Omar El Akkad

One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

cee 

Karolina

Whatever late capitalism is, it seems to be careening into this embrace of growth by negation. Through that prism, it's hard not to see the advances in something like artificial intelligence less driven by technological breakthroughs as by a society that has, over years, over decades, become normalized to a greater and greater magnitude of both loneliness and theft, such that a sputtering algorithm badly trained on the stolen work of real human beings might be celebrated with a straight face as something approximating humanness. Under this ordering, it is not some corporation's increasing capacity for better that drives the extractive world, but everyone else's increasing tolerance for worse.

What art does is meet us at the site of insanity, our derangement, the plainly irrational mechanics of what it means to be human. 

What good are words, severed from anything real?

This is the world we've created, a world in which one privileged sliver consumes, insatiable, and the best everyone else can hope for is to not be consumed.

No, there is no terrible thing coming for you in some distant future, but know that a terrible thing is happening to you now. You are being asked to kill off a part of you that would otherwise scream in opposition to injustice. You are being asked to dismantle the machinery of a functioning conscience.

Language is never sufficient. There is not enough of it to make a true mirror of living. In this way, the soothing or afflictive effect of the stories we tell is not in whether we select the right words but in our proximity to what the right words might be. This is not some abstraction, but a very real expression of power—the privilege of describing a thing vaguely. incompletely, dishonestly, is inseparable from the privilege of looking away.

Amelia

In time, negation becomes all there is. To walk away from this system is to speak the only language the system will ever understand.

The brilliant business idea was persuading people to expect less.

One builds the muscle by walking away from the most minor things: trivial consumables, the cultural work of monsters, the myriad material fruits grown on stolen ground — and realizes in the doing of these things that there is a wide spectrum of negative resistance. Maybe it's not all that much trouble to avoid ordering coffee and downloading apps and buying chocolate-flavored hummus from companies that abide slaughter. It is this realization that renders negative resistance most terrifying to political and economic power-the simple fact that, having taken these small steps, a person might decide it was no great sacrifice, and might be willing to sacrifice more, demand more. That having called for justice in one instance, one might do it again and again, might call for a just world. 

A chasm has developed, these last few months, one of many but one that cannot be bridged. On one side is a portion of society that fears nothing more than the discontinuation of normalcy. That believes, regardless of what horror each new day brings, what matters most is to live as one had lived before, answering emails and meeting deadlines and maintaining productivity. On the other is that portion which, having witnessed the horror, is simply unable to continue as before. How does one live, hearing the screams, bearing witness to the bodies? How does anything else matter? The fear of some comfort disappearing collides with a different fear—a fear that any society whose functioning demands one ignore carnage of this scale for the sake of artificial normalcy is by definition sociopathic.

But Palestinians do respond overwhelmingly with love. Just as the Indigenous populations of an entire hemisphere, subjected to the largest genocide in human history, responded overwhelmingly with love. Just as the Black communities in much of the United States, a country that quite simply would not exist in its current form were it not for the theft of their labor, responded overwhelmingly with love. Just as every people everywhere deemed acceptable collateral in service of the empire's interest responded overwhelmingly with love. Today I watched footage of a man kissing his son's foot as he buried the body so torn apart by the missiles that the foot was one of the only pieces the father could find in the rubble. Tell me this man doesn't know love, hasn't been made to know it in a way no human being should.

One day the killing will be over, either because the oppressed will have their liberation or because there will be so few left to kill. We will be expected to forget any of it ever happened, to acknowledge it if need be but only in harmless, perfunctory ways. Many of us will, if only as a kind of psychological self-defense. So much lives and dies by the grace of endless forgetting. But so many will remember. We say that, sometimes, when it's our children killed: Remember. And it may seem now like it's someone else's children, but there's no such thing as someone else's children. The problem with fixating on the abyss into which one's opponent has descended while simultaneously digging one's own is that, eventually, it gets too dark to tell the difference.

No, I don't want a candidate who's the embodiment of me. I want a candidate who doesn't bankroll genocide. Failing that, I want the superhuman powers of dissociation that even the Democratic Party's progressive vanguard seem able, in a pinch, to conjure.

The literary critic Northrop Frye once said all art is metaphor, and a metaphor is the grammatical definition of insanity. What art does is meet us at the site of our insanity, our derangement, the plainly irrational mechanics of what it means to be human. There comes from this, then, at least a working definition of a soul: one's capacity to sit with the mysteries of a thing that cannot in any rational way be understood- only felt, only moved through. And sometimes that thing is so grotesque-what we do to one another so grotesque--that sitting with it feels an affront to the notion of art as a conduit of beauty. Still, sit. Sit.

No, there is no terrible thing coming for you in sor future, but know that a terrible thing is happening to we now. You are being asked to kill off a part of you that uld otherwise scream in opposition to injustice. You are being asked to dismantle the machinery of a functioning conscienge Who cares if diplomatic expediency prefers you shrug away the sight of dismembered children? Who cares if great distance from the bloodstained middle allows obliviousness. Forget pity forget even the dead if you must, but at least fight against he theft of your soul.

 It is generally the case that people are most motivated by the worst plausible thing that could happen to them. For some, the worst plausible thing might be the end of their bloodline in a missile strike. Their entire lives turned ding to rubble and all of it preemptively justified in the fighting terrorists who are terrorists by default on account of having been killed. For others, the worst plausible thingis being yelled at.

Language is never sufficient. There is not enough of it to make a true mirror of living. In this way, the soothing or afflictive effect of the stories we tell is not in whether we select the right words but in our proximity to what the right words might be. This is not some abstraction, but a very real expression of power—the privilege of describing a thing vaguely, to make incompletely, dishonestly, is inseparable from the privilege of looking away. 

The afflicted don't need comforting, they need what the comfortable have always had.

Whose nonexistence is necessary to the self- conception of this place, and how uncontrollable is the rage whenever that nonexistence is violated?

Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power. Otherwise, they, like all else, are expendable.

It is a hallmark of failing societies, I've learned, this requirement that one always be in possession of a valid reason to exist.

Lindsay

Of course the Republicans would be worse. What the mainstream Democrat seems incapable of accepting is that, for an even remotely functioning conscious, there exists a point beyond which relative harm can no longer offset absolute evil. For a lot of people, genocide is that point. 

good for a beginner or someone who has superficial knowledge of the zionist project. prose is middling for me -- there are some interesting ideas about language, translation, and worldint, but ultimately feels very touch and go. learnt a couple of new things but really feel like the brevity of the book could be improved. the central theme of the book -- refusal and negation -- after which the concept is named in the title, is only elaborated on in the final chapter. doesnt get too navel-gazey and identity-politicky which i appreciate immensely

Ghee

This is not a good book, I am very disappointed but not surprised given how much it was lauded by literary institutions in America. I don’t know whether I have become a much more sophisticated reader but a political book with no citations is a red flag for me. This book could have used historical and academic references.

First the authors choice to juxtapose his own life to those of the Palestinians in Gaza is an odd and frankly disrespectful one. I don’t know whether the intention was for us to understand how his life as Arab immigrant has been shaped around Western liberalism. I could not get a sense in any of the autobiographical material what these connections are for Palestinians.

The author Omar El Akkad supposed intended readers are probably Euro-American progressives who he is critical for their Palestinian exception politics. It’s no wonder it has won a lot of awards it’s the type of book his intended audience(white and liberal) loves especially institutions that have not done much to call for an end to ongoing genocide. 

I wish people would be braver and engage critically with books like this (read this essay: 

https://proteanmag.com/2025/10/05/the-end-of-palestine-in-english/

For a better critique on the liberal and leftist response to the ongoing genocide read Mohammed El-Kurd’s “

Marion

This is not a good book, I am very disappointed but not surprised given how much it was lauded by literary institutions in America. I don’t know whether I have become a much more sophisticated reader but a political book with no citations is a red flag for me. This book could have used historical and academic references.

First the authors choice to juxtapose his own life to those of the Palestinians in Gaza is an odd and frankly disrespectful one. I don’t know whether the intention was for us to understand how his life as Arab immigrant has been shaped around Western liberalism. I could not get a sense in any of the autobiographical material what these connections are for Palestinians.

The author Omar El Akkad supposed intended readers are probably Euro-American progressives who he is critical for their Palestinian exception politics. It’s no wonder it has won a lot of awards it’s the type of book his intended audience(white and liberal) loves especially institutions that have not done much to call for an end to ongoing genocide. 

I wish people would be braver and engage critically with books like this (read this essay: https://proteanmag.com/2025/10/05/the-end-of-palestine-in-english/) 

For a better critique on the liberal and leftist response to the ongoing genocide read Mohammed El-Kurd’s “Perfect Victims: The politics of appeal”

Daringly honest in times when the worst horrors are silenced.

wow, what a piece of literature… the kind that’ll make you reflective and introspective. made me think about my time as an undergrad freshman, how my professor would say a sociology student will always graduate with anger but also hope. in doing all this research and writing, there must be hope that’ll it do good— that the belief things would change for the better is the driving force. love how the author, throughout his honesty about the reality of the Palestinians, is witness to the showcase of humanity amidst it all. i’m glad that this is my first book of the year and it gave me a lot of things to think about. 

This was a really powerful book (the audiobook was phenomenally read as well) that really puts everything that’s been going on in our world into perspective and makes you question your role in it. 🇵🇸

Sadie Hoffman

omar writes in a way no other author dares to. he does not sugar coat anything- poetic yet unnerving

aemouh

I thought this book was something else. I'm glad it wasn't. It stands in opposition to cold distanced pseudointellectualism that looms large and dangerous. 

I always wish I wasn't good at being comfortable.

Dora Tominic

Disclaimer: this is not a review.

Thank god/fuck for audiobooks. 

I thought this book was something else. I'm glad it wasn't. It stands in opposition to cold distanced pseudointellectualism that looms large and dangerous. 

I always wish I wasn't good at being comfortable.

One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

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