On October 14, the publisher Faber & Faber announced that it would stop selling books by the Irish novelist Sally Rooney in the United Kingdom. Rooney has declared her intention to donate her earnings to a group called Palestine Action, which was banned last year by the British government. Her publisher concluded that it could not continue to pay royalties that would end up in the hands of a registered terrorist organization. “To sell a writer’s work and not be able to pass on earnings is an unconscionable situation for a publisher,” Faber said in a statement. “As such, and in full agreement with Sally, we have taken the decision that we can no longer supply her works in the UK in any format.” Almost immediately, international best sellers such as Normal People and Conversations With Friends began to disappear from the shelves of British bookstores.
Because of Rooney’s fame as both a “voice of her generation” and a pro-Palestinian activist, Faber’s decision provoked an outcry among advocates of the Palestinian cause, defenders of free expression, and writers and readers. But Rooney’s books haven’t been banned. Rather, their author, an Irish citizen, has decided to challenge the law of a foreign country, the United Kingdom. Britain’s 2000 Terrorism Act makes it a crime if a person “provides money or other property” and “knows or has reasonable cause to suspect that it will or may be used for the purposes of terrorism.” In this expansive language, the publisher would be on the hook along with its star author.
[Conor Friedersdorf: Europe’s free-speech problem]
By promising her royalties to Palestine Action, Rooney has forced her publisher’s hand—the key phrase in Faber’s brief statement is “in full agreement with Sally.” Faber could have tested the law in court, as courageous publishers have done in other cases, but it took a more direct course in cooperation with Rooney. No doubt she knows what she’s doing. She must have anticipated the storm of indignant editorials, social-media posts, and open letters that has followed the withdrawal of her books. At considerable cost to herself and her publisher, she’s using her cultural power to draw attention to the ban on Palestine Action and embarrass the British government into reversing it. This is not a story of literary censorship, but one of civil disobedience for political ends.
If Rooney had earmarked her royalties for Hamas, there would be nothing more to say—she would deserve the wrath of a reasonable law. But Palestine Action isn’t Hamas; nor is it the Hilltop Youth, the movement of violent West Bank settlers. It’s a loosely organized “direct action” group of pro-Palestinian British activists whose immediate goal is to interrupt the transfer of weapons to Israel, and whose tactics amount to vandalism of property. In the summer of 2025, members broke into a Royal Air Force base in Oxfordshire and sprayed red paint on a pair of military planes, which provoked Britain’s Labour government into designating Palestine Action a terrorist organization.
Other acts have been less spectacular but, in some ways, more vile. Vandals defaced and smashed the windows of a Jewish-owned investment business in an Orthodox neighborhood of North London because of its supposed ties to a weapons manufacturer. Thieves announced that they had stolen two busts of Chaim Weizmann, the first president of Israel, from the University of Manchester, where he had once been a senior lecturer in chemistry. They beheaded one, and when a pro-Israel group offered $10,000 for the busts’ return, they proposed sending an amputated ear in exchange for the money. “First bust of Weizmann is dead,” Palestine Action posted on X. “Soon, his Zionist project will be too.” (The second bust turned out to be that of a different chemist.) So far, the group has seriously harmed one flesh-and-blood human being, when a member swung a sledgehammer at a kneeling police sergeant and fractured her back during a break-in at a weapons factory.
Sally Rooney’s favored activists play at being terrorists, but in fact they’re merely criminal and, by almost any definition, anti-Semitic. Britain already has laws that can deal with them. To lump Palestine Action with the Islamic State and al-Qaeda makes the word terrorism almost meaningless. Even worse, the Terrorism Act has been amended so broadly that anyone who “expresses an opinion or belief that is supportive of a proscribed organization” in a “reckless” way could get arrested. As a result, hundreds of protesters—white-haired pensioners and vicars as well as keffiyeh-muffled fellow travelers—have been detained in the past year just for holding up placards that say I Oppose Genocide. I Support Palestine Action. This absurdity shows up in a recent report from Britain’s Home Office: There were “3,867 arrests for terrorism-related activity in the year ending June 2026”—an increase of 1,553 percent over the previous year, before Palestine Action was banned.
[Gal Beckerman: A free-speech meltdown]
If the withdrawal from sale of Rooney’s immensely popular novels can persuade the British Parliament to amend the law and expand the permissible speech of political activists, she will have done a service for freedom of expression. But there’s no reason to believe that this is her aim, or that she even cares very much about free speech. Rooney has become a prominent advocate—the literary name and face—for the cultural boycott of Israel, including those writers and publishers who fail to meet her exacting criteria for total separation from the state where they were born and live. She refused to allow her most recent books to be translated into Hebrew until she found an Israeli publisher that supports the boycott movement.
The purpose of a boycott is to ostracize its targets—to make it difficult or impossible for them to carry on a normal public existence. For writers, this means to be silenced. The only test of a commitment to free speech is the speech of people you disagree with, dislike, even despise. It’s a test that Rooney doesn’t pass and seems to have no interest in passing. Palestine Action should be undesignated as a terrorist organization; its vandals should be prosecuted under ordinary laws; its supporters should be allowed to hold up placards; Rooney’s books should be stocked, sold, and read. But she shouldn’t be turned into a martyr for a principle in which she herself has no real belief.