
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.”
While Al Akkad expands on the horrors of living on the Western façade of human rights and democracy, he makes an important observation on language. “Language is never sufficient,” he writes. “There is not enough of it to make a true mirror of the living.” Translated into the violence of imperialism, Al Akkad states, “Victims of empire aren’t murdered. Their killers aren’t butchers, their killers aren’t anything at all. Victims of empire don’t die, they simply cease to exist. They burn away like fog.” Language contributes to the annihilation of Palestinians caused by Israel’s Western-backed genocide in Gaza.
A vivid description of the impact language has, depending on the audience, is an anecdote Al Akkad narrates regarding his book American War. For a US audience, the scenes referencing the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacres were too horrific. But an Egyptian woman questions the tone, as Al Akkad recalls, “If that scene is based on Sabra, she says, why did you tone it down?”
Al Akkad shows other examples of language aiding annihilation – one being a new York Times article discussing a drop in Palestinian civilian deaths after Gaza’s healthcare system collapsed. Al Akkad notes that Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system impacted statistical detail and the drop does not signify a change in Israel’s genocide, as the West would have us believe.
One important point Al Akkad makes is now narratives are determined by colonialism. “Colonialism demands history begins past the point of colonisation precisely because, under those narrative conditions, the colonist’s every action is necessarily one of self-defence,” he writes. This observation packs the book in its entirety and also explains why the mainstream narratives rely on imperialist justifications for genocide. Israel’s genocide in Gaza has exposed the decayed politics of the West, with all its double standards – always lethal for the colonised, its justifications for violence, the assumed benevolent stance from which the West authorises itself to inflict even more violence, the suppression of protests and free speech, and legitimising state violence. All to negate the narrative of the oppressed, and their legitimacy.
“When push comes to shove, the state is completely fluent in the violent power of negation, of turning away.” Al Akkad shows how this happens in the international arena, the turning away from thousands of killed Palestinian children to bolster the fabricated Zionist narrative that requires no evidence for proof. And yet, the visible proof of the colonised is completely ignored. Governments require our “tolerance for violence”. And Al Akkad notes, “in time, negation becomes all there is. To walk away from this system is to speak the only language the system will ever understand.”
There is much to glean from this book, as Al Akkad brings forth the dynamics of culpability, passivity, colonial violence, international complicity, and the various ways the colonised are marginalised and murdered. It is also a bleak realisation, although not irreversible, that much of what goes unquestioned in terms of political violence is the underpinning of the current normalisation of genocide.