Powerful, angry, but always compelling in its moral logic, and damn hard to put down. I devoured it in two quick sittings, and by the end my heart was drumming ... Passionate, poetic and sickening. It is full of well-earned rage, frustration with those who need this morality to be spelled out. For me it was cathartic, almost spiritual, to have these ugly truths articulated. It stoked and tempered the fires of my own rage. It is an important book, a must-read.
In One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, his fiercely agonized new book about American and European responses to the devastation of Gaza, El Akkad is trying, in a very different way, to do the same thing — to force American readers to think of Palestinian victims not as 'them' but as 'us' ... Whatever one thinks of its arguments, the book has the desperate vitality of a writer trying to wrench from mere words some adequate answer to his own question: 'What is left to say but more dead, more dead?' It exists in the abyss between, on the one hand, the emotional overload of following daily live reportage of atrocities and, on the other, the future accounting that has not yet arrived ... His memories...are wonderfully evoked. They have the refined coolness of experience filtered through time and reflection. The book’s polemical side, forged in the raging heat of appalling violence, is, understandably, more disoriented ... At its best, it is a probe into the murky depths of a collective consciousness shaped by the need to evade the daily evidence of political and environmental catastrophe ... His book is a distraught but eloquent cry against our tolerance for other people’s calamities.
It took courage to write One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. It takes courage too, to read it. Because El Akkad is right. The genocide is happening before our eyes. We can speak out, or we can choose apathy and collusion. And condemn our souls.
...his narrative voice is measured and quietly engrossing in its articulation of what he sees as almost unspeakable, certainly ethically indefensible ... He is also acutely alert to the contradictions and compromises that modern journalism often entails ... The unsettling power of his writing on Gaza conveys the magnitude of what has happened there most powerfully in the accounts of individual deaths that punctuate his narrative, their cumulative effect amounting to a kind of haunting.
While depicting the grotesquery of state-sanctioned genocide may be necessary to animate El Akkad’s arguments, the anger pulsing throughout One Day is at its best when directed towards more concrete observations of contradictions in Western policy. Entwining the terminology of global capitalism (foreigners labeled as expats as opposed to illegals, aliens, or economic migrants) with scenes of inaction from arts organizations and governments leads El Akkad to question his personal and professional loyalties in a way that might sound hollow coming from other authors with fewer credentials and less poetic instinct. Instead, One Day shines with quotable critique that spares no one from scrutiny ... Such ruthless critiques leave little room to sympathize with the targets El Akkad chooses to attack. Yet, they allow for a closer examination of the motivations and roles that everyone plays in the failings of a global order that protects the powerful ... a call to look into mirrors around the world and ask who is really free.
[A] fierce, anguished indictment of Western hypocritical indifference towards Israel’s destruction of Gaza ... Terrifying, shameful, and necessary testimony.
