As Gareth Roberts pointed out in his latest book, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall had quite a temper tantrum over Israel. “Why is a television chef being consulted on these weighty matters?” Roberts writes. “We were never treated to Fanny Cradock’s thoughts on the Tet Offensive. Viewers would have been staggered if Dorothy Sleightholme had rested her whisk on the chopping block in the Farmhouse Kitchen to give us her two penneth on Soweto. Rustie Lee was not encouraged to volunteer her opinions on the Chernobyl disaster.”

Perhaps the most mainstream and surreal example of this is Carol Vorderman — who has gone from being Rear of the Year to Rosa Luxembourg. But you can see it everywhere: any moment now I expect to find out that Basil Brush has been canceled for inappropriate behavior towards Mr Derek, or vice versa — it was always hard to tell who was wagging whose tail.

The latest “casualty” of the culture wars — though to call it that is to lend it more dignity than it deserves; perhaps we should describe it as the brain-dead brouhaha of the Trash Telly Top Trumps — is the Eurovision Song Contest, from which a growing number of countries are withdrawing their “artistes”. (Though anyone who witnessed last year’s most vocal opponent of Israel, one “Bambi Thug”, might conclude that using the word “artiste” to describe her is about as accurate as calling the contents of a nappy an “artifact”.) The delegations of the unfriendly nations demanded a secret vote on Israel’s participation — for the inevitable reasons — which has sensibly been rejected, indicating that the Eurovision bigwigs are pleasingly determined to dig their heels in, perhaps in the light of how popular the Israeli entry proved with the public last year; ranked joint 14th by the national juries, but dominating the leaderboard due to the results of the online and phone votes. Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain and the UK were among the countries whose viewers awarded Israel the maximum 12 points. Once again, the voice of the people (don’t forget the mocked contest attracts a larger European television audience than anything apart from big sports matches) and the voice of the captured Establishment couldn’t have been more at odds.

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Not content with creating the circumstances which led to a young woman, Eden Golan, being booed while singing a song about the Hamas pogrom, many of last year’s persecutors are back for a second go. Yuval Raphael, who will represent Israel next year, was actually a survivor of the 2023 attack, so one can imagine the usual self-righteous sadists having an especially fun time barracking her. So far, Spain, Ireland, Slovenia and the Netherlands have boycotted the contest; only Spain is one of the Eurovision’s Big Five countries along with France, Germany, Italy and the UK, so I can’t imagine the European Broadcasting Union’s (EBU) General Assembly getting their scanties in a bunch quite yet.

It’s interesting to examine the motivation of this decidedly un-fab four. Slovenia only has a few hundred Jews — but, regrettably, what with knowing what we know about the behavior of Eastern European countries during the Second World War, their joining in doesn’t exactly come as a shock. Since the war ended, the Netherlands have a record of stability and tolerance towards Jews, to the point that the Dutch Jewish population is growing as a result of migration, mainly from Israel; Jews born in Israel constitute about 20% of the Jews living in the Netherlands today. But the recent behavior in Amsterdam towards Maccabi Tel Aviv fans and the massive growth in Muslim immigration may well have changed the mood of the nation, as indeed it has in the UK, where having just under four million Muslims and only around 300,000 Jews residing here has very much made many politicians puppets of the larger demographic.

In the case of Spain and Ireland, though, it’s tempting to shrug, albeit sorrowfully. What did we expect? Spain, the home of the Inquisition, repeated Jewish expulsion and forced conversion, appears to be reverting to type. The same could be said of Ireland, which has taken to anti-Israel activity with a relish that won’t surprise anyone who remembers that Eamon de Valera’s Eire was “neutral” in the war between the Allies and the Axis.

Since the Gaza conflict, the phenomenon of “top-down” antisemitism — masquerading as anti-Zionism — has been noted as being more extreme in Ireland than in any other Western nation; far from being a “bottom-up” issue, this one is driven by the political and academic elite, who have far less excuse for behaving so. (The Irish public, don’t forget, awarded Israel 10 points in the public vote last year.) There are only between 2,000 and 3,000 Jews in the Republic of Ireland; one of them, the chairman of the Jewish Representative Council of Ireland said “I always thought of myself as an Irishman who happened to be Jewish. Now I know that I am just a Jew living in Ireland.”

When I was a girl, the politics of Eurovision were a bit of a chuckle, about ancient grudges; Turkey and Greece punishing each other over Cyprus, or us and the Germans being scrupulously polite to each other while awarding each other sod-all points — an act the French were always keen to get in on with their chicly clipped “Nul points!” Then it became about Brexit. The funniest thing about the Eurovision, for me, is that its whole purpose was to make us forget our petty differences and unite as one continent in The Joy of Song, but all it has ever really done is throw our differences into sharp relief and remind us of them — which I suppose could equally be said of the EU itself. But this was knockabout stuff compared with the real viciousness which, since the Hamas attack, has been aimed directly at the world’s only Jewish state. Where will the Light Entertainment Wars end? As the least switched-on people in media often work in this field, it seems likely that, like the Japanese soldier who refused to believe the war was over, they will keep on plugging away even though those at the top of the TV pyramid have realized that this parrot is dead and are seeking to ditch identity politics in favor of something more vote-catching. So I don’t know about you, but I’m on tenterhooks till I find out what Mr Blobby’s views on puberty blockers are.

Rooney has written another novel about comfortable young westerners overthinking their love-lives. The Israeli state would welcome an edition, but she is withholding it from Israeli readers as a political gesture. Had she written a novel about the suffering of young Palestinians in the occupied territories, and the Israeli state sought to ban it, I imagine she would join all right-minded folk in pressing for a Hebrew edition to be produced.

Sally Rooney has not decided to boycott an entire language. Her decision to refuse the Israeli publisher Modan to publish a Hebrew edition of her latest novel is the refusal of a specific Israeli publisher rather than the refusal of a Jewish language. You may argue the two will add up to the same thing – which non-Israeli publisher is likely to want to produce a Hebrew edition? — but the distinction in principle is not meaningless, and it’s the distinction that she herself makes.

In a statement she said she refused to work with a publisher “that does not publicly distance itself from apartheid and support the UN-stipulated rights of the Palestinian people”, adding: “The Hebrew-language translation rights to my new novel are still available, and if I can find a way to sell these rights that is compliant with the BDS movement’s institutional boycott guidelines, I will be very pleased and proud to do so.”

I think this is a silly move, but it’s not so obviously silly and/or malign as to be slam-dunked in 280 characters. We need to keep this a manageable length, though, so rather than start from 1967, or 1948, or 19th-century pogroms and the birth of Zionism, let’s start from Rooney’s position — which is that Israel’s treatment of its Palestinian population, and its illegal settlements, are illegitimate and deplorable. Let’s take that as a given, whether or not we agree with it. And let’s shelve, too, the argument that you’re only allowed to boycott Israel if you also boycott Russia, Saudi, China and any other countries whose human rights records bear similar challenge. It’s not necessarily a trivial objection — a key part of the IHRA’s definition of anti-Semitism is holding Israel to a double standard by “requiring of it a behaviour not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation” — but it would be, if we’re to approach this issue (as I’m trying to) on Rooney’s terms, to make the perfect the enemy of the good.

Let’s take Rooney’s decision on its own terms. She sees Israel as a baddy. She supports the BDS movement, which holds it legitimate to punish Israel for its badness by economic sanctions and cultural boycotts – on an analogy with the isolation of apartheid-era South Africa. (Is Israel an “apartheid state”? Let’s shelve that one also.) So she won’t let Israel have Beautiful World, Where Are You? because, essentially, they are a baddy and so they Can’t Have Nice Things.

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I’m trying to get to the nub of this, which is the question of what her decision achieves — or hopes to. Sanctions and boycotts are intended to strike a blow against a regime, not against its people. (I can’t speak for Rooney, but I’m presuming she deplores the Israeli state rather than its Jewish inhabitants.) The most powerful arguments against them have always been that in seeking to do the former, they achieve the latter. And, indeed, you can argue that thanks to the backfire effect, they sometimes help the regime by uniting its people in being pissed off about the sanctions.

Still, in economic terms, a successful boycott will seek to hurt a country’s GDP; it will discourage international investment; it may specifically prevent it buying weapons, energy and the other things that a regime needs to thrive. And in cultural terms, it will seek to damage its soft power, and the regime’s internal claim to legitimacy, by signalling its isolation from the international community.

So to take the example of apartheid South Africa, you could make a case for refusing to play international cricket there, or disapproving when major rock stars played Sun City. There’s propaganda value to hosting an international sporting tournament — those who blether on about sport being “above politics” haven’t been paying attention — or having Dolly Parton play your national stadium. It signals, soft-power-wise, that your country, and by extension its government, is a legitimate member of the great family of nations. Bad luck on innocent cricket fans of all ethnic and political stripes; but more infuriating, you’d hope, to the cricket-loving white supremacists in charge of the country who felt humiliated by the snub.

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But books, I submit, are a totally different type of good from weapons, financial instruments, petroleum, sporting events or Dolly Parton concerts. They are no use to a regime; and they can sometimes be a nuisance to it. Reading is a private, rather than a communal event. Governments, as a rule, couldn’t give two hoots about what its citizens are reading at bedtime. You can’t hoist the flag over a scattered population of readers losing half an hour here or there, on a timetable of their own devising, in an imaginary world.

The reason that when states do take an interest in books it’s to ban them is precisely that they don’t fit into an authoritarian order (Israel, I should add, is not in that sense anything like an authoritarian regime). The widespread liberal enthusiasm for the free circulation of books links to this — as well as to the idea, though we shouldn’t push it too far, that fiction is in some way a moral agent. Here we get to George Eliot’s old line that “if Art does not enlarge men’s sympathies, it does nothing morally”. Books can change minds, spread ideas and, yes, enlarge sympathies.

So, to repeat, what does Rooney intend to achieve? She’s a bestseller, sure; but not to the extent, I imagine, that missing out on her new paperback will damage the Israeli economy. The publishing house is a private rather than a state concern. There’s no soft-power blow that withdrawing her book strikes to the prestige of the Israeli regime, either. As I say, they couldn’t give a toss which of their citizens get to read about the tangled love-lives and troubled consciences of Rooney’s protagonists.

And in deciding that ordinary Israeli citizens should not get to read her book (my guess, for what it’s worth, is that most of her Israeli readers will be of a liberal internationalist bent in any case) Rooney seems to sell her own work short by indicating that there’s nothing in it that might do the private and disaggregated good of enlarging sympathies, changing minds, expanding sensibilities. That it’s just product, like the tub of Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream that you also can’t buy in Israeli occupied territories.

Perhaps, as with Ben & Jerry’s, an Israeli boycott will be good branding for that product in the liberal west. But it’s hard to imagine it will do a damn thing for the Palestinians.