On June 16, at a Dublin event billed as “Palestine and the Politics of Solidarity,” Irish author Sally Rooney told the room that “the liberation of Palestine really does represent the liberation of the world.”
It was not a slip. Three months earlier, addressing the People's Congress for The Hague Group, she had said almost exactly the same. The cause was, she declared, “a struggle for human liberation and for our future on this earth.” Struggle. Total and righteous. The people who talk this way have never once doubted they are the good ones. Neither did those who talked this way before them.
One territorial conflict reimagined to mean the freedom of everyone, everywhere, and for all time. That is not how anyone describes a war, a border, or even an atrocity. It is how people describe salvation. A worldview that explains everything is not a position, it is a creed.
Listen to the rest of the Dublin speech and the language is unmistakable. Rooney blamed Israel for the rise of fascism across Europe. “The political classes in Europe today are cooperating with and learning from the US and Israeli regimes. Not only are far right and fascist movements rising to power as a result, but mainstream political parties are increasingly adopting authoritarian and fascist techniques.”
But Europe has never needed help producing fascism – it is one of the continent's own traditions, and the last time it took hold, it murdered Europe's Jews. Now the agency vanishes, and the people fascism tried to exterminate are blamed for its return. One small country, recast as the hidden hand behind the West's descent into darkness. That is not political analysis – it is theology, the source of evil, against which the believer defines the good.
Like the old faith, this one needs a devil too — a particular people turned into a symbol, which can hold any meaning you pour into it. A symbol can be hunted in a way a neighbour can’t.
The Welsh singer-songwriter and actress Charlotte Church called the Palestinian cause “the biggest spiritual quest of our time.” The climate crisis Greta Thunberg built her life on has now been subsumed into the larger struggle as there is “no way of distinguishing the two,” she says. Chanting “crush Zionism” outside the Israeli embassy was neither a political nor an ethical demand. It was a public show of true faith.
Rooney herself has pledged her UK book royalties to Palestine Action, a group banned as a terrorist organisation, knowing that funding it is now a criminal offence. “If this makes me a ‘supporter of terror’ under UK law,” she wrote, “so be it.” The faith asks a great deal of its believers, and they are proud to give it.
None of this began on October 7, 2023. The atrocities of that day gave permission to people who were already converted. Rooney joined the boycott of Israel in 2021, refusing to let an Israeli publisher translate her novel into Hebrew while it stayed on sale in Chinese and Russian. That same year, academics went viral copying and pasting a single paragraph that declared opposition to the world's only Jewish state “integral” to their scholarship and “moral worldview”. They then instructed one another to evangelise others and “pass it on”. An entire worldview, copied and pasted, about a state thousands of miles away.
And the permission has had consequences. Attacks on Jews spiked the moment Hamas broadcast its atrocities, and they have not fallen back to where they were. The ideas surface now where they once stayed hidden – in workplaces, in the arts, and on the street. In Stockholm a few months ago they staged a piece of medieval theatre: a man dressed as the caricature of a Jew wearing a blood-soaked apron, holding a champagne flute of blood. He mimed the slaughter of a Palestinian woman while the crowd chanted “crush Zionism”.
It is an old habit. During the Dreyfus Affair, Frenchmen used the figure of the Jew to settle what kind of country France was. A victim of an antisemitic conspiracy, Captain Alfred Dreyfus was wrongfully accused and convicted of being a spy for Germany and imprisoned on Devil's Island in French Guiana. He was later cleared but the question behind his case – whether Jews truly belonged – was not. The philosopher Hannah Arendt described the Affair as a dress rehearsal for a performance staged decades later. In 1944 Dreyfus’s granddaughter, Madeleine Lévy, was murdered in Auschwitz. Her name was carved into his gravestone because she had no grave of her own.
The case against Dreyfus only broadened, from one man to a people. The question moved with the times: from “can a Jew be a citizen?” to “can Jews have a state?” Antizionist where once it was anti-Dreyfusard – only the right in dispute has changed. Back then, the French parliament had a debate about “Jewish infiltration”. Now in 2026, the British parliament just had a debate about “Israeli” infiltration. Same shtick, different century.
Rooney cannot be waved away as a masked figure at a march. She is one of the most gifted novelists of her generation, read by millions, and she has taken the oldest accusation in Europe and given it the vocabulary of the age. In her telling, to stand against the Jewish state is not merely permitted. It is the measure of whether you are a good person at all.
When religion receded it left a space – the need to feel good, and to belong. What looks like politics is really a faith, and what looks like a faith is really the search for a self. People build an identity out of their stance on what Jews represent, then call Jews the rootless ones. But the emptiness is their own.
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