Name: One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
Rating: 4.176470588235294 (34 reviews)
ISBN: 9780771021787

Omar El Akkad

One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

Amelia

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. 

Karolina

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. 

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

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.

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

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

 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.

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.

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, 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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

The brilliant business idea was persuading people to expect less.

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

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.

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.

What good are words, severed from anything real?

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

Ritik Sahni

Omar El Akkad takes us through his experience of existing at the border of the empire. He is at the same time a citizen of the empire and an alien, he recognizes the dreams of those of the empire and the reality of life inside the empire, itself quite broken, and the plight of those outside the empire, being made to suffer the empire to exist. The war between Hamas and Israel, but more than that, the genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza, is the other centerpiece of the book. The way the western liberal world sees it, ignores it, euphemizes it, even condemns it while supporting Israel or doing nothing - and there is a world of things that could be done - to stop them is in continuity with the world order they made and maintain.

“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.”

By entwining these two threads the author gives the reader a place to feel kinship with him and accomplish some kind of catharsis. At the very least, one will feel one's outrage and impotence understood, as if life actually could make sense, as if the horror one feels at what is happening in Gaza is not a matter of contention, it is obvious and, if anything, too little, too inconsequential. At the same time, the reader is reminded of many other hypocritical parts of what is usually considered the liberal democratic world, from the point of view of those who are never entirely of such world, be it because of skin tone or accent, religion or birthplace, we ignore the "less equal of the equals" with such ease one might suspect all those people quoting Orwell never actually read his work.

“To be accused of speaking too loudly about one injustice but not others by someone who doesn’t care about any of them is to be told, simply, to keep quiet.”

This is not, by the way, a good introduction to the story of Palestine or of Israel, the story of colonialism or regional conflict, the history of how this came to be. Some people may find this off-putting, because the regional and colonial history are more than background to this moment, both in what is happening there and in how leaders all over the world are (not) reacting. I don't. This is not an essay on how this came to be. This is, on the other hand, an essay on how the genocide that is happening in Gaza right now has to be recognized, condemned and stopped, no matter what our opinion on regional matters and previous events might be. It is an indictment of the so called world order as it illustrates how this moment of pretense ignorance and feigned disconnection is not a glitch but an integral part of life under and with neoliberal power.

One can support different solutions to the Palestine-Israel conflict in general, condemn the attack, murder and kidnapping of Israel civilians by Hamas and condemn the razing of Gaza and the systematic murder of it's citizens and demand that our representatives not only state that condemnation but act consequentially to it, paralysing commercial relationship and withdrawing military support to those who are willfully doing it.

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

André Nóbrega

Omar El Akkad takes us through his experience of existing at the border of the empire. He is at the same time a citizen of the empire and an alien, he recognizes the dreams of those of the empire and the reality of life inside the empire, itself quite broken, and the plight of those outside the empire, being made to suffer the empire to exist. The war between Hamas and Israel, but more than that, the genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza, is the other centerpiece of the book. The way the western liberal world sees it, ignores it, euphemizes it, even condemns it while supporting Israel or doing nothing - and there is a world of things that could be done - to stop them is in continuity with the world order they made and maintain.

“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.”

By entwining these two threads the author gives the reader a place to feel kinship with him and accomplish some kind of catharsis. At the very least, one will feel one's outrage and impotence understood, as if life actually could make sense, as if the horror one feels at what is happening in Gaza is not a matter of contention, it is obvious and, if anything, too little, too inconsequential. At the same time, the reader is reminded of many other hypocritical parts of what is usually considered the liberal democratic world, from the point of view of those who are never entirely of such world, be it because of skin tone or accent, religion or birthplace, we ignore the "less equal of the equals" with such ease one might suspect all those people quoting Orwell never actually read his work.

“To be accused of speaking too loudly about one injustice but not others by someone who doesn’t care about any of them is to be told, simply, to keep quiet.”

This is not, by the way, a good introduction to the story of Palestine or of Israel, the story of colonialism or regional conflict, the history of how this came to be. Some people may find this off-putting, because the regional and colonial history are more than background to this moment, both in what is happening there and in how leaders all over the world are (not) reacting. I don't. This is not an essay on how this came to be. This is, on the other hand, an essay on how the genocide that is happening in Gaza right now has to be recognized, condemned and stopped, no matter what our opinion on regional matters and previous events might be. It is an indictment of the so called world order as it illustrates how this moment of pretense ignorance and feigned disconnection is not a glitch but an integral part of life under and with neoliberal power.
One can support different solutions to the Palestine-Israel conflict in general, condemn the attack, murder and kidnapping of Israel civilians by Hamas and condemn the razing of Gaza and the systematic murder of it's citizens and demand that our representatives not only state that condemnation but act consequentially to it, paralysing commercial relationship and withdrawing military support to those who are willfully doing it.

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

From award-winning novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad comes a powerful reckoning with what it means to live in the heart of an empire that doesn’t consider you fully human. On October 25th, 2023, after just three weeks of the bombardment of Gaza, Omar El Akkad put out a tweet: “One day, when it's safe, when there's no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it's too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.” This tweet was viewed more than ten million times. One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This chronicles the deep fracture that has occurred for Black, brown, Indigenous Americans, as well as the upcoming generation, many of whom had clung to a thread of faith in Western ideals, in the idea that their countries, or the countries of their adoption, actually attempted to live up to the values they espouse. This book is a reckoning with what it means to live in the West, and what it means to live in a world run by a small group of countries—America, the UK, France, and Germany. It will be The Fire Next Time for a generation that understands we're undergoing a shift in the so-called “rules-based order,” a generation that understands the West can no longer be trusted to police and guide the world, or its own cities and campuses. It draws on intimate details of Omar's own story as an emigrant who grew up believing in the Western project, who was catapulted into journalism by the rupture of 9/11. This book is El Akkad's heartsick breakup letter with the West. It is a breakup we are watching all over the United States, on college campuses, on city streets, and the consequences of this rupture will be felt by all of us. His book is for all the people who want something better than what the West has served up. This is the book for our time.

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

"turning one's eyes from the horror strengthens that particular muscle, readies it to ignore even greater horror to come."

I think most of the world's eyes, including mine, are trained far too strongly towards self-interest, and it'll be too little and too late.

c0up

"turning one's eyes from the horror strengthens that particular muscle, readies it to ignore even greater horror to come."

I guess this is a rallying cry to some? 

I think most of the world's eyes, including mine, are trained far too strongly towards self-interest, and it'll be too little and too late.

The author raises points and points reflections that are extremely important and that leave you reflecting on the state of the world.

Sadly this was the book I was looking forward to reading the most this year, but for some reason it was slightly disappointing. Still not sure why, but something about it is not entirely clicking for me. 

Nonetheless, he makes some important arguments. 

Denisse Garcia Ramírez 

The author raises points and points reflections that are extremely important and that leave you reflecting on the state of the world.

Sadly this was the book I was looking forward to reading the most this year, but for some reason it was slightly disappointing. Still not sure why, but something about it is not entirely clicking for me. 

Nonetheless, he makes some important arguments. 

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.

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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