Al Mayadeen| October 15, 2026

Irish novelist Sally Rooney has agreed to the withdrawal of her books from the UK market after her support for Palestine Action created legal obstacles to the payment of royalties under British terrorism legislation.

Rooney, the bestselling author of “Normal People” and “Conversations With Friends”, said her publisher, Faber, had concluded that continuing to distribute her work in the UK could expose those involved to criminal liability. The decision was made with her agreement following consultations over the legal implications.

Palestine Action was designated a “terrorist organization” by the UK government in July 2025. The following month, Rooney publicly declared that she intended to continue supporting the group and direct proceeds from her book sales towards it. The organization remains legal in the Republic of Ireland, where Rooney is based.

Rooney was prepared to accept the consequences

In a statement to The Guardian, Rooney explained that her position had placed the publication of her work in Britain at risk.

She said that after expressing her intention to support Palestine Action, fulfilling contracts to publish her books in the UK could constitute a serious criminal offence. Rooney added that she had been transparent about her convictions and was prepared to accept the consequences.

The novelist had previously cancelled a planned UK visit to collect an award over concerns that she could face arrest because of her stated support for the banned group.

Terrorism legislation threatens publishing arrangements

Rooney warned in a statement supporting the legal challenge against the ban that the proscription could prevent her existing books from remaining available in British shops and block the publication of future titles in the country. Her submission to the High Court raised concerns about the consequences for freedom of expression.

The restrictions also extend to royalties from television adaptations of her work. Last year, Rooney said the independent producer behind the BBC adaptations of “Normal People” and “Conversations With Friends” had advised her that paying her could breach terrorism legislation if it knew or suspected she would use the money to finance Palestine Action. Both series aired before the group was banned.

Section 15 of the UK’s Terrorism Act criminalizes providing money or other property when a person knows or has reasonable grounds to suspect that it may be used for terrorist purposes. A conviction can carry a maximum prison sentence of 14 years.

Faber, which publishes Rooney in the UK and Ireland, said the legislation had left it unable to transfer earnings from British sales to the author.

The publisher said selling a writer’s work without being able to pay them was unacceptable. It confirmed that, with Rooney’s full agreement, it would stop supplying her books in Britain in every format, while continuing to publish and sell her work in other markets.

Bestselling novels face uncertain future in Britain

Rooney’s novels have received widespread critical acclaim and achieved substantial commercial success. She has been hailed as a voice of her generation.

“Normal People” has sold more than one million copies in the UK, while “Conversations With Friends” and “Beautiful World, Where Are You” have each exceeded 500,000 sales.

The BBC adaptations also attracted large audiences. “Normal People” accumulated 62.7 million views, making it the broadcaster’s most-streamed series of 2020.

Demand was likely to continue

Despite the withdrawal decision, copies of Rooney’s books remained available in central London on Wednesday afternoon. Waterstones said retailers could continue selling copies already in stock.

Booksellers also indicated that they intended to keep offering the novels while existing supplies lasted.

Gian Carlo, a bookseller at Henry Pordes Books, said the shop could sell its copies without generating royalties for Rooney. He added that he understood her position.

At London Review Bookshop, bookseller John Clegg said he had ordered additional copies after learning of the development. He said demand was likely to continue, although the shop would no longer be able to replenish its stock through Faber. Clegg also criticized the legislation and said he hoped the case would encourage the Home Office to reconsider it.

Thousands arrested following Palestine Action ban

The dispute comes amid a wider legal battle over the government’s decision to proscribe Palestine Action.

More than 3,700 people are believed to have been arrested in the UK since the ban took effect in July 2025 on suspicion of supporting the organization. Many arrests involved people holding placards bearing the message: “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action.”

Approximately 2,500 people have been charged. However, trials have not proceeded while the legal challenge to the proscription remains unresolved. The case is scheduled to reach the Supreme Court next month.

Effect of the ban on freedom of expression

Most arrests and charges have involved Section 13 of the Terrorism Act, which carries a maximum prison sentence of six months.

Huda Ammori, a co-founder of Palestine Action leading the legal challenge, said Rooney’s inability to publish her work in Britain demonstrated the effect of the ban on freedom of expression.

Ammori said Rooney had maintained her position despite the personal and professional consequences. She argued that the author’s books should remain widely available rather than disappear from British shelves because of her refusal to abandon her support for Palestinians.

She added that writers should not have to choose between their political convictions and their ability to publish their work.

The Cradle | October 15, 2026

An Israeli digital advertising agency helped run an espionage campaign using a vast network of online ads to track targets and hack their devices, Reuters reported on 15 October, citing two research groups.

Reports from Canadian cyber watchdog group Citizen Lab and New York advertising security firm Confiant document how the Israeli advertising agency Discover-Tech placed millions of ads online each day for ordinary products such as phones or earpods.

Discover-Tech placed the ads using the advertising services of Google, Comcast, Yandex, and other search engines.

The Israeli ad agency could identify and track internet users who visited websites or used apps with the malicious ads, and at times obtained phone numbers from smartphone users.

Clicking on the ads was not required to allow users to be tracked.

Some ads were used to plant spyware from another Israeli firm, Candiru, ​on users’ devices.

Jerome Dangu of Confiant said Discover-Tech placed at least 10 million online ads per day, affecting more than 120,000 websites and 75,000 apps.

“Very likely hundreds of millions of people would have been touched by Discover-Tech,” Dangu said.

Citizen Lab said Candiru spyware delivered through Discover-Tech’s ads had been used to compromise devices of journalists and executives at the Qatari news outlet Al Jazeera.

Unidentified media organizations in Mexico, Israel, and Europe were also targeted.

Dangu of Confiant said that the malicious Israeli ads targeted officials at the Pentagon, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Discover-Tech ads also helped to surveil the populations of entire regions, most notably the Israeli-occupied Palestinian West Bank and Gaza.

“You go to almost any site in Palestine – any site – you find a Discover-Tech ad. It gives them a very complete visibility on the digital activities of an entire country,” Dangu said.

Citizen Lab also said the malicious ads were directed at officials in the UN, NATO, the European ⁠Commission, as well as more than a dozen governments.

The ads also helped to track employees and executives of chip-related firms such as Nvidia, SanDisk, Broadcom, and Micron.

As a result of the Confiant and Citizen Lab investigations, Google said it has removed Discover-Tech from its ad platforms “for systematically violating our policies.”

IAB Europe, an association for digital marketing and advertising on the continent, has now suspended Discover-Tech from ​its list of globally approved vendors.

Comcast ad tech subsidiary Beeswax also removed Discover-Tech ​from its platform.

Yandex did not respond to Reuters’‘ requests for comment.

Israel has a well-documented history of using private technology companies for surveillance, intelligence gathering, and cyberespionage.

Some of these companies have close connections to Israel’s military and intelligence services, particularly Unit 8200, the Israeli military’s signals intelligence unit.

Truths about Israel

ILANA MERCER’S FPV Resistance | October 13, 2026

What Israel has done, is doing, to Gaza has not sprung ex nihilo from October 7.

Genocide is not a situational counter-response to aggression. It’s a coming-out event of sorts.

Differently put: There are no legitimate antecedents to genocide. Genocide is not a “war crime” to which a set of mitigating or exculpating legal defenses can attach.

Genocide is a stand-alone indefensible crime—“the blackest of all crimes”—for which there are no extenuating circumstances and to which no traditional legal defenses attach.

Ethnocide, depopulation, domicide and daily mass murder can never be explained away or exculpated using argument from law, ethics or history.

In essence, talk to the hand about October 7, 2023; because the face isn’t listening. Just as there are no legal or moral extenuating circumstances for genocide, so it is that there are no historical defenses for this “blackest of all crimes,” for genocide.

To assert that you are just, justified or even coherent as you carry out that which cannot be just or justified—this is to embody a most grotesque incoherence and contradiction.

At minimum, Israel deserves—and has yet to receive—the unanimous revulsion and isolation reserved for entities whose existence is a confidence trick and a fraud upon us all.

Reality is truth, past and present. The reality of genocide gives rise to irrefutable truths. From the facts of this Twenty-First Century Genocide; certain truths immemorial and irrefutable that traverse time have emerged. Truths about Israel.

Through Gaza, the world has come to know Israel’s ways with the Palestinians, with their lands and homesteads—down to what Israeli terrorists habitually do to the intimate bits-and-bobs that make up a household.

Through Gaza, we have come to know Israel’s ways across the Levant and beyond. They unground and salt the earth forever. They uproot ancient communities and their olive groves. For fun. They deform babies and the baby faces of children for life.

The reality on the ground is of genocide ongoing, of daily extermination. In aggregate, a “child has been killed in Gaza every 71 minutes for three years.” This extermination campaign is not only of children—the one segment of Palestinian society which American conservatives are comfortable defending—but of adults, young and old: admirable, valuable adults. Adult lives matter, yes?

Hasbara and official myth-history aside, because of Gaza and the Ghazzawi you don’t have to know much history at all to arrive at the truth about Israel.

Because of the Palestinians of Gaza, the living, the martyred and those who still resist; the truth about Israel is now ahistoric.

To arrive at that truth about Israel, you don’t have to know much about the genesis of the so-called “conflict” between Israelis and Palestinians in historic Palestine. I hazard that you need to know hardly a thing about this history to arrive at the truth about the lived reality of Palestinians.

You are what you do.

We know the Real Israel through the actions of real Israelis in Gaza. We know how Israel operates and how a preponderance of its people thinks. These realizations came out of the Gaza genocide, which has shown the world in cruel relief how Israel acts and, by extension, what Israel is.

Since October of 2023, the world knows in detail what the untouchable Israel—state and civil society—has done and continues to do to the Strip, to the West Bank and in South Lebanon.

But what have the Ghazzawi, the living and the martyred, accomplished? A great deal. In a manner, Palestine and the Palestinians have won.

Gaza has exposed Israel for the morally and militarily corrupt force that it is. The Genocide of Gaza has, very plainly, invalidated Israel and validated the Palestinian cause.

When you are in the writhing coils of a boa constrictor; it is small comfort to know, as Palestinians have always known, that, while outwardly captive, they are, nevertheless, truly liberated from the illiberal political propaganda that grips the West.

So, they need to know, too, that they have shown good people around the world the way. For once and for all, Israel’s televised genocide had corroborated the lived reality of the Palestinians; their reasons for rage and their rights to resistance and recompense.

Palestinians had been telling us for decades that they have been set upon by murderers and thieves. Palestinians have told us they are being killed and robbed as a matter of course. Their lived reality has been irrefutably affirmed, and universally so.

“It’s complicated,” Israel’s supporters keep countering. “Study up before you open your mouth.” The opposite is true. It’s absurdly simple.

A moral, sentient human being need know nothing much about the history of the region to arrive at this conclusion.

Israel has had the nerve to play its genocide of the Palestinians of Gaza to a packed house: to the world.

Most galling of all: In the course of this very public genocide, Israel has engaged in the mother of all performative contradictions: denying genocide, while publicly committing genocide, effectively asserting a birthright to commit genocide.

Think about it:

To deny ongoing, prime-time livestreamed genocidal action at the very same time that you are committing these actions, and then to hound and hurt anyone who dares notice: This is a performative contradiction in a category all of its own, like no other.

Caught in the protracted act of genocide, the guilty party, Israel, has continued to cavalierly claim for itself and be granted the right to keep killing and deceiving without being considered and treated as a killer and con-artist.

In essence, Israel exists among nations us as a privileged, protected, well-funded aberration, carrying out unspeakable evil with universal blessings and absolution.

I belabor the most galling reality, as it really gets me: At the same time that Israel and its cringing Western admirers have killed and deceived; they have instructed The World to deny Israel’s genocide, then deny Israel’s deception about its genocide, and finally to justify both or fear defenestration, cancellation, banishment, arrest and worse.

To no avail. Human action is the undeniable key to man-made reality. Israel and the US have acted; they’ve revealed themselves. They’ve been exposed.

“Just as you can identify a tree by its fruit, so you can identify people by their actions,” said Jesus (New Living Translation). As Matthew 7:20 reads, “Therefore by their fruits you will know them.”

With the exception of the flint-hearted ruling political elites—the wholesale slaughter carried out by Israel in Gaza has stirred the hearts of ordinary people across the world. A collective conscience developed around Palestine. Minds not AI became engaged. They said, “We see you, Israel. We revile you. We reject you.”

This is what October 7 will forever mark and signify: The triumph of the Palestinians over the alternate reality mass-marketed to the World by Israel and our ruling elites.

©2026 ILANA MERCER
The Unz Review, October 12
LewRockwell.com, October 13

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Ilana Mercer, a widely published paleolibertarian author, essayist and theorist, has been writing up an anti-war, anti-woke storm since 1998, starting in Canada. On arriving in the US, in 2002, her weekly column was right away syndicated. Mercer’s national syndication fell through shortly after due to writing in strident opposition to the war in Iraq. ILANA is described as “a system-builder. Distilled, her modus operandi has been to methodically apply first principles to the day’s events.” She’s Jewish, grew up in Israel ages five to nineteen, and left, at 19, decades back, never to return. She had refused to serve in the IDF, Israel’s compulsory military. Ilana’s focus since October of 2023 has been the genocide.