What Is the Sally Rooney Case Really About?

It’s Not What Her Supporters Think It’s About

Sally Rooney. Pic: Getty.

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In November 2025, Sally Rooney submitted a witness statement to Britain’s High Court, on behalf of a co-founder of Palestine Action, Huda Ammori. The court was considering the UK government’s decision to designate Palestine Action as a terrorist group. Ammori was arguing that this constituted an authoritarian ban on protest. In support, Rooney said that her books might have to be withdrawn from sale in Britain, and that, "The disappearance of my work from bookshops would mark a truly extreme incursion by the state into the realm of artistic expression."

Almost a year later, this has come to pass. Rooney’s publisher, Faber, has taken her books off sale, with her consent, because they fear a prosecution. The Terrorism Act of 2000 makes it illegal to provide money to anyone where you have reasonable cause to suspect it might be used for the purposes of terrorism. After the 2025 ban on Palestine Action (PA), Rooney said, repeatedly, that she continues to support it, “in whatever way I can”. That constitutes a pretty firm basis for suspicion. It is also illegal to express support for a banned organisation. Rooney has made her statements of support from Ireland, where she lives. Had she made them here, she might have faced prosecution. Thousands of people in Britain have been arrested for holding signs which say, “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action”.

To be clear, the British government hasn’t banned Rooney’s books. It isn’t illegal to sell or distribute them; you can easily pick them up second-hand. Faber’s withdrawal is voluntary. Faber could, in theory, have kept the books on sale and withheld the payments, but decided that wouldn’t be fair on their author. They were under no pressure from the government to stop paying Rooney and in truth it seems unlikely that the Crown Prosecution Service would have picked this fight. But it’s a reasonable precaution for them to take.¹

There is, of course, a political motivation for the withdrawal, at least on Rooney’s behalf. She wants to highlight the negative effects of the ban on PA. In this, she has been very successful. Millions of Sally Rooney readers have been shocked by this turn of events and many will blame the government. To anyone of common sense, it seems absurd that novels about the love lives of Irish millennials should be made unavailable on the basis of terrorism law. It also seems crazy that middle-class pensioners holding placards should be treated as engaging in terrorist activity. Even those who aren’t fans of Rooney’s books, or her politics, may feel sympathetic to her cause.

But what is her cause, exactly? What is actually at stake here, beyond the banning of one particular organisation?

The literary world is in no doubt: it has enthusiastically adopted Rooney’s framing of the issue, as set out in her statement to the High Court. The New Statesman has gathered an impressive list of writers and intellectuals, and Gary Lineker, to sign an open letter to the government. This is its admirably short text:

Sally Rooney is a writer, not a terrorist. Her books must be available to the public. Their withdrawal from sale, on the basis of ill-conceived and draconian anti-terror legislation, is an affront to basic principles of free speech and expression so long taken for granted in this country. We categorically reject censorship – whether direct or indirect – and urge the government to change course, amending the legislation which has led us to this point of repressive absurdity.

The letter comes attached to an op-ed by Tanjil Rashid, editor of the New Statesman’s (superb) culture pages which opens by invoking the name of Salman Rushdie, before going on to develop the comparison:

The last time books by a controversial author were withdrawn from retailers was during the more heated affair over The Satanic Verses. The UK government, of course, had not banned Salman Rushdie’s novel, but a climate of fear had led to its voluntary withdrawal. The government has not intentionally banned Rooney’s books either; the withdrawal of her work is equally voluntary, but based, likewise, on a climate of fear. The difference lies in how the fear has been stoked. Rushdie’s censor was terrorism – actual terrorists, who spilled real blood over his book. In Rooney’s case, it is legislation.

Now, I like (and subscribe to) the New Statesman, but I don’t like this comparison. I find it crass, even obscene, caveat and all. But we’ll get back to Rushdie. Before we do so, let’s look at the question of whether the Rooney case is really about what she and her fellow writers say it’s about.

Is it about freedom of artistic expression? Usually, when people invoke the spectre of censorship it’s because a work of art has been banned, or an artist has been punished for self-expression. But one thing all parties agree on here is that there is little politically subversive about Normal People or Intermezzo. That these books have been removed from the shelves has nothing to do with the words inside them. Nobody in government has ever sought to ban them. Their disappearance may be a secondary effect of a restriction of speech but it is not because the artist concerned, or anyone else, has had their artistic expression curbed.

Is it about the right to dissent? The New Statesman thinks so:

Rooney has shown us that the laws aren’t fit for purpose, that writers cannot always dissent from government policy with the outspokenness and commitment that is their right.

But this doesn’t seem right, either. Writers dissent vehemently and frequently from government policy on Israel every day. Insofar as Rooney has put her publisher in legal jeopardy, it is not because she has criticised the government, and in fact it is grossly misleading to imply that it is. It is because she has said, or implied, that she will give the money that she receives from the publisher to a designated terrorist organisation. That’s it. The fact that Rooney is an author is irrelevant to the legal situation. Let’s imagine she is not a writer but a businesswoman, the owner of a vegan granola brand which exports to the UK. If she happened to tell a local paper that she might use the proceeds from these sales to support Palestine Action, Waitrose would now be in the same position as Faber.

In truth this case has nothing to do with the suppression of radical art, or subversive ideas, or dissent. It’s about an illegal flow of money. For the writers and artists who signed the New Statesman letter, that might be a disappointingly prosaic way to put it, but it’s accurate. Nonetheless, we shouldn’t dismiss the free speech question entirely. Funding aside, any expression of support for Palestine Action would expose Rooney to prosecution, if she were in Britain. Those peaceful, placard-holding protestors who spent the night in a police cell can testify to that. That does seem like an objectionable curb on speech and protest, even if it’s not specifically to do with arts and letters. But I think we should be clear, once more, about what we’re objecting to.

The New Statesman’s open letter blames the withdrawal of Rooney’s books on “draconian anti-terror legislation”. Nowhere in the letter or editorial do we learn what specific law they are objecting to, or what change they would propose. We are forced to guess. Are they objecting to the proscription of terrorist organisations in general? I doubt it. Everyone seems to agree that organisations like Al-Qaeda should be banned. Are they objecting to a law which bans people from providing funds to individuals if they suspect it will end up with terrorists? I hope not - that seems pretty sensible to me.

Perhaps their objection is to the criminalisation of any expression of support for a terrorist organisation? They would be on stronger ground here. If you’re a free speech advocate, you might well argue that it should be legal to cheer on a terrorist group, even if doing so is clearly abhorrent. But somehow, I doubt this is what those writers want. The signatories of that letter should ask themselves if they would be happy with the government making it legal to speak up for, or hold placards on behalf of, a neo-Nazi group like Sonnenkrieg Division, also banned under this law. Looking at the list of names, I’d be very surprised if so. I don’t think they are objecting to legislation at all. I think they are objecting to the proscription of Palestine Action under this legislation.

Now, this more tightly defined dispute might be worth taking up cudgels for. But before taking a closer look at whether PA should be proscribed, let’s mark how far we’ve travelled. We started by asking whether this is really about artistic self-expression, as Rooney and her fellow writers claim. It doesn’t seem to be. Then we asked whether it’s about free speech and the right to dissent. Not much going on there either. Is it about draconian anti-terror legislation? Perhaps, but only insofar as it applies to Palestine Action. We’ve gone from a grand and rather romantic battle of artists against the dead hand of state censorship, and high arguments of principle, to a dispute over the proscription of one group.

The New Statesman letter, which I’m really using as an example of a much wider confusion, states that Rooney is not a terrorist. This is superfluous. Nobody is calling her a terrorist; at most, she’d be treated as a supporter of a terrorist organisation, as defined by the British government. I don’t begrudge a rhetorical flourish, but it would have been more honest to say, “Palestine Action is not a terrorist organisation”, since that is the ground on which the whole objection rests. Yet Palestine Action isn’t cited in the letter and is mentioned only in passing in the editorial.

I can see why. Who wants to have that rather tedious and confined argument when we can ride the high horses of artistic expression? The Ruffian, on the other hand, is always up for a tedious argument. So let’s look at whether Palestine Action ought to be classed as a terrorist organisation and proscribed as such. I should say that my prior belief was ‘No, it shouldn’t’, and that the proscription is absurd. Having spent a bit more time on it, I am less sure.

A brief recap. PA was banned by the government in 2025 when Keir Starmer was Prime Minister and Yvette Cooper was Home Secretary. It came directly in the wake of the group’s attack on the RAF airbase at Brize Norton, when members of the group sprayed paint into the engines of two aircraft. There had been several prior incidents, the most serious being an attack on a subsidiary of Elbit, the Israeli arms manufacturer, at a site near Bristol, in the course of which they smashed up a lot of equipment and attacked a police officer with a sledgehammer, fracturing her spine.

The High Court overturned Cooper’s ban on the basis that she didn’t follow due process, and that the ban had a chilling effect on free speech and protest. The Court of Appeal then upheld the ban, reversing both of the High Court’s findings. Now for the Supreme Court, which considers the case on November 4. We won’t go through all the legal arguments here; let’s just say this is hardly an open and shut case, either way. Certainly, the argument for PA being classified as terrorists is not an absurd one.

The Terrorism Act’s definition of terrorism includes causing serious damage to property in order to influence the government in pursuit of a political cause. Arguably that test is too broadly defined, but PA obviously passes it. This isn’t just a matter of technical definition. The Court of Appeal cited its “Underground Manual” which advocates for the damage and destruction of targets, and for avoiding detection; the escalation of its campaign without an apparent restraint; its attacks on key national infrastructure and firms, crucial to British defence and to our assistance of Ukraine (Elbit’s British operations are major suppliers to the UK military); its covert organisation into secret cells.

So here we have a group which has carried out several attacks on property in pursuit of its political goal and which has harmed a policewoman in the process. It puts property damage at the centre of its activity. It’s committed to continuing and escalating its campaign, which involves attacks on the country’s defence infrastructure, and its structure makes it hard for the security services to stop the attacks without banning the group.

That last is a point that even the more intelligent commentaries on this affair have overlooked. It’s very hard to prevent these crimes without taking on the organisation behind them. The Atlantic’s George Packer, in a piece sharply critical of Rooney and PA, says, “[PA’s] vandals should be prosecuted under ordinary laws”. Others have said similar. But these aren’t just vandals pursuing individual offences; they’re part of a network which shares money, training and targets. The Court of Appeal’s point is that you can’t disrupt the funding and plotting of a secretive, cell-based organisation without banning it. Proscription lets counter-terrorism police go after the whole network rather than prosecuting individual offences after the damage is done.

The effects of this proscription on free speech and protest ought to be weighed in the balance, and might outweigh the security benefits of a ban. It does seem ridiculous to me that so many peaceful protesters have been arrested (although I find it hard to see this as an authoritarian curb on speech and dissent: people can protest for the Palestinian cause as loudly and vociferously as they like without fear of the law, as long as they don’t cite that particular group). But it’s a fine balance, whichever side you come down on.

And let’s take a step back, once again. Why has the legal status of this particular group become such a cause célèbre for writers and thinkers? That one is pretty easy to answer: it’s because Sally Rooney has made it so. I doubt that most of her allies know or care much about Palestine Action and its activities. They just know that they are for the Palestinians, and are keen to stand up for a novelist claiming that her free artistic expression is being curtailed. But Rooney is framing her quarrel with the British courts in this way precisely in order to make it a cause célèbre. Without this sleight of hand it becomes a much narrower and muddier dispute.² I admire her tactical brilliance in this regard, even if I don’t support her aim.

But what is her aim? I don’t have a clear answer to the question of why Rooney has picked this group in particular as her personal cause. I would wager that not one Israeli strike on Gaza has been stayed by Palestine Action’s attacks on British infrastructure and businesses, including Jewish-owned businesses in Stamford Hill and Hampstead. Not one Palestinian life can be said to have been saved or improved. The activist term of art, “direct action”, rings terribly hollow here. Rooney could be supporting the Palestinians more directly via the aid charities which work there, or failing that by supporting lawful campaigns against arms exports. She might be doing that too, but she has chosen to associate herself most closely with this group. Maybe she sincerely believes that PA is disrupting the flow of arms to Israel, or maybe she is more attracted to extremity than efficacy; smashing things up is exciting.

To me, Palestine Action seems to be an exercise in symbolism, thrill-seeking and identity-fashioning (perhaps that is the artistic self-expression Rooney refers to). Regardless, this is the fight she has picked; the one that gives her a reason to go on. Her fellow writers and intellectuals might wish to join it, but I hope they have thought through why they are doing so. One notable absentee from the New Statesman list of signatories is the author that its editorial is so keen to associate with Rooney. I don’t know if Salman Rushdie was asked, although I’d be surprised if they didn’t think of him before they got to, say, Kneecap. But without his endorsement of the cause, the invocation of his name, even with qualification, is all the more jarring.

Rushdie was targeted by an Islamist head of state for the content of his art. He lived under credible threat of murder for decades. He saw mobs of angry men burning his book. He came horribly close to losing his life when a terrorist attacked him with a knife. He has lost an eye and a good part of his best life because of what he wrote in a novel. His allies put themselves at risk to publish his work and some of them paid a price for it. His Japanese translator was murdered, his Italian translator stabbed, his Norwegian publisher shot.

No, Rooney and her supporters do not get to bask in this reflected valour. If anything, the comparison ought to remind us how little is at stake here, either for the artist or for the principle of artistic expression. The awfulness of one author’s suffering makes the other’s position look very comfortable indeed. Rooney has had a source of income cut off. Not because of her writing, but because of her declared intent to fund a designated terrorist group. Sally Rooney is not a terrorist, but neither is she Salman Rushdie.

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I’m sorry - I spent so long on this I haven’t left time for a Rattle Bag. I’ll be sending that separately, for paid subscribers only.

1. I am proud to be a Faber author myself. I haven’t spoken to anyone there about this story and have no inside information on it.

2. As Packer and others have pointed out, Rooney is an unlikely champion of free speech and open cultural exchange. These are not causes she has taken up in any other context. She is an ardent advocate for a cultural boycott of Israel and went so far as to try and stop her books being translated into Hebrew.