Part story of the genocide in Gaza, part scathing critique of Western culture, and part memoir, Omar El Akkad’s book One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This should be required reading in every American high school. It lays utterly bare the emptiness of American imperialist thinking, the ‘special’ relationship our governments have always had with Israel, and our willingness to look the other way when the deaths of others disturb or inconvenience us.
El Akkad was born in Egypt, grew up there and in Qatar before moving to Canada, and became a U.S. citizen a few years ago. He worked for many years for The Globe and Mail, and prior to this had written two novels, but no non-fiction books. It reads as if he has been saving up his rage, his indignation, his despair for decades so that he could pour it out on to nearly every page of this slender book of under 200 pages. It is a damning, heartbreaking read, rendered in extremely human language.
The main throughline of One Day is Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza, which El Akkad refers to as “the world’s first live-streamed genocide,” the last a word he uses often and with plenty of justification. Indeed, the west’s fear of using that word, which extends to its media and political leaders of both U.S. parties, is also a major subject in the book, because, unlike any previous genocide (including the one that is likely happening right now in Sudan), we have visual evidence, we have videos and audio recordings, we have witness testimonies from people who were there and survived, and from people who were there and did not, but whose testimonies made it out.
El Akkad minces no words for the pusillanimous pundits who bothsides their way around the conflict, or for those who seek to dehumanize Palestinians. He points to the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman’s comparison of various Arab groups to spiders and caterpillar larvae (the U.S., of course, was a lion), the Times of Israel’s Luciano Mondino saying that Palestinian children “are the explosives of the future,” and the Israeli “Defence” Minister who called Palestinians “human animals.” Palestinians, Arabs in general, or just all brown people are still seen as something less, as the savages who simply can’t understand democracy or the rules of war or western civilization, such as it is, where we attacked an entire country that had nothing to do with 9/11, simply because 9/11 happened and the people who did it looked sort of similar. Yet after Hamas’ terror attacks and the massacre of October 7, 2023, when a single, unsourced story about murdered Israeli babies appeared online and then in major newspapers, even earning a mention by President Trump, even though the story was a hoax. It was seen by tens of millions of people, at the least, and I’m going to go on a limb and say that few of them stuck around to read the correction.
He does condemn Hamas, and describes their barbarous acts of October 7 in appropriate language, while also asking why it is that all people of Arab descent are expected to condemn terror attacks by Arab or Muslim groups, while white people are not expected to do the same – are called antisemitic and threatened with consequences if they do condemn – when Israel bombs a hospital or an aid convoy, or blockades Gaza so no food or medical aid can reach the starving population. He brings receipts; when Canadian protestors scaled Mt Sinai hospital in Toronto and flew a Palestinian flag, Canadian leaders condemned it and called hospitals sacred places of healing. They did not condemn Israel for bombing such sacred places of healing in Gaza.
Within the broader framework of the Gaza genocide and the ongoing failure of American imperialism, El Akkad also gives glimpses of his own life story. He remembers Egyptian security forces, barely adults, stopping his father after curfew, tearing up his security papers, and trying to arrest him, only for his father’s boss to happen upon the scene and save him – maybe saving his life. He remembers life in Doha, Qatar, which was exploding with newfound wealth thanks to the oil deposits beneath the tiny peninsula, and imported laborers to build up the city, often in near-slavery conditions, with no rights, no freedoms, and no way out. He also explores the environment of the last two years in the writing world, where may writers have declined to use their platforms to call for an end to the genocide, and where enough did speak out that PEN America had to cancel its 2024 awards ceremony because so many winners and nominees withdrew. He points out that the cost, perhaps fewer books sold, a cancelled appearance here or there, pales compared to the costs borne by the victims of genocide. One person’s words will not stop an attempt to extinguish a people, but enough people’s words, spoken together, might.
While El Akkad was writing the book, the war on Gaza entered its third year, and he notes that our attention had moved elsewhere. Yes, there is more sentiment in the U.S. electorate now that we should not be funding Israel’s efforts, and a few more elected officials and candidates are speaking out, but media coverage of the assault on Gaza has waned. We can only stare at misery for a few minutes before our eyes glaze over and we choose to look elsewhere.
One day, he points out, this will end, either because someone will stop Israel from wiping out the people of Gaza, or they will succeed to the point that there are too few Gazans left to matter. At that point, we will all have to reckon with what we did and said, if we did or said anything, to explain it to our children, our grandchildren, to ourselves. How does one finish the sentence, El Akkad asks, “it is unfortunate that tens of thousands of children are dead, but…” He has no answer. Neither do I.
