It would be trivial to start any discussion of the genocide in Gaza, now 19-months old and counting, looking at how the consequences of campus protests and journalistic free speech have decimated both the fourth estate — the media —and academia. Look toward statistics of over 53,000 killed and 100,000 wounded by Israeli forces, and nearly 2,000 killed since the breaching of a ceasefire. Palestinian forces reportedly killed 1,195 people, including 815 civilians in their initial invasion of Israel.
Look beyond the statistics and the pain takes on different shapes. A Tufts graduate student who signs her name to an editorial criticizing her university’s complicit role in the war-making process gets kidnapped off the sidewalk outside of her apartment. The current U.S. president brazenly threatens to cut funds from major touchstones in U.S. academia if they refuse to tow ideological lines. In the guise of fighting anti-Semitism, the message has become more clear than ever; criticize the war in Gaza, go against the Israeli government, and you are branded an anti-Semite. There is no middle ground.
How do we process the pain? How do we make sense of the incomprehensibly horrible? Omar El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is an at times brutal, often graceful, sublime call to action. Through ten linked essays, journalist and novelist Omar El Akkad takes readers through the stages of comprehending the magnitude of what’s continuing to happen in a barrage with seemingly no realistic conclusion. The essays are simply titled but infused with a controlled rage: “Departure,” “Witness,” “Values,” “Language,” “Resistance,” “Craft,” “Lesser Evils,” “Fear,” “Leavetaking,” and “Arrival.” It’s as if he’s reminding us that October 7, 2023 was a removal from complacency, the start of a journey toward something and somewhere else, but the notion of having arrived at a conclusion is extremely subjective.
El Akkad’s bona fides are impressive. Born in Egypt in 1982, raised in both Qatar and Toronto, he was barely out of his teens when he started his journalism career as the “War on Terror” began. In locations like Guantanamo, Afghanistan, and through other assignments like Black Lives Matter, Ferguson, and climate change protests, El Akkad has managed to weave together rage and measured polemic. He makes it extremely clear in his opening essay how he views the system of justice in which he’s been reporting for over two decades:
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power. Otherwise, they…are expendable.”
Later, as a prelude to the memories he’ll invoke and the path he’ll want us to follow in 187 intense pages, he makes his message even more clear: “We are all governed by chance. We are all subjects of distance.”
The essays are simply titled but infused with a very clear mission statement: “Departure,” “Witness,” “Values,” “Language,” “Resistance,” “Craft,” “Lesser Evils,” “Fear,” “Leavetaking,” and “Arrival.” It’s as if he’s reminding us that October 7, 2023 was a removal from complacency, the start of a journey towards where we are now, but we have not landed in a safe place. He’s especially focused on delineating what might have gone wrong with Western ideologies and the lead up to the 2024 election. Reading this book (published in February 2025 and covering events just prior to the November 2024 US Presidential election) offers a sense of possible hope, a sliding doors notion that where we are now might not have happened had we taken action prior to July and backed a stronger Democratic candidate.
Before he gets into the deserved hectoring against those in the Democratic party who looked away for the sake of expediency, El Akkad expounds on the role of the journalist. They are, in essence, “a tourist in someone else’s misery.” He writes that “…the journalist cannot be an activist,” that the only real obligation outside reporting is “…to agitate against silence.” The fact that Palestinian reporters “…are in effect the world’s sole source of information about the reality of the obliteration of Gaza” is balanced against the fact that 108 Palestinian journalists have been killed as of July 2024 in the act of doing their jobs (and dozens more in total have been murdered by Israeli forces).
El Akkad knows of what he writes when it comes to “the immigrant class” and how they are segregated by narrative. “Some are afforded the privilege of an arrival story, a homecoming. Others, only departure after departure.” It’s this enforced peripatetic nature of the Palestinian people that is of concern here. El Akkad understands that he needs to provide a context through which the essence of this book can be sustained. This is a carefully constructed book whose passages can be extremely bracing if you’re not prepared for them. El Akkad clearly calls out the American left for hollow, performative acts of concern. He reminds the reader that the Democratic party in 2024 was focused on repeating the fact that the opposition was a clear threat to democracy, but they offered no concrete solutions.
“The moral component of history…is simply a single question…When it mattered, who sided with justice and who sided with power?…”
There’s a wealth of material in this book that can be somewhat frustrating, but in a good way. El Akkad’s reflections on his time in Guantanamo Bay are worthy of a separate, more expansive entry, but they do lead us to this question: “What is the statute of limitations on resentment, on rage, on revenge?” This leads to an even stronger line in a book that’s festooned with jewels:
“Forget pity. Forget even the dead if you must, but at least fight against the theft of your soul.”
More nostalgia for a past long gone and never to return again surfaces when El Akkad muses about Donald Trump in 2015, how most mainstream liberals then believed he was “…a singular entity, a freak storm somehow returned to shore, rather than a symptom of an entirely different climate.” El Akkad implores his readers to examine photos of the darkest times in US history and look “…at the faces of those who watch from the sidelines…you’ll see a childish little smirk.” Moments later, in a passage which takes justifiable digs at Nancy Pelosi, El Akkad takes direct and justifiable aim at New York Democratic Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, whose thoughts about Gaza in an undated TV interview conclude with: “‘I don’t associate myself with what’s happening.’” El Akkad responds: “…It must take great courage, to dissociate so fully, and under such difficult circumstances.”
How will the war play itself out? El Akaad properly does not offer any answers. There will be no Palestinian Martin Luther King to lead his people to a homeland with no bloodshed or horror. He worries that this very book will be too political, too problematic. The horrible story of US soldier Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation as the ultimate sacrifice protest is paired with the unspeakable tragedy of five year old Hind Rajab, killed by the Israeli military after having called out for help. “What is the word for what she felt?” El Akkab writes. He may implore that “no atrocity is too great to shrug away now…” but history could contradict that statement.
There will be a reckoning. Omar El Akkad knows this and we need to understand it. “None of this evil was ever necessary,” he writes, and most of us should at least want to believe. Little by little, what is acceptable now will be unconscionable in a more equitable future. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This comes to us with a ponderous title which itself is an abbreviated version of a post first published on X and viewed over 10.4 million times. While the title might be ponderous, the total effect of this collection is anything but. This book is equal parts Paulo Friere, Franz Fanon, Susan Sontag, and James Baldwin. El Akkad’s 2017 dystopian novel American War may have won many awards both here and in Canada, but it’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This that has the greatest chance of serving as the primary text for our troubled, dangerous times.
