OPEN LETTER: Sally Rooney is a writer, not a terrorist. Her books must be available to the public. Their withdrawal from sale, on the basis of ill-conceived and draconian anti terror legislation, is an affront to basic principles of free speech and expression so long taken for granted in this country. We categorically reject censorship - whether direct or indirect - and urge the government to change course, amending the legislation which has led us to this point of repressive absurdity.

Jacqueline Rose: Confessions of a dissident Jew I speak here, today, as a woman who is proud to define herself as a dissident Jew. Proud to be “dissident” because, with the rise of autocratic regimes across the globe, the crushing of political protest and freedoms, dissidence feels like the only place to be. Proud to be a “Jew” because there exists a tradition of Jewish history and thought which, over millennia, has made its appeal for equity and justice to be placed at the core of what it means to be Jewish. To cite two powerful Biblical injunctions: “Justice, Justice, you shall pursue,” (Deuteronomy, 16:20); “Remember you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Exodus, 22:21, Leviticus, 19:34). For this tradition, the actions of the State of Israel currently being perpetrated against the Palestinians in my name would, I strongly believe, be viewed as anathema. The PEN prize I have just received is named for Harold Pinter. “Unflinching”, to use his own word, he was never one to hold fire in the face of deadly political power. On the occasion of being awarded an honorary degree at the University of Turin in 2002, he listed the political silences that had spread and were continuing to spread across the globe. From the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children deprived by US sanctions of life-saving medicines in Iraq, to the killings, now mostly forgotten, that had unfolded in 1970s Latin America, from Nicaragua, to Guatemala, and El Salvador. But he ended with “the desperate plight of the Palestinian people” as “the central factor in world unrest [which] is hardly referred to”. “Central”, the key to “world unrest”, “desperate” and ignored. “What a misjudgement of the present,” he concluded, and “a misreading of history this is”. That was close on a quarter-century ago. We can only imagine what he would have had to say now about the genocidal atrocity being inflicted on the Palestinians for whom the spectre of freedom has never been so frail and fades by the day. Pinter was in good company. On 4 December 1997, in what became one of his most iconic statements, Nelson Mandela had insisted: “We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.” Palestinian self-determination becomes the litmus test for the future of world freedom. In which case, if we look around us now at the debris of the future, it is a test at which the entire world has drastically failed. We now wait to see if Ed Miliband’s House of Commons speech, delivered on 8 September, its principles repeated loudly at the Labour Party Conference, will be the breakthrough moment it so urgently needs to be. Even while, I think I can say with tragic confidence, we already know it will not be enough. newstatesman.com/world/middl…