One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, by Omar El Akkad. A Book Review by a Fellow Traveler

How does it feel to live in a time when no one is stopping a genocide?

That’s the question Omar El Akkad addresses in his new book, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.

This book can be called a "personal memoir," as some reviewers have done, but not in a dismissive way. The author is sharing his consciousness, like in an intimate diary. He speaks to the reader as a recently naturalized citizen of the US, and as an immigrant from the Middle East (born in Egypt).

He tells us about his personal experience of being baffled over how people in the West, especially in the US, can fancy themselves as exemplars of righteousness, and even supporters of the underdog, while letting their government supply a genocide. He shares his befuddlement without preaching at us. This is not a noisy protest. He doesn't rail against Israel's astonishing cruelty, nor chide the US for its complicity, but rather describes his personal experience as a person living in a world where a genocide proceeds unhampered by any other country.

He does side with those who protest. He admires those courageous students building encampments to protest the genocide in Gaza. He understands that harms may be done to some of their careers because of their public expressions of moral anguish and outrage. Indeed, an agreement to make a movie based on his novel, American War, was canceled, at least in part, because of his public protest against the genocide. Actor friends had suffered similar harms to their careers. For speaking out against the genocide, people of heightened moral sensitivities are unjustly labeled “antisemitic.” While not using the term, he recognizes that the New McCarthyism has had numerous victims.

But, in his view, authentic moral sensitivity sometimes demands self-sacrifice, even though that is contrary to the American philosophy of self-interest.

What he finds incomprehensible is the vast majority of moral duds, in and out of government, who just let the genocide grind along. Without effective political pressure intervening, it seems that the only way it will end is when there is nobody left to kill, and nothing left to destroy. (He doesn’t say this, but the actual world we are living in today makes a mockery of Stephen Pinker’s Pollyannish celebration of humanity’s “great” moral progress, made in The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, written before the genocide in Gaza.)

Throughout the book, I felt that Omar El Akkad is a kindred spirit. In this sense, the book was comforting for me. I too am deeply disturbed at the indifference the Western world, especially the US, shows towards the awful suffering of those human beings in Gaza. While I would describe my experience differently, and probably with less measure, getting an in-depth insight into the way in which Omar is baffled by the realities of the present shows me that I’m not alone in my own dismay.

I have two mild criticisms of the book. The first is that, unlike John Mearsheimer or Jeffery Sachs, Omar seems unaware of the power the Zionist Lobby has over the US, and other, governments. That’s never mentioned. Secondly, and unfortunately, the book does nothing to relieve my feelings of helplessness as first a Democratic administration, and then a Republican administration, showers Israel with arms and money, and unconditional encouragement to do as it pleases.

Clearly, there is no happy ending to this book. But it is an eloquent expression of a mind stunned by living in the moral desert we call “America.” I’m glad to have such companionship.

William J. Kelleher, PhD

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