“I now know what it looks like when a little girl starves to death,” says Omar El Akkad quietly. “I’ve heard a girl begging for her life before Israeli soldiers shot at her car at least 355 times. I don’t know how someone is the same human being after that. I just don’t.”
Omar speaks to me from his home in Oregon, on the west coast of the United States. He’s just back from touring the UK for his new book, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, and has done a number of events for the US tour.
His book – his first non-fiction after two novels, including the acclaimed American War – is a very personal look at his splintering relationship with the West. Omar was born in Egypt, grew up in Qatar and Canada, and is now a US citizen.
His whole life has been formed by the ideas and ideals of the West, but in the face of Israel’s latest attack on Gaza, Omar has felt a shift and an urgent need to reassess what he feels is broken.
It’s a shift that led him to this book, which he finished writing before the viral October 2023 tweet it is named after, in which Omar said: “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.”
“This is a book that I think barges in through the door, seeming it wants to pick a fight, and I wrote it when I was deeply angry – and I’m still deeply angry – which is a dangerous thing for a brown man to be in this part of the world because what you are imagined capable of doing becomes very quickly unlimited,” says Omar.
“But I think of the book as not trying to convince anyone of anything and not being particularly interested in having these arguments that seem to be, by their very nature, dehumanising as a prerequisite.
“To me, the book is about a deep kind of uncertainty, where one finds themselves untethered from a thing that had previously been their defining orientation,” he adds.
Not a book that shouts
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is a book with an undercurrent of anger through it, but it’s not a book that shouts.
Instead, it’s a quietly convincing indictment of the West’s institutions and of its moral failings, and a thorough laying out of an argument about breaking away from the ideas and ideals we’ve held ourselves to.
Although, of course, it criticises right-wing institutions, one of the book’s biggest targets for critique is the Western liberal.
“The process of writing, for me, I think, necessitated that I come to terms with the reality that so many of the things I am trying to part ways with in this book or critique or autopsy are parts of myself,” says Omar.
“When I talk about Western liberalism, I am Western liberalism. I’ve been defined by it, by its stories, and I don’t know if having to contend with that was cathartic. I don’t think it was, but it was clarifying,” Omar adds.
Complicity that cannot be ignored
Before becoming a novelist, Omar worked as a journalist (and there’s plenty in the book criticising media institutions for their failures to report the war on Gaza accurately).
During his time as a journalist, he covered the war in Afghanistan and spent significant time at Guantanamo Bay writing about the trials of imprisoned men.
Having seen those injustices and horrors, I ask Omar why it’s this particular moment, rather than any of those that came before, that has caused a splinter for him.
“I suppose the most immediate practical answer is my own naivety, right?” Omar says honestly.
He adds, “It may be the case that were I a less oblivious person, perhaps I would’ve come to these conclusions earlier because I wasn’t far away from these things.
“I was a journalist during the war on terror years. I went to Afghanistan, I went to Guantanamo Bay. I saw these things up close, but I think particularly in the last year and a half, even for someone as oblivious as me, the immediacy and the intimacy and the complicity has been impossible to ignore.
“When I say that I killed those kids, that’s not hyperbole. My tax money paid for the bombs.”
Sense of guilt
The guilt Omar feels is clear to hear – he speaks a number of times about how he feels directly responsible for the bombs that were used by Israel to kill Gazans.
“I’ve seen too many dead kids and I killed them, right?” he says at one point during our conversation. “My tax money paid to kill those kids. I can’t be the person I’ve been for the first 40 years of my life and I don’t know who I am on the other side of it.”
Omar is still working out who he is now, and he realises that’s an immense privilege to have, given all he sees on his screens, and all that he’s encountered directly.
While teaching a course in Qatar, a Palestinian student revealed to Omar that most of his mother’s side of the family had been killed. It was a galvanising moment for Omar and is one of the things that has put in perspective what matters to him.
“You think to yourself, what the hell does any of this matter? I mean, what are we doing here?” he says.
“That thought has crossed my mind more times in the last year and a half than the rest of my life put together.
“I don’t care if the book sells. I don’t care if it gets bad reviews. I don’t care if I don’t have a career as a writer on the other side of this book.
“If you’d gone back two years and told me that I would be saying these things, that version of me would’ve never believed you. There’s a lot of things that used to matter greatly to me that quite simply don’t anymore,” he adds.
And yet, despite his anger, guilt and frustration, Omar still does feel some hope, and One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is a book that offers hope (Omar tells me it’s the most hopeful book he’s written) – not just in making you feel you’re not alone, but in believing there is a new way forward.
“As cynical as I’ve become about almost every institutional load-bearing beam of the West – political, academic, cultural, journalistic, you name it – I have been so incredibly inspired by what people are willing to do individually and in community with one another,” says Omar.
“I’m not a courageous person. I am a coward in every respect, and so I have to leach my courage from others.
“Watching these kids at universities risk their futures and be subjected to brutality by administrations that are supposed to protect them. Watching dock workers refuse to load missiles onto boats, watching Palestinian journalists be the sole source of information from a killing field and quite often pay with their lives for it.
“All of it has given me immense hope at what we are able to do in solidarity with one another.”
Sarah Shaffi is a freelance literary journalist and editor. She writes about books for Stylist Magazine online and is the Books Editor at Phoenix Magazine
Follow her here: @sarahshaffi
