Author Omar El Akkad.Nathan Howard/The Globe and Mail
- Title: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
- Author: Omar El Akkad
- Genre: Non-fiction
- Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
- Pages: 208
Some of the most haunting works of fiction depict the oppressed becoming oppressors. For example, in José Saramago’s novel Blindness, during an epidemic in which the state imprisons people who have lost their sight, one group of detainees begins to assault and rape the others. In Joyce Carol Oates’s novel Foxfire, abused teenage girls form a gang to exact disproportionately intense revenge against their predators. Omar El Akkad reprises this literary tradition in his new work of non-fiction, One Day, Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This.
In his 197-page hybrid of essay, memoir and journalistic reflections, El Akkad calls on Western governments and citizens to shrug off their apathy and intervene to stop the state of Israel – created in 1948 as a homeland for Jews in the wake of the Holocaust – from bombing, killing, maiming, making homeless and pulverizing the social infrastructure of Palestinians in Gaza. It is a powerful and deeply disturbing book. With his core message – to ignore inhumanity is to corrode the soul – El Akkad demands that his readers look with him at the horror. And he asks, once you have looked, how can you not act?
El Akkad is a Canadian novelist and journalist who also holds American citizenship. He lives with his family in Portland, Ore. In 2017, El Akkad brought out a stunning debut novel, American War, a futuristic dystopia in which rising seas have swallowed up the East Coast of the United States and plunged the country into a new civil war.
American War went on to become an international bestseller. El Akkad followed this with the novel What Strange Paradise, about a boy – an undocumented migrant – who washes up half-dead on the shores of Greece and is aided by a young girl while authorities, hell-bent on imprisoning refugees, hunt for them both. That novel was a Canada Reads finalist and in 2021 won the $100,000 Scotiabank Giller Prize – Canada’s most prestigious and lucrative award for fiction. This book should be similarly hailed. But it is a demanding read – not for its prose, but for what it asks of us.
El Akkad was born in Egypt in 1982, and as a young boy moved with his family to Qatar after Egyptian soldiers harassed and nearly imprisoned his father. He moved to Montreal as a teenager, studied computer science at Queen’s University and became a foreign correspondent with The Globe and Mail. He covered Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay and, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans. When he left Qatar for Canada, El Akkad says he believed in the West. He believed that people in the West were committed to fairness of treatment under law and order and social norm “until the fall of 2023. Until the slaughter.”
El Akkad opens his chapters with italicized passages that read like fiction but reflect the realities Palestinians face in the occupied territories. ”An eighteen-month-old with a bullet wound to the forehead. Maybe the sniper was aiming elsewhere. Maybe there’s some explanation. Maybe it was necessary.”
El Akkad wants the reader to witness what he has witnessed: “I have seen, almost daily, images of children mutilated, starved to death, executed. Bodies in pieces. Parents burying limbs.”
“Almost all of the region’s 2.3 million residents have been displaced. Virtually every school, hospital and university was either damaged or destroyed. The deliberate withholding of aid and destruction of infrastructure have resulted in widespread famine and death by disease. Over and over, residents were ordered from their neighbourhoods into ‘safe zones’ and then wiped out there … there is no accurate count of the murdered. There may never be.”
On Feb. 10, Palestinian authorities estimated that, since the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks in which Hamas fighters killed 1,200 Israelis and abducted another 250 people, the Israeli military has killed at least 48,218 Palestinians and injured 111,664 others. Among the victims are 18,000 children. The Committee to Protect Journalists says that at least 169 journalists and media workers have been killed in that time in Gaza, the West Bank, Israel and Lebanon. These acts, El Akkad argues, have been directly and indirectly supported by Western governments.
“The Israeli military, at the direction of the country’s government and with the support of the vast majority of the Western world’s political power centers, enacted a campaign of active genocide against the Palestinian people,” he writes. But his gravest lament relates to the apathetic response of media outlets, writers and citizens in general. When you do nothing, he suggests, “You are being asked to kill of a part of you that would otherwise scream in opposition to injustice. You are being asked to dismantle the machinery of a functioning conscience.” To read El Akkad’s book is to bear witness. To look into one’s own heart.
In reading El Akkad’s book, I heard the echoes of my own artistic and racial ancestry, in the words of James Baldwin’s explosive, 1963 book The Fire Next Time: “I know what the world has done to my brother, and how narrowly he has survived it. And I know, which is much worse, and this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it.”
Those who come from communities that have been marginalized, can also become privileged, and it is a privilege that is particularly hard to let go of.
When American War came out, I reviewed the novel favourably for The Globe in 2017, and in 2022 and 2023 welcomed El Akkad to literary events at the University of Guelph and in Woody Point, N.L. Embracing that work and trumpeting the talent of another writer required little of me.
Shortly after the Israeli military’s response to the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, protestors disrupted the black-tie, nationally televised Giller Prize ceremony to deplore that a subsidiary of its primary sponsor, Scotiabank, held a $500-million stake in Elbit Systems, an Israeli arms maker. El Akkad and many other Canadian writers signed a petition boycotting the literary prize and calling on it to cut its ties to Scotiabank. Other writers signed a counterpetition. Earlier this month, the Giller Prize announced that it has parted ways with Scotiabank. For El Akkad, who admires the courage of emerging writers who risked their careers to boycott the prize, one has the sense that his association with the Giller is forever strained. He writes, “Any institution that prioritizes cashing the checks over calling out the evil is no longer an arts organization. It is a reputation-laundering firm with a well-read board.”
I signed neither.
Like many Canadians, I have hoped in vain for two seemingly opposing goals: for Jewish people to live in peace and security in Israel, and for Palestinian peoples to be freed from their open-air prisons in the occupied territories and to be respected as equal citizens in their own state. But with Israeli leaders and Hamas fighters so entrenched in their violence, even the ceasefire in effect today seems at risk of cracking. Meanwhile, Donald Trump muses about the U.S. taking ownership of Gaza, displacing 2.2 million Palestinians and turning it into the “Riviera of the Middle East.”
Because Canadians on opposing sides of the conflict often shout at each other, it is hard to know how to bring people together to promote peace. Many people, especially those who do not consider themselves to be knowledgeable about the century-long conflict in the Middle East, are not sure what to say, or how to help. But to see, to witness, is to bear responsibility.
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.
