Omar El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This explores a contradiction. On one hand, for 80 years or so, many if not most people, especially Western liberals, have understood that genocide is wrong. Few of us would argue that the slaughter of thousands of human beings is ever acceptable. But, on the other hand, most of us do nothing while a genocide unfolds in Gaza. Doing something would cause us some inconvenience, so we don’t bother. That contradiction, and the hypocrisy of people who claim to have a moral centre while turning away from mass murder, enrages El Akkad, but despite this book’s incandescent anger, it remains coherent, thoughtful, and even self-reflexive. Its moral clarity is bracing and, for me, compelling.
El Akkad was born in Egypt and lived in Qatar and Canada before moving to the United States. His anger is partly directed at the Democratic Party, which claims to be the lesser evil in American politics; the fascists who now run the Republican Party are at least aware of what they are. They can openly advocate the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and its redevelopment into a Levantine coastal resort for profit, even if they add, as a fig leaf, the notion that such a 21st century version of the Madagascar Plan is the best thing for Palestinians. (That outrageous idea isn’t in the book, which seems to have been written before Trump took office.) The Democrats, however, claim a moral compass that’s entirely fictional. That’s not surprising, since various kinds of hypocrisy are built into empire.
As I read—I’d forgotten how much reading I can accomplish on a plane, although I’m going to need to mail the books I’ve finished home, rather than dragging them around for the next ten days—I kept marking particularly powerful passages that I might include here. There ended up being too many. How could I choose just one? And yet, because I want to give some small sense of what this book is like, here are a couple of sentences from the conclusion that stood out:
One day there will be no more looking away. Looking away from climate disaster, from the last rabid takings of extractive capitalism, from the killing of the newly stateless. One day it will become impossible to accept the assurances of the same moderates who say with great conviction: Yes the air has turned sour and yes the storms have grown beyond categorization and yes the fires and the floods have made of life a wild careen from one disaster to the next and yes millions die from the heat alone and entire species are swept into extinction daily and the colonized are driven from their land and the refugees die in droves on the borders of the unsated side of the planet and yes supply chains are beginning to come apart and yes soon enough it’ll come to our doorstep, even our doorstep in this last coddled bastion of the very civilized world, when one day we turn on the tap and nothing comes out and we visit the grocery store and the shelves are empty and we must finally face the reality of it as billions before us have been made to face the reality of it but until then, until that very last moment, it’s important to understand that this really is the best way of doing things.
This book is hard to read. Jeremiads usually are. Few people, not even El Akkad himself, escape being caught up in its argument. But that’s what makes One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This such an important book.