I’ve managed to avoid the work of Sally Rooney. I gather she’s not only a best-selling novelist, but also the Irish, Marxist ‘voice of the millennial generation’, with all the terrible opinions those descriptors now imply. But thanks to a bad call made by the UK government last summer, she has become a ‘progressive’ cause célèbre who none of us is now allowed to ignore.

Rooney, you’ll be shocked to learn, hates Israel. She is convinced of the modern-day blood libel that its war on the killers of Hamas is in fact a ‘genocide’ against the Palestinians of Gaza. And she has thrown her support behind Palestine Action – the anti-Israel direct-action group that was proscribed as a terrorist organisation in Britain last year, following its ransacking of an RAF base in Oxfordshire.

‘I support Palestine Action. If this makes me a “supporter of terror” under UK law, so be it’, Rooney wrote in The Irish Times shortly after the ban. She also pledged to donate her royalties to the group. Both of which constitute an offence under the UK Terrorism Act, potentially leading to a 14-year spell inside.

Rooney no longer visits the UK, for fear of arrest. And now she has pulled all of her books from sale, too. Her publishers claim paying Rooney UK-derived royalties risks breaching terror law, as the money would then be funnelled to a proscribed ‘terrorist’ group. Thus, the shelves of whatever WHSmiths is now called will no longer groan under the weight of her paperbacks.

Predictably, there is plenty of nonsense being talked about this by the ‘pro-Palestine’ set, whose Jew hatred is surpassed only by their histrionics. Rooney’s books have not been ‘banned because of her political opinions’, as the denizens of BlueSky would have you believe. Simply making clear she will no longer fund Palestine Action would end this stand-off instantaneously.

This is also, clearly, a stunt. Rooney’s quixotic self-boycott comes a few weeks before the UK Supreme Court is due to hear a legal challenge to the proscription of Palestine Action. I dare say the timing is not coincidental. She intends to expose the censorious consequences of the proscription, just as the UK’s top beaks open the case for a final time next month.

But this is a soapbox the government has given her, by dint of its own terrible decisions. Proscribing Palestine Action, thus putting it in the same bucket as al-Qaeda and indeed Hamas, placed pro-Palestinian activists on a collision course with the British state that was only going to corrode free speech and lend these keffiyeh-draped bigots the martyrdom they crave.

This is much bigger than Rooney. There have been thousands of arrests of Palestine Action supporters since the ban was brought in, most of them for holding up signs saying ‘I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action’, which can lead to a six-month prison sentence. This has produced a situation as absurd as it is authoritarian. Half of all terror arrests in Great Britain since 9/11 occurred last year, purely because of the post-proscription crackdown on Pally Action supporters.

We should remember the kind of group it is these people are supporting. Palestine Action is no mere protest movement, nor have its activists’ crimes been limited to vandalism. When six of them broke into a UK site of Israeli defence firm Elbit Systems in 2024, to smash up computers and drones, one of them swung a sledgehammer into a policewoman’s back, fracturing her spine. Palestine Action also attacked a Jewish business in Stamford Hill last year, claiming it was a landlord to Elbit, even though the owners categorically deny any such link. So, the Palestine Action mob targeted a Jewish business, in a Jewish area, leaving red paint and broken glass in their wake. You need not be a history buff to recognise the chilling echoes.

Those scumbags have rightly had the book thrown at them. But if we are to defend freedom of speech we must draw a very bright line between speech and action, between criminality and voicing support for those engaged in criminality. One is a crime, the other is an opinion. Or that’s how it should be. Otherwise, you end up with radicalised pensioners being dragged off the street for nothing more than holding up a homemade placard.

Funding is a little more complicated. Of course, the potentially terroristic nature of Sally Rooney’s royalties is downstream from the decision to deem Palestine Action a terror group in the first place. This was clearly a mistake, for no other reason than it blurs boundaries and makes a mockery of words. Is Palestine Action prejudiced, destructive, committed to breaking the law? Absolutely. But it isn’t on a par with ISIS – and if the British government wishes to stop Irish novelists funding criminal damage, it should find less draconian ways of doing so.

Sally Rooney is no free-speech heroine. She is a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, for one thing, which advocates a ‘boycott of Israeli academic and cultural institutions’. She only recently agreed for her books to be translated into Hebrew, after she found a ‘BDS-compliant’ publisher in Jerusalem. But she isn’t a terrorist fundraiser, either. Nor should she or any other Pally nutter be arrested for saying ‘I support Palestine Action’ at a Daunts Book do.

That’s the principled case against this mess. Here’s the tactical one. The ‘pro-Palestine’ movement is ugly, anti-Israel, virulently anti-Semitic in places. It also has one hell of a persecution complex. Despite being a thoroughly high-status, conformist movement, whose prejudices are shared across the cultural elite and the left-wing political class, it thrives off a phoney air of edginess, and the sense that those sinister Zionists are out to get them. Let’s not give these pricks the satisfaction.