One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

Sam's Review 

Once every few years, a book comes along that requires you to stop reading and breathe deeply. It slows time and blurs the view beyond the pages, rendering everything but its words irrelevant. You must sit and think, contemplate what has been said and measure yourself, your actions, your worth, against the words. One Day Everyone Will Have Been Against This is one of those books.

In his collection of essays, Egyptian Canadian novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad reconsiders the belief that the West is a place of freedom and a force for good. He left Egypt as a child, escaping martial law for the safety and opportunities of the West. His parents believed that they would be safer, life would be better, futures could be built. El Akkad believed the same, but after years as a journalist on the battlefields in Afghanistan, in the cells of Guantanamo Bay and on the streets of the Arab Spring, his belief in this ideal was shaken. Then, Israel’s actions in Gaza, which El Akkad argues are genocidal, and the West’s armed support, reduced his convictions to rubble, and impelled him to write these essays.

While Gaza is central to the book, other subjects like the so-called War on Terror, climate change, colonisation, and neo-liberalism all also considered. El Akkad argues that in its handling of all of these vital issues, the West has failed its moral and ethical responsibilities. Nobody involved escapes his examination and his anger. Politicians, journalists, writers, arts organisations, businesses, the public, himself: we all share responsibility for our timidity, our inaction, our exchange of comfort for the safety of the lives of those we don't know.

Each essay begins with a graphic, harrowing snapshot of the injuries being suffered in Gaza. This structure forces us to ask: how can I look away from this, before answering: this is how and this is why. Nor does El Akkad exempt himself from answering this question; he tells us, for example, how he considered non-Egyptian, non-Muslim names for his daughter, erasing her heritage to make her path through the world easier. He examines how those in authority use language as weapon, a smokescreen, an obfuscation, an excuse, a justification: “No one during those years was ever tortured, only subjected to enhanced interrogation ...No prisoners, who require a prison sentence, only detainees, who can be held forever without charge.”

Lest we think that El Akkad has an agenda against conservative ideology, it is liberals for whom he holds the most ire. He argues that while they denounce war and acknowledge the destructive effects of climate change, they do nothing to solve either problem. When faced with such inaction, he concludes that what matters most to the "modern American liberal ... is not what one does or believes or supports or opposes, but what one is seen to be.” Appear to be against war, appear to be for peace, and don’t for one moment do anything that might change the status quo. Uphold the system from which one benefits is the priority, at whatever cost.

As his gaze returns to Gaza, El Akkad considers the justifications given for what has happened. He argues that fear has become the overriding tool of politics, the end to all arguments and protests, the excuse for all restrictions of freedom and acts of aggression and genocide. He denounces those who think such measures are necessary because they believe that the alternative is barbarism. As he writes, with characteristic passion: “The alternative to the countless killed and maimed and orphaned and left without home without school without hospital and the screaming from under the rubble and the corpses disposed of by vultures and dogs and the days-old babies left to scream and starve is barbarism.”

Despite the anger and despair, the book rejects nihilism, even resignation to the injustices he exposes. Australian writer Richard Flanagan, himself a fierce advocate for refugees, has called the book “a howl from the heart of our age.” One Day Everyone Will Have Been Against This is a cry of the wounded, the call of the isolated to their pack, a roar of defiance. But El Akkad also understands that since whole system change is not simple, there are no simple answers to the profound global problems he investigates. Instead, he asks us all to search our conscience by asking: “What are you willing to give up to alleviate someone else's suffering?”

This is a brilliant, challenging, fearless and confronting book. I can think of few that have affected me more.

One Day Everyone Will Have Been Against This is available in store now, priced $32.99.

Publisher's Review 

'A howl from the heart of our age' - Richard Flanagan

'A unique and urgently needed book.' - Naomi Klein

'A powerful, uncomfortable but thought-provoking read.' - Dua Lipa

'Clear, elegant and devastatingly truthful...Read this shatteringly honest book.' - Max Porter

From award-winning novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad, an urgent and necessary reckoning with what it means to live in the West today.

As an immigrant, Omar El Akkad believed the West would be a place of freedom and justice for all. But in the past twenty years, reporting on the various Wars on Terror, climate change, Black Lives Matter protests, and more, and watching the unmitigated slaughter in Gaza, he has come to the conclusion that much of what the West promises is a lie. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is a chronicle of that painful realisation, a moral grappling with what it means-as a citizen of the US, as a father-to carve out some sense of possibility during these devastating times.

This is El Akkad's nonfiction debut, his most raw and vulnerable work to date. It's a heartfelt breakup letter with the West, a brilliant articulation of the same breakup we are watching all over the world, in family rooms, on university campuses, on city streets. This book is for everyone who wants something better than what the West has served up. This is the book for our time.

PRAISE

'I can't think of a more important piece of writing to read right now... I found hope here, and help, to face what the world is now, all that it isn't anymore. Please read this. I promise you won't regret it.' - Tommy Orange, author of Wandering Stars

'It is difficult to understand the nature of a true rupture while it is still tearing through the fabric of our world. Yet that is precisely what Omar El Akkad has accomplished, putting broken heart and shredded illusions into words with tremendous insight, skill and courage. A unique and urgently needed book.' - Naomi Klein

'A startling, shocking, beautiful and essential book.' - Brian Eno

'If you read one thing this year, read this.' - Amplify Bookstore

'Part elegy, part rallying cry, this magnificent book should, and will, be required reading for future generations trying to reckon with one of humanity's darkest chapters.' - Tea Obreht, author of The Morningside

'I urge you to read Omar El Akkad's astonishing book.' - David Olusoga, Black and British

'I feel inadequate to describe a book like this with the right superlatives - I don't want to reduce the book down to one thing in doing so...but I hope Omar El Akkad's One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This will find a large audience.' - Jeff Vandermeer

'This book is a reckoning. The lie that the West is founded upon-from the beginning-blooms in blood on the pages. This book is a love story in the face of genocide-a love born between the very peoples we have always colonised and killed as if they are the raw material of building nations. What a furious, perfect heart it took to stare into the abyss we call being human and emerge with a revolution song.' - Lidia Yuknavitch

'A furious, intimate, profound articulation of the soul ache so many of us have been feeling every single day for the past fifteen months as we watch the Israel/US assault on Gaza unfold. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is a book I wish I could gift to everyone in America. I have honestly never recommended a work of nonfiction as strongly as I do this one. There is no doubt in my mind that it will become one of the essential texts of this unfathomably dark time. A painful but essential indictment of a broken world.' 'Most Anticipated Books of 2025', - Literary Hub

'Certain to become one of the essential texts of this terrible era.' - LitHub

'Terrifying, shameful, and necessary testimony.' - Lesley Williams, Booklist

'El Akkad's writing is mesmerising- it juggles the lyrical with the political, the comic with the analytical, and never once drops a ball. His book is at once observation, admonition and tender autobiography.' - Good Reading