Mark O'Connell: Sally Rooney knows what she’s doing and is willing to pay the price for it

Sally Rooney could have made things a great deal easier for herself. Last year, when the UK government proscribed the direct-action network Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation – making it a criminal offence to provide financial aid to the group or to express an opinion or belief in support of it – she could have said nothing. It was clear, by then, where she stood on the question of Israel’s campaign of slaughter in Gaza: that it amounted to a genocide; that it was happening with the full support of European and American governments; and that it needed to be named and opposed and brought to an end.But she did not say nothing. She wrote an article for this newspaper about the proscription and its ramifications. In it, she criticised the Irish Government for remaining silent about the Irish citizens arrested in the UK for expressing their support of Palestine Action; Irish citizens who, because of the very legislation they were peacefully protesting against, risked being imprisoned for up to 14 years. She also defended Palestine Action itself, and its direct-action tactics against arms manufacturers whose weapons were being sold to Israel, and which were used in the destruction of Gaza in the wake of Hamas’s October 7th attacks. In the incident that immediately led to the proscription, activists broke into an RAF airbase in Oxfordshire and sprayed red paint on two aeroplanes in protest against the UK government’s military support of Israel. In this context she felt obliged to state her support for the group. “If this makes me a ‘supporter of terror’ under UK law, so be it,” she wrote. Her books were still available in British bookshops, she pointed out, and she was regularly in receipt of residual payments from the BBC’s television adaptations of two of her books. “I want to be clear,” she wrote, “that I intend to use these proceeds of my work, as well as my public platform generally, to go on supporting Palestine Action and direct action against genocide in whatever way I can. If the British state considers this ‘terrorism’, then perhaps it should investigate the shady organisations that continue to promote my work and fund my activities, such as WH Smith and the BBC.”She made this claim in the full knowledge it was likely to lead to serious legal consequences. And this was not recklessness; it was a calculated decision. Her aim was to use her fame and the prominence of her books to illustrate the absurdity of the legislation. The consequences, as such, came as no surprise. Her UK publisher Faber was forced to stop paying her royalties, because of the legal risk that it would be held liable for indirectly funding terrorism. (The same situation arose in the UK, with residual fees from the television adaptations of her books Normal People and Conversations with Friends.) And it was this situation that led, earlier this week, to the announcement that, because of its inability to pass on earnings, her UK publisher Faber will no longer be distributing her books in the United Kingdom. READ MOREI should say here that it has not come as a surprise to me either. Rooney is a very close friend. I’ve known her since long before any of this arose, since long before she was a famous novelist, or a novelist at all. My view of this whole business can’t but be influenced by my friendship with her. But my admiration for the way she conducts herself as a public figure – for her judicious and moral expenditure of the otherwise useless currency of celebrity – would, I feel sure, be no less great if I’d never met her. The decision to stop supplying her books for sale in the UK was one she came to in close consultation with Faber. They would not have done this without her consent. They were not prevented from selling her books, after all, only from passing on royalties for those sales. But as Faber itself put it in a statement released on Wednesday, “to sell a writer’s work and not be able to pass on earnings is an unconscionable situation for a publisher”. So this is in that narrow sense a matter of principle, on which both author and publisher are in agreement. It is a matter of principle in a broader sense, too: her aim is to force this legal situation to the limits of its own absurdity, at whatever the cost might be to herself. The ruling on Palestine Action was rooted in the UK’s Terrorism Act of 2000. That act provides a very broad definition of terrorism, stating: “a reference to action taken for the purposes of terrorism includes a reference to action taken for the benefit of a proscribed organisation.” And since Palestine Action is a proscribed organisation, any action taken for its benefit could be interpreted as an action taken for the purposes of terrorism. (Earlier this year, the UK’s high court struck down the proscription, ruling it unlawful, but the Keir Starmer government appealed, and the court of appeal overturned the ruling. The case is due to go to the supreme court next month.) Until the Palestine Action proscription, UK governments tended to use the power to proscribe organisations in a less sweeping way, but the potential for this swerve into authoritarianism was always present within it. [ Naza review: An essential record of the nightmare Israel has engineered in GazaOpens in new window ]Last month, Margaret Owen OBE, a 94-year-old Jewish human rights lawyer – and a friend of foreign secretary Ed Miliband’s late mother – was arrested in Liverpool after she wore a placard reading “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action”. Owen knew what she was doing, and why she was doing it. She wanted to expose the absurdity of this cruel and stupid law, and she succeeded. Rooney, in her own way, is doing a similar thing. The withdrawal from sale of her novels is a direct result of this profoundly illiberal legislation, and its absurd application in the case of Palestine Action. This legislation does grave damage to the UK’s image as a nation that values individual liberty and free expression. This is not the conduct of a democratic culture in robust health. [ Raphaël Glucksmann’s refusal to use the word ‘genocide’ divides France’s leftOpens in new window ]There are very few writers as famous as Rooney, and almost none as willing to leverage that fame as bravely for a moral cause. There are people who resent and despise her for it, of course, just as there have always been those who have resented and despised artists and other public figures – especially female ones – for their strong moral and political commitments. But she understands it is a price worth paying for turning her fame to some moral purpose. And that purpose is, in its more direct and political way, in keeping with the role of an artist in society: to reveal the world as it is to those who are willing to see it.[ Gaza student with UCD scholarship hopes for reprieve ‘before chance is gone’Opens in new window ]