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RE: https://todon.eu/@regendans/116647919233756613

“I am not raw material for the self-improvement of the people whose state, with active and pervasive participation from its population, expelled my family and me, stole our homes and heritage and has been actively trying to erase my people ever since.

But if one accepts the “widen the horizon” frame – that it is right to push books across the language barrier so that Israelis can learn something – then the choice of which books to publish would carry the entire moral weight of the argument.
It would have to be books that confront Israeli readers with what their society is doing: Palestinian testimony from Gaza; diaries of murdered journalists; documentary work on the destruction of medical infrastructure; translations of writing by prisoners held without charge; forensic accounts of the famine; the late Palestinian poet and academic Refaat Alareer‘s work and the tribute to him, If I Must Die; the anthology Every Moment Is a Life, a short story collection from 18 writers in Gaza that I mentored and edited; or the rest of the writing that has come out of Gaza in these 31 months, written under bombardment by people who are still there or who are no longer with us.

It could be argued that the boycott could suspend itself for books that perform the work the boycott itself was meant to do – books that confront the colonizing society. But none of these was deemed worthy by +972 Magazine.

The book in question is Intermezzo, a literary novel about two Irish brothers and the slow choreography of family moving through grief and love. It is not a book that holds a mirror up to the society into whose language it is being delivered. It does not place a single Israeli reader before a single uncomfortable truth about the carnage their state and military are waging.
It is prestige literary fiction – the kind of book a national literary culture imports to feel itself participating in the global conversation.

Sally Rooney is one of the most commercially powerful literary personalities of her generation. A new novel by her is a publishing event. The whole appeal of the maneuver is that it punctures the isolation. That is the function of the choice.

It is a demonstration that the boycott has a backdoor and the celebrated novels of the global literary scene still arrive in Hebrew on time, preserving the cultural normalcy of the Israeli reading public in the middle of a genocide.”