Anyone living in America these days will have noticed the rift between the White House and the US public over Israel’s war on Gaza, exacerbated by the administration’s refusal to call it what it is: genocide. Rather than acting to halt the violence, the US government has instead offered unconditional support to the perpetrators.
Doing so contradicts the human values that America has long professed to uphold and defend, values it has frequently invoked to justify its own military interventions. Such double standards are no stranger to Canadian-Egyptian writer and journalist Omar El Akkad, who has spent many years living in North America.
His journalistic career led him to cover Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, the Arab world, and various domestic issues, including racial injustice in the United States, all of which shaped his perspective. He used that perspective, as well as his experience of moving from Egypt to Canada via Qatar, to write his debut novel, American War, published in 2017.
A speculative work that imagines a second American Civil War in the not-too-distant future, the novel earned critical acclaim. He followed it with What Strange Paradise (2021), tracing the fate of a Syrian boy who alone survives a sinking refugee boat, in a book that exposes the moral collapse of the modern world.
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. https://t.co/lemZnLb44h
— Omar El Akkad (@omarelakkad) October 25, 2023
When it is too late
On 25 October 2023, with Israel pounding Gaza, El Akkad posted a tweet that garnered more than ten million views: “One day, when it is safe, when naming things truthfully carries no personal risk, and when it is far too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will claim they had always been against it.” Sure enough, his latest book is called One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.
In it, El Akkad explores what it means to live in the West today and, more broadly, in a world dominated by a small group of powerful nations, through the lens of the war in Gaza. It is full of piercing insights, a bitter and disillusioned tone permeating the prose.
A letter of rupture with the West, it reflects the scenes witnessed on American streets and university campuses, as well as across Europe. But unlike chants or protest slogans, El Akkad’s work takes the form of a long, ice-cold yet blistering meditation, his irrefutable arguments and sharp analysis cutting like a blade.
“This book is for me,” wrote American literary critic Sarah Trembath, writing in The Washington Independent Review of Books: “It is a pristine lamentation, a mirror, and—for humanitarian activists of the literary type—an amplification of our cry.” El Akkad’s audience, she added, is “the liberal, the person who knows better than to tacitly condone mass atrocity but has said nothing”.
