Depending on where you live in the world and what your principles are, the past year and a half has either been business as usual or one of the most devastating periods of your life. Israel’s relentless massacre in Gaza, which began in October 2023, was initially explained as a necessity in order to defend the settler state from the militant political group Hamas—but has continued long past the point when that excuse could hold water. It has resulted in the incomprehensible destruction of an already-choked region: the displacement of almost two million, the deaths of nearly 50,000—a number likely to increase as more bodies are pulled from the rubble—and the destruction of nine out of ten housing units. There have been effects throughout the region, with outbreaks of settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank and Israeli incursions into Lebanon and Syria.
This crisis, which human rights experts have described as a genocide, has also resulted in a moment of reckoning for the West. Governments in North America and Europe have been passionately signaling principles of democracy and liberalism with one hand, and sending weapons and funds to advance Israel’s brutal military aims with the other. The Biden administration publicly stressed the need to alleviate human suffering in Gaza, while continuing to be Israel’s top supplier of military aid. This contradiction has long been a defining part of Western identity. It is also a contradiction that is disguised very skillfully; the cultural and political machines working together to uphold the illusion that the principles espoused by Western governments are the same principles that guide their conduct. After sixteen months of watching a genocide happen in real time—with more-or-less total support from Western governments, despite the euphemisms and justifications skillfully woven by headlines and political speeches—the contradiction is becoming harder to ignore. At least for those compelled to raise their eyes and look.
It’s this moment of reckoning that’s the subject of Omar El Akkad’s latest book, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (McClelland & Stewart). The work of El Akkad has long been concerned with the displacement and violence inflicted in the name of Western ideals. In his 2017 debut novel, American War, the conditions of terror and instability that define many of the places scarred by Western intervention are grafted onto an imagined future United States. His follow-up, the 2021 novel What Strange Paradise, demonstrates the lengths of social and emotional work that the West puts into denying the humanity of refugees.
With his first non-fiction book, El Akkad stays with this thematic focus, but switches gears in his approach. There is no elaborately unfolding allegory, nor any heart-wrenching depictions of human relationships amid tragedy; there is only a directness. In concise, steady prose over ten sections, El Akkad systematically picks apart the illusion of a West that is concerned with morals or human rights, and reveals the blood-soaked machine that lurks behind its political and cultural institutions. Through descriptions of growing up in the Middle East and North America, his work as a journalist reporting on Guantanamo Bay and the NATO invasion of Afghanistan, and watching the current genocide unfurl in Palestine, El Akkad presents an image of a West that refuses to embody the ideals it drapes itself in.
Omar El Akkad spoke with me about his new book One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, what it means to critique Western ideals from within the West, dissecting one’s own complicity, and the acts of courage and solidarity that this period of reckoning has brought about.
Nour Abi-Nakhoul: Throughout the book, you intersperse discussions of the genocide in Gaza and the political ramifications in the West with personal scenes, particularly of your upbringing, your career, and your family. What do you think bringing these things together does for the subject?
Omar El Akkad: A few years ago, I wrote this novel called American War. A lot of that novel was very much inspired by the ongoing occupation of Palestine. The problem was the word “American” in the title, and my superimposition of another people's story onto the heart of the empire. Either I did it quite badly or it was just not received that way, because overwhelmingly that book is read as an American book, as a literal attempt to predict what a second civil war would look like. I think something of the opposite is likely to happen here.
I don't think I'd have written this book if not for the slaughter of the last [sixteen] months, but in my mind, it is primarily a book about the West at an institutional level, and the glaring disconnect between what it pretends to be and what it is in practice. There was no way for me to write that kind of book and not engage with how deeply complicit I am in all of that, which meant taking apart the moments in my life in which I began to orient myself toward this part of the world. There's a reason I sound the way I do. There's a reason why, if I called you up and said my name was John Smith, you'd probably believe me. I'm culturally fluent in this part of the world.
One of the things that has happened over the last year and a half is that I've parted ways with the desire to be that person. And I have no idea what I'm headed toward. But none of this seemed possible to talk about without talking about my life. All that said, I think there's a different version of this book—and maybe a much better version of this book—that either focused exclusively on [my personal trajectory], or ignored it entirely. It’s just not the book I wrote.
This book and American War explore very similar themes—global instability, the cruelty and corruption of the West, dehumanization, war, massacres—but in different genres. Have you found that working in nonfiction has been more limiting, or has it enabled you to do things that you couldn't otherwise with fiction?
It's forced me to use a different set of tools. To be perfectly honest, the things I can hide behind in fiction are more readily available to me. If you had read the first draft of American War, I spent a lot of time talking about what the sky is doing at any given moment. It is some purple, purple prose. Some of those defense mechanisms are taken away from me here, which exposes the weakness or the limits of the talent of the writer. It also forced me into a place where I have to speak with slightly more clarity than I otherwise would.
You worked as a journalist for a decade—has that experience helped you write this book?
It has, both in terms of the experiences that I'm able to draw on as well as in understanding how the sausage is made. A significant part of this book is about how we are in a situation where, for example, an anchor on TV can talk about “a bullet finding its way into a van and colliding with a four-year-old young lady.” What the fuck does that sentence mean? [My experience has served me in] understanding the mechanics of an editorial room where that would be acceptable.
Practically every day for the past sixteen months there’s been a story about a new development in the situation in Palestine. How did you navigate writing a book on a topic that's changing so rapidly?
I was rewriting this book up until the publisher had to take it out of my hands, essentially. I was recording the audiobook in December and still finding things I wanted to change, which was not making the publisher happy. If left to my own devices, I would continue rewriting. That's the nature of a book like this. Two things necessitated most of that rewriting. The first was that a lot of the things that were presented to me as facts ended up being complete bullshit. And so, your natural tendency to believe that everyone is operating in good faith takes a real beating.
But there was also the form [of rewriting] that was related to my complicity in the things I was indicting. For example, I can sit here and tell you how much of a pacifist I am, and how much I'm committed to nonviolence, and how all violence is wrong. But, A: that gives me no right to tell anybody how to resist their occupation. And, B: by virtue of how my tax dollars are spent, I'm one of the most violent people on earth. I'm killing those kids. And so, the process of trying to contend with that, or at the very least acknowledge it, necessitated more rounds of thought. And I don't think there's a ceiling on that. The book has to come out into the world, and so I have to stop writing at some point.
Have you felt like that about your last two books as well, that there's an endless way that it can unwind and you have to put a barrier on it at some point?
Yes, but in a much more craft-based sense for the two novels. I could have kept trying to make those sentences prettier, or to add depth to a character. But at some point, you realize you're getting diminishing returns. This wasn't that: this was something far more existential to the nature of the work.
Do you think the current ceasefire between Gaza and Israel, which took effect on January 19, changes anything for the release of the book? Would you have altered anything if you had known about the ceasefire beforehand?
No, both because I don't consider this an actual ceasefire—I don't think it's a ceasefire when one side gets to murder indiscriminately while never being held to account for it [Note: Gaza’s Ministry of Health has reported that Israel has continued to kill people in Gaza throughout the ceasefire]—but also because a lot of the things I talk about in this book are deliberate attempts to challenge a default narrative that considers certain grotesque interpretations of reality as a given. Like, for example, this notion that a “ceasefire” is when only one side gets to kill with impunity. And these things have been in place long before the active part of this genocide.
I grew up with a lot of Palestinian friends in Qatar and we went on a school trip once. We took a series of flights, heading over to Switzerland. And two of those kids were flying on, not even Palestinian passports, obviously, but on Palestinian travel authorization papers. By the end of the first flight, we realized that these people would be taken into secondary every single time. We'd all have to sit there and wait, and they were going to be treated as a lesser class of human being. I'm not telling you anything you haven't heard before, but what sticks in my mind is that by the second flight, all of us had taken it as perfectly normal. We weren't asking questions about it anymore. That was just how it was.
So much of this book is trying—possibly failing, but trying—to say no, this shouldn't be the default narrative. In this respect, a book that otherwise would be incredibly susceptible to the next piece of news that comes out tomorrow is slightly less susceptible to it.
The book talks a lot about a break from Western ideals, but it's also written from within the West, and ostensibly for other citizens of the West. How did you navigate this tension?
I’ve thought about this a lot, and that doesn’t mean that I’m going to give you a particularly satisfactory answer. I don't think this book is going to be remembered, but if it is, I think it's going to be remembered as one of the tamest of its kind. But I do think that my skill set that I’ve developed [through my relationship with the West] serves me well in talking to a particular kind of audience, an audience that is important by virtue of what its purchasing power is. What I mean is that if you want to talk about the Wu-Tang Clan or Arrested Development or anything in-between, I know how to do that. And I sound the way I do, and I'm not the “scary foreign guy.”
All of these things that I've developed feel so hollow now, but if they are useful to get somebody who has way more political or social purchasing power than I do to change their mind, then it’s worth it. If a white progressive in Minnesota reads this book and it causes them to change their view, or start to give a shit about issues that they previously did not think about at all, that means something. And that's enough. Even if I have no idea what it is I'm headed toward, even if I feel more unanchored than I ever have.
Were you thinking about these audience-based considerations while writing, or are they rather things you're seeing in retrospect?
It came to me after the fact, when the book started to percolate out into the world. Early on, there were reactions that led me to believe that the way I had written it might have a chance of speaking to people who otherwise have the privilege of looking away from all of this. That's not a reflection of the quality of the book, and in fact might be a reflection of its weakness in the long run, that it caters to this population in the first place. But in hindsight this isn’t particularly surprising given the life I've led; of course I'm going to speak this language, of course I'm part of this.
Earlier you mentioned this book being perhaps remembered as one of the tamest of its kind. What exactly do you mean by that?
I was referencing my own cowardice more than anything else. As much as I talk about this book as an indictment of the West's institutional load-bearing beams, even framing it that way makes them the spotlight at a time when they shouldn't be the spotlight; when the spotlight should be the human beings who've been resisting occupation for the better part of a century, and who are now resisting an active genocide. My own complicity in all of this, I think, makes it a tamer book than it otherwise would have been.
I find myself going to the same modes of argument as somebody who has marinated in the empire would make: a notion like, “those bad things are happening over there, but if you don't oppose them now, they might happen to white Westerners one day.” The implication being that the people that this is happening to now aren't worth your time or concern, but you better be careful because this might happen to “real people” one day. To confront that and try to shed yourself of it, in real time, on the page takes the bite out of a book like this. These aren't things I'm particularly proud of, but they're inevitable in this kind of book.
Any discussion of Palestine that is critical of Israel and the West can inspire aggressive backlash. Have you been nervous about negative reactions to the book?
The only thing I'm nervous about is whether this affects the safety of my family. I don't give a shit if somebody yells at me on Twitter. I was a journalist in the years where they kept the comment section open. I know negative reviews are coming—I strongly suspect there's going to be such a piece in the Atlantic, which I can write myself at this point—I don't mind any of that. But on top of that there's a second layer; there's been legitimate criticism of this book from the left, and that's worth listening to.
On the flip side, as much as I'm a deeply insecure person and crave the respect of people I admire, I also find that I quite enjoy the antagonism of people I don't admire. I don't mind if a guy who has horrible opinions doesn't like this book, and narratively speaking, this is a book that throws a lot of punches. It's only fair that people throw punches back.
Throughout the book there’s a lot of discussion of how language is weaponized and manipulated by Western states and media to morph and disguise reality, which you describe as an “unmaking of meaning.” Do you think there is power to be found in speaking truthfully?
I think there is power, but I think there's also an obligation. If you're going to call yourself a writer, you're obligated to give a shit about the specificity of language, about using a word for its intended meaning, or rather, not using a word to hide its meaning. I've seen this so often, particularly over the last [sixteen] months, but well before then.
There's an entire section of this book where I talk about the idea that, for example, there were no “prisoners” in Guantanamo Bay, there were only “detainees,” because detainees can be held forever. That there’s “collateral damage,” instead of “whoops, we bombed a wedding party.” All of that is vital to interrogate because the physical layer of violence can't exist in a vacuum, it needs linguistic violence and euphemistic violence to hold it up.
One of the simultaneously most disheartening and inspiring things I've seen in my little corner of the world over the last year and a half has been how many writers who have so much to lose standing up and calling a thing what it is, and how many writers who have nothing to lose, who have all the cachet in the world, keeping their heads down and saying nothing at all. That's been a very clarifying thing about the industry I'm in. I think everyone over the last [sixteen] months has shown you who they really are, myself included, and language has been the medium through which most of us have done that, whether we want to or not.
In the announcements of this book, you've said that you “don’t know how to do anything but write.” I was wondering whether you mean that writing is the skill that you can bring to this work, or rather that writing is a compulsion that you can't break from no matter its usefulness? There seem to be both of those going on in that statement.
I think it's true on both counts. As horrific as this period has been, there is a strange and terrible clarity that comes when you know that you're in a situation so grotesque that everything you do matters: from the most courageous acts of people chaining themselves to the gates of weapons manufacturers and those travelling to conduct surgery in the middle of an obliteration campaign, all the way to the stupid shit I do, where I write and hope that somebody reads it and changes their mind. All of it matters, and almost as an act of self-insolation, I go to the thing that I know how to do, to the field in which I'm most comfortable.
I feel that there are two threads running through this book: One in which we are at a crisis point that represents a complete break with the lie of the Western rules-based order, and the other in which this will pass, and things will go back to normal. People will put their heads down, and there won't be any grand reckoning. How do these threads fit together for you?
I think they function along the axis of privilege. I was talking to a friend of mine a few years ago, toward the end of the [first] Trump administration, about all of the horrible things that had happened, and he said very matter-of-factly “I'm kind of surprised at how little any of this affected me.” I don't think he was even being malicious; he's just a straight white guy who's making six figures. So, they seem to be entirely contradictory modes of forecast, but I don't think they are. Depending on where you exist along the axis of privilege, you will either have no choice but to understand that when push comes to shove, there is no such thing as international human rights law or equal rights and equal justice—or you will have the privilege to continue believing in these things because it never applied to you in the first place.
Do you have hope that this reckoning that some people are having will impact the West’s mask of a rules-based order?
This is a very weird thing to say given how much of a stone-cold bummer this book is, and my writing in general is, but I do think of it as a hopeful book. As much as I've become so cynical about the political, academic, and cultural institutions of the West, I've been so inspired by what people are willing to do individually and in community. I've seen immense acts of courage, and I've leeched courage from these people because I'm not a particularly courageous human being to begin with.
I think something will change, not because the fascists are going to become any less fascist, but the people pretending to be progressive and liberal can no longer count on being rewarded for simply wearing the costume. If they don't behave in keeping with those words, they will be punished for it. One of the most monumental things that happened over the last few months was that a democratic administration lost an election, in large part because people were telling them to stop a genocide and they simply chose to believe that none of that was happening, and they lost to one of the worst human beings ever to run for president. The consequences feel new. Maybe I'm being overly hopeful, but I'm seeing acts of solidarity that I can't help but think are going to ripple outward, from the lowest level all the way up.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
