On October 25, 2023—when Israel’s war on Gaza had already claimed the lives of 6,500 Palestinians, including 2,500 children—the Egyptian-Canadian novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad posted on Twitter: “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.”
The post would go on to be viewed more than 10 million times and supply El Akkad with the title of his first work of nonfiction. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is a searing indictment of Western institutional complicity in the most appalling crime of the 21st century, as well as a powerful meditation on the horror, despair, and guilt so many of us have felt watching a genocide unfold on our phone screens for fifteen months.
Earlier this month, I spoke to El Akkad about what is certain to become one of the essential texts of this terrible era.
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Dan Sheehan: I found this book to be profound, and deeply moving, articulation of everything I’ve been feeling over the past fifteen months: the rage, the despair, the sorrow, but also the hope that this terrible injustice will, someday, end. At what point did you know you had to write it? How did it come about?
Omar El Akkad: I think early on in October it became clear to anyone who wasn’t invested in looking away that this was the beginnings of a genocide, and one of the aspects that I ended up dwelling on quite a bit was my role as someone who is actively complicit in that genocide. Quite often I talk about being a pacifist, and about how important non-violence is to me, but by virtue of where my tax dollars are being spent, I’m one of the most violent people on earth.
I was thinking about it in those terms because one of the defining aspects of this horror became how openly complicit our entire way of being was in the killing, which I suppose is quite a naive thing to say because plenty of moments in history have involved active complicity on the part of the world I live in.
But, long story short, in early November I was at the Portland Book Festival when my editor John Freeman came to town. He and I and a couple of other writers were out to dinner that night and I was talking about this idea that the load bearing beams of Western society were sort of falling apart. This notion of equal justice and respect for the law, of international human rights, and so on and so forth. And I think John just got so tired of me rambling on that he called me up a couple of days later and said, “you know, you need to write about this.” I started in early November, and I just didn’t stop. I was writing quite furiously. I’m one of those people who gets, you know, 20 words down a day on average. And this wasn’t that. I was writing quite furiously for months on end, and that’s how that book came to be.
If you open your social media feed and there’s a picture of a young Palestinian child smiling, it’s probably accompanying a post about how that child was just murdered.
DS: You write of the West: “I saw the terrible wrath of the place, saw it obliterate hundreds of thousands of people with names and ethnicity and religion like mine, knew for certain that there were deep, ugly cracks in the bedrock of this thing called ‘the free world.’ And yet I believed the cracks could be fixed, that the thing at the core, whatever it was, was salvageable. Until the fall of 2023. Until the slaughter.”
That was the point of fracture for you, and it was for me, too. Personally, I’m finding it increasingly difficult to live in this country. To be connected in any way to its institutions. To raise my young daughter in what has come to feel like a morally gangrenous place. And I think that goes to what you were saying about our tax dollars—the idea that, even if you espouse the values that you think are consistent with your morality, you are still contributing to this awful war machine. I don’t know if there’s any answer to how one reconciles those two things, but after the fracture point, how do you function with that knowledge, that realization?
OEA: I mean, the short answer is that I don’t. I think that something has fundamentally changed about who I am as a person. Among the many horrible things from the last year and a half is this conditioning, for example, to know that if you open your social media feed and there’s a picture of a young Palestinian child smiling, it’s probably accompanying a post about how that child was just murdered. You can’t do a year and a half of that and come to a place of any kind of equilibrium.
I think about it in almost exactly the same terms you just described. I mean, I think about it in terms of my two young children, trying to explain to them, or not explain to them, this moment that we’re in, and, to be perfectly honest, resorting to a kind of cowardice in which I sort of try to bubble wrap them and not let them know about this horror, because I’m having trouble with the inevitable corollary, which is how do grownups, how do you, let this happen? How did it get to be this way?
I should say that, ironically, this might be the most hopeful book that I’ve ever written, in the sense that as completely and utterly disillusioned as I’ve become with virtually every institutional beam in this country—political, academic, cultural, journalistic—I’ve become so much more inspired by what individuals have been doing. I’ve watched these incredible acts of courage. I’ve watched people risk their livelihoods. I’ve watched young people risk their futures. Folks chaining themselves to the gates of weapons manufacturers. I’m not a particularly courageous person and, like I told you at the beginning of this call, I’ve leeched so much courage from people much braver than I.
That’s the closest thing I have to an answer in terms of trying to find a place in this part of the world, a place that feels so very different to me now than it did a year or two ago. I’m depending heavily on solidarity among individuals, and I’m turning my back on a lot of the institutional stuff, which is probably easier said than done because the institutions have the resources and so on. But yeah, I don’t know what my place is anymore. I’ve been oriented towards this part of the world since I was five years old. And I feel like I’m taking my leave of it in one way or another, even if not physically, but I don’t know where I’m going to. I think, to me, that remains an open question. I’ve never really known my place in the world, but that’s especially true now, in this moment.
I think the book world has been better than almost every other facet of the arts, which is not saying very much given how miserable every other facet of the arts has been.
DS: You’re a novelist as well as a journalist, and the literary world is one in which we’ve seen more movement on the Israel issue than perhaps any other area of the arts. I’m thinking of the 10,000-strong author boycott of complicit Israeli cultural institutions, as well as the boycotts of PEN America, the Giller Prize, etc. It’s been like pulling teeth trying to get these institutions to divest from Israel, but it does seem to finally be happening. Do you think the book world has turned a corner on this issue?
OEA: Certainly. I think the book world has been better than almost every other facet of the arts, which is not saying very much given how miserable every other facet of the arts has been. I’ve been trying to figure out why that is, and I have a bunch of half-baked theories, all of which probably don’t withstand scrutiny, but I was wondering if it maybe had to do with the fact that, if you are a writer, you’re engaged in the act of not looking away. For very long periods of time, you are intensely committed to not looking away from things, and that probably makes it harder be oblivious to this kind of horror. I don’t know if writers on average have less to lose. Most of us are broke. We’re not being invited to the fancy parties anyway.
Regarding the Giller, you’re watching young writers who could really benefit from being on the longlist or the shortlist, whose careers could really benefit from it, taking a stand and saying no. Whereas some of the biggest names in literature, and not just in Canada, have completely kept their mouths shut. The people with the biggest platforms have done such an exceptional job at keeping their heads down.
DS: I think about an institution like the New York Times and its continued status as the world’s de facto paper of record. I think about the leaked internal memo cautioning its reporters against using the word “Palestine”; about the number of its Middle East correspondents who have ties to the IDF and AIPAC; about the refusal to retract “Screams Without Words” or alter the approach to quoting IDF press releases; about Thomas Friedman comparing Arabs to insects. I think about all of that, in the context of this genocide, and I wonder if there’s any hope for some of this country’s most ideologically compromised journalistic institutions, and whether you think we—as both writers and readers—need to be focused on reform or replacement?
OEA: Well, one of the more insidious aspects, one of the more troubling aspects, has been the number of notes I’ve gotten from people within these organizations that express a deep disgust at the overarching orientation of the institution. I was asked to write an op-ed for a fairly major newspaper a few months ago and I said, “listen, I’m gonna save you some time. You’re not gonna run the thing that I’m gonna write.” And the opinions editor was like, “no, no, tell me what you’re going to write,” and I said, “well, I’m gonna call it a genocide and I’m gonna say that Western governments are complicit.” And he was like, “yeah, you’re right.” But then he said something like, “but please know that we’re pushing against it.”
And this I think is where I have the most difficulty, because in moments like this I want to be deeply certain about where I stand. Here I find myself torn between wanting to support the people who are trying to change things from the inside, and having seen overwhelmingly how that quite simply doesn’t work. You don’t end up changing the system, the system ends up changing you. I find myself deeply torn and, in a somewhat grotesque way, given comfort by the reality that, at the end of the day, a lot of the institutions we’re talking about are essentially corporate entities and they are going to be susceptible to pressure.
So, I return to the title of the book. We can go back and look at mainstream media coverage of South African Apartheid and see if any of those stories would fly today and quite simply they wouldn’t. Part of me thinks that if we are able to helm our own institutions and we’re able to make something of our solidarity, such that we’re not reliant on crumbs all the time, those other institutions, the ones that have been around for a very long time, that have the resources and have the cachet, they can be swayed over time. It’s shameful how much time it takes, and it’s quite disgusting how many people have to die before the very, very obvious horror is called what it is, but I’m convinced that they will change one day. I just hope it’s in my lifetime.
You know, the reason I find myself having had such a hard time talking about this is because I’m just so preemptively furious at the moment, many years from now, when we’re gonna get all of those, you know, “Hiroshima”-type stories. The after-the-fact shared grief, the how-could-we-let-this-happen type stuff. I’m just so furious that we’re going to do it again. You know, we’ve got the president of the United States talking about mass ethnic cleansing as though it’s a tourism opportunity and we’re all going to sit around and wait until the taking is done and the killing is done and everything colonialism needed it has gotten. And then we’re all going to feel sad about it afterwards. And I find myself so furious about that all of the time.
I think Joe Biden had a kind of blood lust that feels unique, even by the standards of these political parties. I think he desperately hates Palestinians…
DS: I know what you mean, and there really is no other response to it other than fury. If I could quote you again: “One remarkable difference between the modern Western conservative and their liberal counterpart is that the former will gleefully sign their name onto the side of a bomb while the latter will just sheepishly initial it.”
It’s a brilliant and terrifying line, and it makes me wonder if there’s any hope for the current incarnation of the Democratic Party on the Palestine issue. I look at the total lack of accountability, the sort of deadened reaction to their loss. And then I look at some of the rising stars of the party—people like John Fetterman and Richie Torres. High ranking members who have the same enthusiasm for bringing Arabs to heel by any means necessary that we see from their counterparts across the aisle. I’d like to believe that the horror of Gaza will prompt an absorption of the pro-Palestinian narrative into the larger Democratic platform, even if only for opportunistic reasons rather than humanitarian ones, but I worry that that there won’t even be a push for that. I worry that we’ll see no meaningful change. That no lessons will be learned.
OEA: Yeah, I mean, I couldn’t agree more. I don’t think that, within the leadership of the Democratic Party, they believe they lost the last election. In the sense that I think a greater loss would’ve been having to completely retool the party to come up with a message that wasn’t just diet Republicanism.
I think that for something like what the Democratic Party pretends to be to work, people have to believe that the folks who run it are invested in a mutual liberation. And one of the things that has become apparent over the last year and a half is that no such investment exists. That instead, the only time there’s any kind of shared investment, it’s in terms of mutual benefit, not mutual liberation, and so you end up in this situation where, you know, almost every day I’m watching somebody who proclaims to be a proud liberal posting something about how they can’t wait to see the deportations. “You voted for Trump, now here’s what you get,” sort of thing. And the sheer amount of glee that’s built into that statement lets me know that we were never on the same side. There was never a shared sense of liberation. There was never a shared sense of justice. I was temporarily useful to you in some kind of pragmatic attempt to capture power, and having fucked that up for you, I now deserve everything I’m gonna get.
That’s my overarching view. But one of the difficulties with this particular situation is that I think Joe Biden had a kind of blood lust that feels unique even by the standards of these political parties. I think he desperately hates Palestinians in a way that complicates the issue beyond just the normal kind disinterest that the US political and social and media class have for that part of the world. There was something about watching that man over the last year and a half that felt very ghoulish, and I think that’s going to be the defining aspect of his of his legacy as a result.
DS: It was terrifying, and we had this mantra of response which was, Trump will be worse. Trump will be worse. Trump will be worse. And I think that, ceasefire or no, it’s become quite clear that that is not the case. You could make an argument for “as bad” if you really stretch it, but it’s difficult to imagine any political figure with as much blood lust for Palestinians as Joe Biden has demonstrated. It’s difficult to imagine any politician being willing to write a blank check for so long, even at the cost of his legacy.
I don’t think Trump would have been willing to sacrifice all of that, to humiliate himself like that, for Israel’s bloody crusade. I don’t know if that will be the accepted narrative in the fullness of time. I hope it will be, because that will mean that Trump didn’t greenlight a restarting of the Gazan genocide. But to your point about being chastised for the Democratic Party’s loss by people who were getting fed up of being guilt-tripped by those calling for an end to a genocide, the current party discourse doesn’t inspire much hope because it doesn’t feel like any lessons have really been learned or properly internalized by those who were in a position to to apply them.
OEA: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that it comes down to this notion of what’s a greater loss if you’re the Democratic Party? Is it losing an election to someone like Donald Trump, or is it winning the election but having to change completely what your party stands for as a result? I ended up rewriting parts of this book right up until the very end, and one of the reasons was that so much of the initial seemingly factual information ends up being lies, and you have to sort of adjust accordingly. You begin with the 40 beheaded babies stuff and then you just kind of go from there.
I found myself thinking about this idea of how much is dependent not on what somebody has done, but on what they are believed capable of doing. I think this is applied to Palestinians, specifically, and to Arabs and Middle Easterners, generally. This notion that what you actually do is less important than what you’re seen to be capable of doing. Which has always struck me as, in addition to being an incredibly racist way of viewing the world, particularly interesting in the sense that I don’t know how to think about the difference between what the Republican Party is capable of doing and what the Democratic Party is capable of doing.
I understand that the Democratic administration will happily put a Black Lives Matter sign on the front lawn of the White House, whereas Donald Trump is going to make sure that the end racism sign at the end of the football field isn’t there when he goes to that game. I get all of that stuff. But I feel like I’ve been shown in pretty gruesome detail over the last 15 months that, when push comes to shove, there are very few things that that Republicans are willing to do that, in a pinch, the Democratic Party won’t also acquiesce to. And that’s been a very terrifying thing to contend with.
I can’t tell you if this is a good book or bad book. I don’t know if any of my writing is worth a damn, but the process of writing it has forced me to contend with my own complicity within the empire and how with much being within the empire has shaped me, because my knee jerk reaction has always been dependent on this idea that, no matter what, the Democratic Party is better on every issue. That no matter how awful or grotesque they may be, you should always just pick up the ballot and vote for the person with the D under their name, right? I can’t do that anymore, and that has messed me up quite a bit, both in terms of how I think about being in this part of the world, pragmatically and strategically, but also in terms of having to come to terms with my own cowardice, and my own intellectual and moral laziness. I’d been fed this story that, no matter what, you have to vote Democrat because the alternative is so much worse. Maybe that’s still true, but I can’t commit to it anymore.
I find that my fury is directed more at people who looked away than the people who actively cheered this on.
DS: I agree. And I think that makes it difficult to navigate America at large. I mean, previous to this, I might have naively thought to myself, well, I know this person is a self-proclaimed liberal and a Democrat voter, and so even if they have beliefs that are more centrist or more right-wing than mine, that’s fine, there’s a ceiling to what they’ll endorse. I know that they would never go all-in on X, Y, or Z issue. And now, I really don’t know. Our liberal institutions, authors that we might be on panels with, neighbors that have cringey but well-meaning signs in their front yards—these are people who may have been in favor of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s Middle East policy, or at least who may not have disagreed with it enough to even throw up a social media post objecting to it.
I’m more discomforted by the idea of sitting down next to a person like that then I am, say, somebody out here where I live in Wyoming who doesn’t care about anything except being allowed to hunt wolves, or whatever. And that’s quite destabilizing. How do you stack up somebody who is liberal on a host of social issues but sees all Palestinians as potential terrorists and thinks the bombing should continue, against a nativist Republican who has no interest in foreign conflicts but is anti-gay marriage and anti-abortion? How can you tell me one of those people to somebody that I shouldn’t speak to and the other one is somebody who is on the side of the angels. It has complicated a lot of things in a very uncomfortable way.
OEA: I had a friend who, the day before the election, had posted something about how it was important right now to vote for Harris and then push her on Gaza and push her on climate change afterwards. I’d seen some version of that a million times before, and I’m not trying to throw my friend under the bus or anything like that, but, you know, Trump goes on to win the election and then we’re hanging out a few weeks later and I asked, have you tried pushing her on anything? And he looked at me like I was from outer space. She lost the election. What am I going to push her on? What are you talking about? And I thought to myself, well, she’s in power right now.
I find—and this has been difficult for me to contend with because in every rational way it feels like it shouldn’t be the case—that my fury is directed more at people who looked away than the people who actively cheered this on. And I don’t feel good saying that. That feels quite grotesque to say, but I think part of it has to do with this idea that, especially on Palestine, there is a very emotionally and psychologically calorie intensive effort that has to be done on the part of the mainstream liberal to engage in a kind of dissociation from everything they want to be seen as believing, which is to say, you know, apartheid is wrong, except in this case where it’s good and necessary and must continue. Segregation is wrong, except in this case. I think it puts one in a position that causes a kind of intellectual fracture, and I don’t know that there’s anything new about that, but to see so many people so determined to look away—because otherwise they would have to come to terms with the hollowness of what they claim to believe in, or what they desperately want to be seen as believing in—has been very perspective changing for me.
DS: I’m sure you’ve heard, as I have heard, plenty of people saying, “Why are you calling out Democrats? Why are you only spotlighting the liberal media’s failures? Why are you showing us clips of Dana Bash at CNN and not an anchor at Fox News?” And it always seems like the answer to these questions should be obvious: that there is no hope or expectation for a side that is so naked about its intentions. You write about this beautifully in the book—the idea that there’s an almost refreshing honesty to the conservative media platform on this issue which at least allows you to know where you stand, and so you don’t have to waste energy engaging. The effort to point out the hypocrisies and the silences of liberal friends, and ostensibly liberal institutions, however, is worthwhile because there’s still a faint hope that you can change them. If not through persuasion, then through shame. And when that might be the difference between, at the highest level, a higher or a lower body count halfway around the world, it feels like the only fight worth fighting.
OEA: Yeah, I mean, I’ve been trying to convince myself precisely that for a long time now. This idea that, if I want to be cold and pragmatic about it, one of the reasons I’m engaged in this is because I think that there is room for something better than this. The hope that, if call yourself a liberal, if you—on every other issue—have at least a passing concern for human suffering, then I can make the case to you that these aren’t some far away people whose liberation is entirely irrelevant to yours. I can’t make that case to someone who’s an outright fascist.
On top of everything else, the thing that they, the outright fascists, want to happen is currently happening. Whereas, you know, when a Democratic spokesperson gets up to the podium and talks about the desire for a lasting peace and respect for all people…Maybe it’s naive on my part, but there is a part of me, just a basic human part, that wants to believe there’s some element of sincerity behind those statements. And so that’s sort of driving how I think about this. But you know, after a while, you get pretty sick of being proven wrong over and over again.
DS: You write beautifully about your origins, your father’s experiences after leaving Egypt, your conflicted feelings about living in the West, and your struggle with how best to articulate all of this to your young, North American-born children. Was there a catharsis in the writing of these sections, or was it a painful process?
OEA: I think a lot of the book ended up being a meditation on the ways in which I have failed to be so many of the things that I believe myself to be, and that was one of the places where there was a kind of intersection with my upbringing and my children’s upbringing. When you’ve had the kind of life I have had, where you’ve been a guest on someone else’s land since you were five years old, there’s always this tendency to not want to have the kind of distance between you and your children that you had with your parents. And, of course, I do have something like that now. I don’t know if there was something cathartic about the writing of this, but there was something interrogative. I had no choice but to sit with these things that I never thought myself to be but clearly am.
Like I said earlier, I don’t know if this is a good book or even a worthwhile book. I don’t think it’s going to be remembered, but if it is remembered, I think it’ll be remembered as one of the tamest of its kind. It is, however, impossible to write a book like this and not stare down all of the intellectual and moral shortcuts that you’ve been allowed to take as a result of living in the heart of the empire, as a result of making yourself acceptable to the empire. One of the parts that I ended up rewriting quite a bit had to do with this idea of armed resistance and violence because, again, I go back to this notion of being a fairly committed pacifist, but it’s not enough to say that, because then you have to ask yourself, Okay, if I’m this great pacifist, how does that relate to my right to tell anyone how to resist their occupation?
I have no right to do that. No right at all. And so the closest thing to catharsis that came with the writing of this book was being forced to sit with the contradictions in my own interpretation of myself. I don’t know if I’ve resolved any of those, but being forced to sit with them has changed me as a person almost as much as the last year and a half has.
