Sally Rooney’s novel protest

Towards the end of Normal People, Connell and Marianne go to a Palestine march. It is their final year of university, and while in her younger days Marianne had wanted to “stop all the violence committed the strong against the weak”,  over the course of the plot she has grown older and wiser: “she would live and die in a world of extreme violence against the innocent, and at most she could help only a few people.”

Character development in a Sally Rooney novel means becoming jaded and demurely accepting your own political futility. Their attendance at a Palestine march — in 2014 — offered a rare bit of localism; among Dublin’s students, more than elsewhere, this was already the cause célèbre. 

As the book rose to international prominence, it was unclear what to do with this awkward Irishism, which threatened to break the illusion that these were “Normal People”. In the BBC adaptation the Palestine march is duly swapped for a climate march. The rest of the world, which cared much less about esoteric Middle Eastern border disputes, could now also root for these brooding good guys against the posh Trinity students and the evils of corporate capitalism they represented. 

But Rooney, a self-referential millennial author, shares the preoccupations of her book characters. True to her roots, Rooney was pro-Palestine before it was cool. In 2021, Rooney refused a Hebrew translation deal with an Israeli publishing house for her book Beautiful World, Where Are You citing her support for BDS (Boycott Divestment and Sanctions), and she only recently made a deal with a Jerusalem-based, BDS-compliant independent publishing house for her latest novel Intermezzo. In 2025 she pledged her support for Palestine Action after it was proscribed by the British government as a terrorist organisation, and now she and her publisher Faber have made the joint decision to withdraw her books from circulation in the UK. 

Palestine Action, when in charge of its own PR, does itself no favours. The “Filton Four” who broke into Elbit Systems struck a police officer in the spine with a sledgehammer, and there is no evidence that their vandalism has any broad base of public support. Those who took up a hunger strike in prison were largely ignored; someone could have told them that about 200 prisoners go on hunger strike every year, and that if such behaviour worked there would be very little justice system to speak of. In June, they were sentenced to almost thirty years in prison combined. 

Proscribing Palestine Action, however, has altered their image drastically, because even uttering support for the innocuously named amorphous protest group can get you into trouble. Now, the front lines are a mousy Irish author, and the cane-bearing twenty-somethings and old ladies who were thrown into the back of police vans for holding placards. The impotence of the British police has been on full display, as they showed seemingly no power to stop the vandals, but spent valuable time arresting self-righteous protesters in parliament square. The hunger strikers could more plausibly larp as political prisoners even though they were facing exactly the same delays and conditions as their fellow criminals. 

Even as Rooney’s books are withdrawn from the shelves, the adaptation will still be available on BBC iPlayer. The BBC swap was made on the assumption that the march in the book was more important for what it represented: a chance for Marianne to reflect on the causes of human suffering. In 2020, “protesting” was just a signifier of virtue; the cause itself didn’t matter that much. Now, the stakes have been raised. The days of inconsequential leftwing virtue-signalling are gone but the pro-Palestinians have risen to the challenge. 

Rooney is not the only artist in recent months to have taken a stand for pro-Palestinian views. After Macklemore was barred from performing at venues for Ed Sheeran’s concerts, Sheeran let him go, which resulted in Sheeran’s band and other supporting acts withdrawing in solidarity. Especially for the up-and-coming artists on the tour these were real professional sacrifices. Some tried to tie themselves in knots arguing that it was Sheeran who was “cancelled” for his insistence on being apolitical — but that does not stand up to scrutiny. A venue disinvited an artist for his political views. Leaving in solidarity was the principled thing to do. 

The British state is already making a fool of itself — and by withdrawing her novels, Rooney is calling their bluff

The Israel-Palestine conflict is messy, but the logic that shapes the Irish — and by extension Rooney’s — moral stance on the conflict is remarkably simple. “Palestine Action” is a moral intention more than an organisation, and Rooney is a popular author, not a politician. Her politics are not admirable, and there is no reason for them to be. Like going to the protest is for Marianne, taking a stance is more of a personal cleansing ritual than it is about conflict resolution. But on the question of censorship and attempts to stifle debate by rhetorical and legal categorization of such a vague grouping, they are right. It is important to oppose anti-terror legislation that quells dissent, especially when it results in the withdrawal of dull and entirely innocuous popular young adult novels. 

Rooney is putting her money where her mouth is. Unlike Marianne, she is famous and people want to read her books, and though she likes to pontificate on the insignificance of her vocation she is far from politically futile. When people think of Palestine Action now, they think of grannies with placards being hauled away by antiterror police, and their daughter no longer being able to buy a cuddly coming of age novel in Waterstones. The British state is already making a fool of itself — and by withdrawing her novels, Rooney is calling their bluff.