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By the end of this book One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, I was crying. Omar El Akkad has a well-honed diction that cuts through the painfully passive voice of mainstream news, politicians, and organizations that will tie themselves into knots to avoid calling a genocide a genocide. This is at once a love-letter and a Dear John letter to journalism, a profession that's abandoned muckracking for capitalism.
I've read several books on Palestine, ranging from historical to memoir to fiction, and I mentally categorize them based on the ideal reader. This is a book I'd recommend to anyone, especially someone who has read nothing about the occupation of Palestine. While historical context is intrinsic to comprehending the slant against Palestinians and the justification for the revolving door of genocide and ethnic cleansing, this memoir cuts through to the core. In this moment, after the most recent decimation of Gaza, it's impossible for the average person to justify the number of murdered civilians. This is when people rewrite their narratives about where they stood while Isreal and its allies in the West blew up whole families, gunned down medical personnel, and maimed children. El Akkad painstakingly elucidates the human and environmental cost of these long overdue postmortems, where the body of the problem has rotted and no evidence of wrongdoing can be found, because everyone was always against this.
El Akkad neatly and efficiently strikes at the heart of hypocrisy and how, years after an unspeakable event, people rewrite where they stood in the room on the day, who was right, and who's still paying the price. He also criticizes liberal centrism and how establishment Democrats hold people hostage by posing themselves as the only salvation from the other candidate, no matter their own vacuous ethical assertions.
"It is a source of great confusion first, then growing rage, among establishment democrats that there might exist a sizeable group of people in this country who, quite simply, cannot condone a real, ongoing genocide no matter how much worse an alternative ruling party may be or do."
I often think about these issues. I watch people say and do heinous and insidious things, and I wonder what they'll tell their grandchildren and how they will become the heroes of these stories. The dissonance manages to both enrage me and leave me wrung out, exhausted and unwilling to get out of bed.
"More and more, daily life seems to invert. The very consequential work...becomes utterly trivial."
More than anything, this book made me feel seen. El Akkad reflected all my frustrations back to me. At the end of the book, he assured me that everything I do, no matter how small, is worth doing—the marches, phone calls, endless social media posts, and blogs. He also advocated for non-participation in bad-faith institutions and practices. Choosing not to engage in destructive and discriminatory behavior is powerful, even when it feels like screaming into a void.
I'd recommend this book to anyone and everyone. I'd throw it at people in the street if I could get away with it. Also, the audiobook is fantastic. Hearing his words in his voice gives life to the concepts and makes it impossible to turn away.
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