One Day, Everyone Will Have Been Against This

Omar El Akkad’s book forces us to look at the savagery of Western imperialism through Israel’s genocide in Gaza. One Day, Everyone Will Have Been Against This (Canongate books, 2025) spells a moment of reckoning for the entire world, of the magnitude of atrocities worldwide culminating in a genocide on blockaded territory, of those killed, tortured, disappeared, buried under rubble, those surviving, and elsewhere in the world, those deciding the violence, the passive spectators, the enablers, and those who resist.

The sharp contrasts that open this book set the scene for the anger that pours forth, as El Akkad exposes not only the politics of the genocide in Gaza, but the politics of Western imperialism and its snare on humanity. The middle ground is exposed for its lethality, as it is there that arguments for and against are purportedly balanced out in the name of neutrality – a neutrality that sustains the imperialist narrative. “Because it is the middle of the empire that must look upon this and say: Yes, this is tragic but necessary, because the alternative is barbarism,” El Akkad writes.

Following this introduction, the author sets the scene in his family home in Portland, where stability versus uprooting are ushered in to the reader’s mind. In protecting his daughter, however, El Akkad observes the severance between his heritage and his daughter’s upbringing: “But there’s a fraudulence to those excuses, no different than when my wife and I found out we were having a girl, and I spent weeks and weeks considering baby names that would work in the West and the Middle East, that would allow her to pass through many worlds untroubled.” It is a burden that is forced not only upon the author, and what El Akkad terms as cowardice – the urge to protect his daughter from the ramifications of associating with part of her heritage – soon turns into full blown, justified anger. An anger directed at the false premise of security that Western imperialism exudes – an anger that realises how silence creates not only impunity for violence, but enforces various degrees of subservience.

Neutrality underpins what unfolds in this book. As El Akkad dissects society and politics, journalism is called into question. “In the modern, well-dressed definition, adhered to in one form or another at almost every major newspaper, the journalist cannot be an activist, must remain allegiant to a self-erasing neutrality.”

Each chapter of the book deal with a theme and it is almost overwhelming to consider the depravity of the politics that has silenced so much of our voices to build justification for violence. El Akkad takes the reader through US support for Zionism and genocide, on the supposed collective guilt that Palestinians should feel for voting for Hamas so that the West can justify its role in Israel’s genocide, on what is perceived as the lesser evil in US elections, censorship over Western depravity and atrocities in Guantanamo which are carried out ostensibly “to preserve the values of the civilised world.”