Going sideways from the previous musing, in amongst the media hype and TV adaptations of books by Sally Rooney, I was fascinated to see she had refused to allow her work to be translated into Hebrew and thus for sale in Israel. Authors are usually delighted for their work to be sent around the world so I had to look further.
The Republic of Ireland aligns itself with Palestine. It considers that they have shared historical experiences concerned with oppression, colonisation, occupation as well as sectarian conflict. Added to this there is the fact that the Roman Catholic Church stayed mainly silent on the Nazi treatment of Jews in the Second World War.
On the other hand, Northern Ireland, despite having no foreign policy of its own, takes a biblical, Protestant stance seeing Jews as Gods chosen people and thus entitled to a state of its own.
I wonder if Sally Rooney is the only Irish author to take this rather extreme position?