{"id":11287,"date":"2026-07-20T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-07-20T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=11287"},"modified":"2026-07-19T21:32:34","modified_gmt":"2026-07-20T01:32:34","slug":"one-day-everyone-will-have-always-been-against-this","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2026\/07\/20\/one-day-everyone-will-have-always-been-against-this\/","title":{"rendered":"One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Part story of the genocide in Gaza, part scathing critique of Western culture, and part memoir, Omar El Akkad\u2019s book One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This<\/a><\/em> should be required reading in every American high school. It lays utterly bare the emptiness of American imperialist thinking, the \u2018special\u2019 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The main throughline of One Day<\/em> is Israel\u2019s ongoing war on Gaza, which El Akkad refers to as \u201cthe world\u2019s first live-streamed genocide,\u201d the last a word he uses often and with plenty of justification. Indeed, the west\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019 <\/em>Thomas Friedman\u2019s comparison of various Arab groups to spiders and caterpillar larvae<\/a> (the U.S., of course, was a lion), the Times of Israel<\/em>\u2019s Luciano Mondino saying that Palestinian children \u201care the explosives of the future<\/a>,\u201d and the Israeli \u201cDefence\u201d Minister who called Palestinians \u201chuman animals<\/a>.\u201d Palestinians, Arabs in general, or just all brown people are still seen as something less, as the savages who simply can\u2019t 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\u2019 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<\/a>. It was seen by tens of millions of people<\/a>, at the least, and I\u2019m going to go on a limb and say that few of them stuck around to read the correction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n