One Day, Everyone Will Be Against This
Author: Omar El Akkad
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Pages: 187

Purchased from: Octopus Books – 116 3rd Avenue Ottawa, Ontario (Purchased Online)
Paid: $36.00 CAD

Rating: ★★★★★ (5/5)

“A woman’s leg amputated, without anesthesia, the surgery is conducted on a kitchen table. A boy holding his father’s shoe, screaming. A girl whose jaw has been torn off. A child, still in diapers, pulled out of the tents after the firebombing, his head severed from his body.

Is there a distance great enough, to be free of this? To be made clean?”

At its heart, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always been Against This is a brilliant and well-needed critique of Western imperialism and the hypocrisy that underpins it. El Akkad grounds that critique in the blood reality endured by Palestinians in Gaza during the on-going Gaza genocide; exposing the gulf between the self-proclaimed moral high-grounds of liberal democracies and the violence they enable, encourage, excuse, and ignore.

What lifts this book beyond political commentary is Omar’s remarkable style of prose. Every sentence feel carefully wrought, lyrical without sacrificing urgency. More than once, I had to put the book down to simply breathe or collect my emotions – not because of the graphic descriptions alone, but because of the relentless moral clarity and fury with which El Akkad confronts the reader. This is very much a piece of political non-fiction that will challenge your comforts. Intermixed with observations from his own experiences as a journalist and as a newly-arrived Egyptian immigrant to Canada, it is a well-crafted piece of introspective writing examining his work reporting on conflicts and political violence as well as immigrant who left Egypt as a child believing in the promises of Western liberal democracy as well as the contradictions of the societies that claim to stand for universal human rights. This is the testimony of someone whose faith in those ideals have been profoundly shaken.

There is a deep-set anger on every page, but it is never performative. It is grief transformed into skillful prose, outrage rooted in evidence, and a burning human rage that has been earned through witnessing the collapse of the values that Western democracies are always so ready to proclaim and protect. El Akkad refuses to succumb to cynicism and false neutrality. Instead, he offers an uncompromising moral witness to a world in which human rights are treated as transactional or selective, and history is rewritten only after the powerful have moved on.

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always been Against This is not simply a book about Gaza and the Palestinian genocide. It is a bold book about empire, memory, complicity, and the stories that societies tell themselves to justify continued injustice. It is an urgent, courageous work that deserves to be read widely and most importantly, remembered long after the headlines have faded.

It will stay to haunt you for days.

wHAT IT COMES DOWN TO

This is the kind of book that reminds us what political writing can be at its best. It doesn’t simply present an argument, it grabs you by the collar and demands you face a moral reckoning. It asks you to open your eyes to the hypocrisy of the wars and genocides, it asks us to examine not only the actions of our governments and institutions, but our own willingness to accept comforting narratives over uncomfortable truths by hiding behind easy-to-swallow language, self-censorship in media, and a self-interested sense of nationalism and supremacy. In the words of Howard Zinn:

“There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.”

This is a book that refuses indifference; it takes aim at moderates and centrists who fail to think critically about empire, humanity, solidarity, and the selective application of moral principals that have come to define much of modern Western politics.

For me, this wasn’t just one of the best books I’ve read so far this year, I’d argue it’s one of the most important. It’s emotionally exhausting, intellectually rigorous, and beautifully crafted. Books rarely change the world on their one, but they can challenge us to change the way we see it.

Omar El Akkad has written one that has the potential to do exactly that.