One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
By Omar El Akkad
Knopf, 188 pages
Published February 25, 2025
The title (almost) says it all: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. After the bombardment of Gaza in October 2023, Egyptian-American journalist Omar El Akkad attracted the attention of 10 million people with a tweet to this effect, and his book is a thoughtful exposition of this statement. Akkad condemns both Hamas’ attack on Israeli citizens and the Israeli military response. “But this is not an account of that carnage,” he writes. It is, he says, a “witness” to “something that, for an entire generation of not just Arabs or Muslims or Brown people but rather all manner of human beings from all parts of the world, fundamentally changed during this season of completely preventable horror.”
Akkad imagines a future when we are far enough removed to be “properly aghast” at the devastation in Gaza, even though it’s currently controversial to label it a “genocide.” One Day weaves together the history and politics leading to this climate, emphasizing the erosion of Western principles and American democracy in a post 9/11 world.
Other scholars and cultural critics have argued that America’s challenges (e.g. racism or poverty) are features (not bugs) in American democracy. Akkad takes a similar approach, outlining the way these systems serve capitalism and the interests of our leaders — dehumanizing those who suffer the most allows the rest of us to look away, so that we can get on with daily life. Republicans and Democrats are both responsible, he argues, believing that liberal Americans’ willingness to vote for the “lesser evil” has led to the “lowest of benchmarks.”
As a young journalist, Akkad was often told that part of his job was to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,” advice I’ve usually heard offered to preachers. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This calls preachers and other church leaders to pay attention, show up, and work toward a renewed moral compass in our country and culture.
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