Ezra's Bookshelf

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

by Omar El Akkwad · 241 pages · ~4.5 hrs

Politics & GovernmentRace & IdentityForeign Policy

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Omar El Akkad, the Arab-American novelist known for 'American War,' reflects on how the bombardment of Gaza has affected faith in Western values among communities that never fully trusted them. Writing with personal intensity, El Akkad argues that for Black, brown, and Indigenous Americans, and especially for younger generations, the contrast between professed ideals and actual policy has become impossible to ignore. The essay examines how selective application of human rights discourse reveals its hollowness, and how communities long aware of America's capacity for violence overseas now see it more clearly. El Akkad draws on his background as a journalist who covered Guantanamo and the Arab Spring, bringing reportorial detail to a personal meditation. The title suggests a future in which current policies will be universally condemned, as with past atrocities, and asks what responsibility those who saw clearly bear in the present. This is a reckoning with what it means to live inside an empire while belonging to communities that empire harms. El Akkad writes without illusions but also without despair, arguing that clear-sightedness is necessary for any path forward.

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