One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
by Omar El Akkad
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About the Book
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2025 PALESTINE BOOK AWARDS • From award-winning novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad comes a powerful reckoning with what it means to live in a West that betrays its fundamental values“
[A] bracing memoir and manifesto.”—The New York Times“
I can’t think of a more important piece of writing to read right now. I found hope here, and help, to face what the world is now, all that it isn’t anymore. Please read this. I promise you won’t regret it.”—Tommy Orange, bestselling author of Wandering Stars and There There
On October 25, 2023, after just three weeks of the bombardment of Gaza, Omar El Akkad put out a tweet: “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 tweet has been viewed more than 10 million times.
As an immigrant who came to the West, El Akkad believed that it promised freedom. A place of justice for all. But in the past twenty years, reporting on the War on Terror, Ferguson, climate change, Black Lives Matter protests, and more, and watching the unmitigated slaughter in Gaza, El Akkad has come to the conclusion that much of what the West promises is a lie. That there will always be entire groups of human beings it has never intended to treat as fully human—not just Arabs or Muslims or immigrants, but whoever falls outside the boundaries of privilege. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is a chronicle of that painful realization, a moral grappling with what it means, as a citizen of the U.S., as a father, to carve out some sense of possibility in a time of carnage.
This is El Akkad’s nonfiction debut, his most raw and vulnerable work to date, a heartsick breakup letter with the West. It is a brilliant articulation of the same breakup we are watching all over the United States, in family rooms, on college campuses, on city streets; the consequences of this rupture are just beginning. This book is for all the people who want something better than what the West has served up. This is the book for our time.
About the Author
Omar El Akkad is an author and journalist. He was born in Egypt, grew up in Qatar, moved to Canada as a teenager and now lives in the United States. He is a two-time winner of both the Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Award and the Oregon Book Award. His books have been
translated into 13 languages. His debut novel, American War, was named by the BBC as one of 100 novels that shaped our world.
Editorial Reviews
“It is difficult to understand the nature of a true rupture while it is still tearing through the fabric of our world. Yet that is precisely what Omar El Akkad has accomplished, putting broken heart and shredded illusions into words with tremendous insight, skill and courage. A unique and urgently needed book.” —Naomi Klein, author of Doppelganger
“[A] bracing memoir and manifesto…. With precision and passion, [El Akkad] compels readers to close the emotional distance between ‘us’ and ‘them’ and to consider the immense suffering of civilians with renewed urgency.” —The New York Times
“A bracing case for empathy…. What would it take to render a horror ‘over there’ equally real to one ‘over here’? How do we lie to ourselves so convincingly, and what is the cost of those lies? These questions burn and throb with a haunting clarity [in One Day]…. El Akkad is … a moral meteorologist…. It reminds me of a story I heard once, about the late Toronto filmmaker Charles Officer, who was asked why he makes films that preach to the choir. It is because the choir must be fortified, he answered. El Akkad is tending to an exhausted choir, so that its song may ring clear.” —Elamin Abdelmahmoud, The Washington Post
“Fiercely agonized…. [Omar El Akkad’s] book is a distraught but eloquent cry against our tolerance for other people’s calamities.” —Fintan O’Toole, The New York Times Book Review (cover)
“Powerful… compelling… haunting.” —Sean O’Hagan, The Guardian Observer
“A thoughtful, heartfelt, and ultimately heartbroken missive from an immigrant to his second home—a country whose vaunted values, never fulfilled, now seem almost a mockery. Echoing Baldwin, El Akkad writes from anger and love.” —Kate Tuttle, The Boston Globe
“Affecting…. Wherever we go, El Akkad is correct that we must start with refusal, if only the refusal to look away.” —JewishCurrents
“Exceptionally powerful, as a howl of rage and grief against the status quo must be…. This is a book that many will take issue with, and most will find uncomfortable, which makes it even more important. Discomfort, as he points out, is a luxury.” —Alex Clark, Financial Times
“One Day is powerful, angry, but always compelling in its moral logic, and damn hard to put down…. by the end my heart was drumming…. For me it was cathartic, almost spiritual…. It is an important book, a must-read.” —Dina Nayeri, The Guardian
“A powerful and deeply disturbing book…. 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.” —Lawrence Hill, The Globe and Mail
“This book is a howl from the heart of our age. I struggle to find more precise wording that might capture its ferocious, fracturing rage, as it seeks to describe the indescribable, make coherent an increasingly incoherent world.” —Richard Flanagan, author of The Narrow Road to the Deep North
“I can’t think of a more important piece of writing to read right now. Doom and gloom and unspeakable horror abound and overwhelm these days, but it remains important to understand what we already know is happening now and how it will be understood in the future. It helps when we feel helpless to give our time and attention, our hearts and consideration to a voice like this, a book like this, from our particular time and for it. There is so much power in language here, where it is difficult to find words, such heart in a world that feels has lost its way. I found hope here, and help, to face what the world is now, all that it isn’t anymore. Please read this. I promise you won’t regret it. I honestly don’t know how you could.” —Tommy Orange, author of Wandering Stars