As an immigrant who came to the West, El Akkad believed that it promised freedom. A place of justice for all. But in the past twenty years, reporting on the War on Terror, Ferguson, climate change, Black Lives Matter protests, and more, and watching the unmitigated slaughter in Gaza, El Akkad has come to the conclusion that much of what the West promises is a lie. That there will always be entire groups of human beings it has never intended to treat as fully human—not just Arabs or Muslims or immigrants, but whoever falls outside the boundaries of privilege. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is a chronicle of that painful realization, a moral grappling with what it means, as a citizen of the U.S., as a father, to carve out some sense of possibility in a time of carnage.
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.
