One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, Omar El Akkad, McClelland & Stewart, 2025.

Other work mentioned:
Brown, Kamal Al-Solaylee, 2016.

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is a briskly written, urgent indictment of the Western nations complicit in the ongoing genocide of Palestinians, chiefly the United States though Canada and others are mentioned. In the book, Omar El Akkad eviscerates their disproportionality in upholding freedom, democracy, international law and human rights, by their unequivocal support of Israel, a religious ethnostate that uses Western monetary, political, and military support to deny those very same rights to Palestinians.

The “everyone” of his title refers to all Westerners, but specifically to Western liberals. He correctly identifies them as both the most noisily zealous about democratic values, and also the most hypocritically inconsistent in applying them. Who deserves them and who doesn’t and for what reasons often a function of some wavy-handed word salad involving notions of “civilization” and “barbarity”; concepts dissected of actual meaning when they were first trotted out during the original periods of colonial parasitism of Brown people and lands, from which the current imperial order was spawned.

The provocative title comes from a viral tweet posted at the beginning of the genocide, and as El Akkad has stated in interviews, was an editorial choice made after the book was written. A short while into the text, it’s clear that the scope of the book extends well beyond the title, into El Akkad’s personal experience living in North America, powerfully connecting to his focus on present-day events. It’s this memoiristic position, and especially his experiences reporting on Guantanamo Bay, Afghanistan, and the investigation of the Toronto 18 that ground what is a fulsome and sharp critique of empire.

It is also very personally his ‘account of an ending’:

‘…the moment millions of people looked at the West, the rules-based order, the shell of modern liberalism and the capitalistic thing it serves, and said: I want nothing to do with this.’

One of the tent pegs of empire scrutinized here is the field of journalism in which El Akkad’s career as a writer began. He writes ‘…journalism at its core is one of the most activist endeavors there is’, and then expresses his dismay at the contradictions inherent in a field that rewards journalists for public service, while preventing them from calling ‘for justice…[e]xcept when they can.’

When they can is when the aims of empire align with them doing so, hence the full throated cheering of Ukrainian resistance to Russia, versus the silence of Western media to the relentless targeting of Palestinian journalists by Israeli forces. El Akkad mentions some of the language—the passive voice never so tortured—used by the Western media to deliberately obscure the gruesome facts of an ongoing slaughter of helpless civilians, most of them children. ‘What good are words severed from anything real?’ he asks.

El Akkad references his family’s departure from Egypt in the 1980s, his upbringing in Qatar, followed by higher education and work as a journalist in Canada, and his current residence and citizenship in the United States. His experiences and his family’s reasons for leaving the Middle East are resonant and akin to the stories of other Arabs in North America and the West. Leaving your home country only happens when you’re left without a choice, when the safety of your family and the ability to pursue a peaceful existence come under threat. When the price of staying is higher than the price of leaving, but as an immigrant a price is always paid, regardless.

For Arabs living in the West during the last year and a half or so, this price has been the obliteration of belief that the part of the world we find ourselves living in holds any pretence to being judged by the same standard that it applies to other nations. Many of us have lived uncomfortably with this hypocrisy for years, but the masks have been so completely ripped off—the quiet parts said aloud, the long standing racism and ethnocentrism passing for foreign policy made grotesquely evident, the brutality and slaughter committed so unbelievably without shame—there can be no going back to a state of suspended disbelief. There is no lesser evil anywhere in this scenario.

More than once in the book, El Akkad mentions imagery of the genocide’s carnage, and an inability to look away; one of the chapters of the book is entitled Witness. To remain aware of this horror is to live untenably: between a feeling that you cannot go on, and the feeling that you absolutely must at the very least act as a witness holding the space of what you’ve seen. Because it feels like a duty, and an obligation—in the midst of your utter helplessness, and feelings of uselessness—to witness, to take in enough that you will never forget. As if your remembering will counterbalance the intentional forgetting of the West, whose entire mission is to forget, the better to rewrite this later and erase its culpability.

There is a discomfort that runs throughout the entirety of this book, and to a Western-born-or-located person of Arab ethnicity, it’s familiar. Our safety, our ability to be tolerated by the West, is contingent on our complicity, our silence, and our willingness to abide the excesses of empire; we are all aware of the internment of Japanese Americans and Canadians during WWII, how their mere presence invited suspicion. How being born in the United States or Canada didn’t allow them to evade that suspicion, that the fact of their skin colour and visible ethnicity made them enemies, as it still applies to anyone who isn’t White. Additionally, the internal conflict for someone Arab who is Western-born comes from being raised bathed in the voice of empire, a royal ‘we’ that you eventually realize doesn’t include you or ‘your kind’, regardless of birthplace. As El Akkad writes:

‘It’s no use, in the end, to scream again and again at the cold, cocooned center of power: I need you, just this once, to be the thing you pretend to be.’

A serendipitous resonance arose for me as I was reading both El Akkad’s book and one published in 2016 by a former colleague of his, Kamal Al-Solaylee, at one time a theatre critic for the Globe and Mail. In One Day, El Akkad mentions that the both of them were initially roped in to the newspaper’s investigation of the Toronto 18—the only two employees ‘at the time who had any personal experience with Islam, the Middle East, or generally any facet of the identities of the accused.’

In Brown, Al-Solaylee examines the many ways in which Brown skin affects the fate of various constituencies worldwide, from Filipinos to Sri Lankans, and Arabs like himself. He acknowledges that as a Muslim man of Arab ethnicity, he's experienced relatively little but not zero bigotry, a reality that doesn't match others' in Canada, and he touches on the kind of racist smears that Arabs in Canada will have experienced for expressing certain views especially against Israel. At a point near the end, he writes:

‘…in writing about Canada, I’m writing about my home, my self, my skin, my now and tomorrow. I have nowhere else to go, no other place to run to…’

This passage hit me as it expressed the essential schism many of us have carried internally over the past year and a half: when your parents have left nations that openly suppress free speech, the dissonance of Western condemnation for the opinion that genocide is unacceptable feels like a thunderclap to the head. El Akkad has mentioned in interviews that, during the last year and a half, he considered for the first time whether leaving the West might be an option. But as he writes, there are no Arab nations anyone could leave to that offer something different; their support of Palestine always provisional on never having to do much more than utter empty platitudes, and their adherence to democratic rights and freedoms less than zero. And, pragmatically as an immigrant 'I live here because it will always be safer to live on the launching side of the missiles. I live here because I am afraid.'

El Akkad’s book is a necessary and vibrant act of witnessing. It is also a worthwhile excoriation of the justifications for the unmitigated advance of empire—whether of the state or of industry, in many ways inextricably intertwined—to raze lands and people, everything fodder for its maw. When the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement is referred to as “economic terrorism”—its history conveniently forgotten as the only means by which apartheid South Africa was persuaded to give Black South Africans their freedom and the franchise—the means and aims of empire as both economic and political become crystal clear.

El Akkad writes of knowing his tax dollars are funding the genocide with a sense of guilt and culpability, as if it’s only just occurred to him that the inhabitants of an empire are considered responsible for its excesses. But empire has us trapped: if this is all you’ve known—and for El Akkad, it’s the place he’s built his adult life and family—and there’s nowhere to go, what’s the alternative?

The only alternative, as he quotes the Palestinian poet Rasha Abdulhadi is

‘wherever you are, whatever sand you can throw on the gears of genocide, do it now. If it’s a handful, throw it. If it’s a fingernail full, scrape it out and throw. Get in the way however you can.’

El Akkad spends a good portion of the book detailing the ways that people in the West have done just that: writers and activists pushing the Giller Prize committee to abandon Scotiabank as a sponsor; university students occupying their schools to demand divestment from Israel; Jewish organizations and other groups protesting shipments of arms to Israel, among other acts of conscience. He correctly associates these actions to the capacity within people to love, and it is this love which provides the light of hope within the book.

As a journalist and writer, El Akkad examines the fungibility of words in the face of unmitigated slaughter, and at times he seems to be utterly defeated by the futility of written expression. In the book and in interviews, he’s discounted his writing of this book as ‘less than nothing.’ No one believes that after over a year of protests and all manner of activism—millions of people worldwide out on the streets for weeks, months, a year—one book is going to stop a genocide.

But to put these things down, to make a record of it, is significant. Omar El Akkad has succeeded here in expressing so much heartbreak in the most heartfelt and eloquent of ways. It is a handful of sand that makes the rest of us feel that our handfuls of sand matter, however small. Even as a thimble of sand, it registers, and I suspect will resonate into the future as a vital and timeless account.