, and civil society associations in an appeal to the international community to use economic and cultural tools against Israel. The initiative has received growing support abroad, especially in the past two and a half years.
The idea of boycott was inspired in great part by the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, which at its height in the late 1980s led to the isolation of the oppressive regime and contributed significantly to its collapse. Israel is similar to South Africa not only in the nature of its regime, but also in that it is a relatively small country that is highly dependent — economically, culturally, and in self-image — on its close ties with Europe and the United States. For precisely these reasons, an international boycott has the potential to affect Israel more than other countries.
The BDS movement has articulated three basic demands, rooted in international law and UN resolutions: an end to the Israeli occupation of territories captured in 1967, full civil equality for Palestinian citizens of Israel, and the implementation of the Palestinian right of return. These are roughly the same demands put forward by the Palestine Liberation Organization and Palestinian Authority throughout years of negotiations with Israel, and the demands that appeared in the 2002 “Arab Peace Initiative,” in exchange for which all Arab states declared their willingness for peace and normalization with Israel.
Regarding the right of return, which is particularly fearsome to many of BDS’ critics, various approaches to a just solution to the displacement of Palestinians during the Nakba have been proposed in negotiations over the years — including a combined approach that would see some Palestinians return to a future Palestinian state, others elect to receive compensation or be resettled in third countries, as well as the physical return of several tens or hundreds of thousands into Israel.
In other words, BDS is advancing three realistic and fundamental demands, rooted in human rights and international law, whose fulfillment could guarantee both Palestinians and Israelis a just peace, security, and prosperity.
Undermining misperceptions
According to BDS, Israeli groups that accept these three principles — and additionally, do not conduct business in West Bank settlements nor receive funding from Israeli state bodies — are exempt from the boycott. This is especially pertinent in the context of the literary world. When members of the Palestine Festival of Literature (PalFest) surveyed dozens of Israeli publishers in 2024, only our partner November Books was found to meet the requirements.
As a result, more than 7,000 writers from around the world — including winners of Nobel, Booker, and Pulitzer Prizes — signed a letter calling for a boycott of the Israeli publishing industry, accepting the framework of the boycott and its exceptions. This initiative by PalFest, and years of behind-the-scenes work by +972 and Local Call, paved the way for the translation and publication of “Intermezzo” in Hebrew.
The choice by authors like Rooney to seek genuine partners on the Israeli side, and to find ways to foster cultural activity in Israel within the framework of the boycott, undermines the widespread perception in Israel that BDS is driven by ignorance, terrorism, or antisemitism.
“BDS is a non-violent human rights movement that seeks freedom, justice, and equality for the Palestinian people, based on international law and universal principles of human rights,” Omar Barghouti, one of the movement’s founders, explained in an interview with the Nazareth-based outlet Bokra (which we translated on +972) over a decade ago. “As such, BDS has consistently and categorically rejected all forms of discrimination and racism, including antisemitism as well as dozens of racist laws in Israel. Our non-violent struggle has never been against Jews or Israelis as Jews, but against an unjust regime that enslaves our people with occupation, apartheid, and denial of the refugees’ UN-stipulated rights.”
From the very beginning of the boycott, there were those who sought to explain this mistaken perception to the public in Israel. Naomi Klein, for example, had her bestseller “The Shock Doctrine” translated into Hebrew in 2007 without violating the boycott, by working with the publishing house Andalus (which sadly no longer exists).
Some claimed that by supporting the boycott, she was seeking to isolate the Israeli public, and that in situations of conflict there is a need to increase dialogue, rather than reduce it. Klein’s response was simple: “Our modest publishing plan required dozens of calls, emails, and instant messages, stretching between Tel Aviv, Ramallah, Paris, Toronto, and Gaza City. My point is this: As soon as you start a boycott strategy, dialogue grows dramatically.”
The example set by Klein was somewhat forgotten over the years. So when we set out to recreate that initiative, we went through a similar process with “Intermezzo”: five years of deep, multi-party dialogue between an Irish author, a British agent, Israeli publishers, and Palestinian activists in the occupied territories, inside Israel, and in the diaspora — all of whom worked together for the success of the translation project. Now that we have shown it is possible, I hope other authors and publishers will be able to follow the same path, in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle.
Personally, as an Israeli committed to justice and liberation for Palestinians and peace for all in this land, I believe we Israelis have a deep interest in seeing the non-violent tools of the Palestinian struggle, such as the BDS initiative, receive support and achieve real success. Israelis must listen to what international public figures who boycott — like Sally Rooney, Naomi Klein, J.M. Coetzee, Omar El-Akkad, and others — are telling us, and not simply dismiss them as antisemitic, as so many do.
It is the role of Israelis, as the nation oppressing Palestinians for decades, to transform the growing international support for the boycott into meaningful action against genocide and apartheid, in order to guarantee a better, more just future for Palestinians and for ourselves. And along the way, we will gain access to wonderful books like “Intermezzo.”
*Update: Since publication, the fundraising platform Headstart has taken down the pre-order link for the book because of November Books’ refusal to ship to Israeli settlements in the West Bank. November Books will not cave on this commitment, and a new link to purchase the book will be added here once it goes live.