“There’s a good chance this will wreck my career”: Omar El Akkad on his new book about Palestine, Israel and Western hypocrisy

Since Israel intensified its bombardment of Gaza in October of 2023, Egyptian-born Canadian-American journalist Omar El Akkad has woken up every day to witness livestreams, images and videos of the destruction being visited upon the territory’s roughly two million civilians. All the while, the novelist and former Globe and Mail reporter watched as world leaders of all stripes supported the war effort and critics faced retribution and ostracization. The cognitive dissonance El Akkad experienced between the facts on the ground and mainstream media narratives prompted him to write a new nonfiction book, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, a scathing account of his disillusionment with the West. We spoke with the author about the impact of witnessing the unimaginable, how to preserve your moral soul in dark times and his advice to activists.

Before it was the title of your book, “One day, everyone will have always been against this” was a viral tweet you sent out in the early days of the war. What was running through your mind when you wrote it? I was watching a group of people be eradicated while the Western world was cheering it on, bankrolling it and telling me that if I opposed it in any way, that made me a terrorism supporter. Everything I knew about history, and everything I’d experienced covering wars and mass injustice as a journalist, led me to believe that one day, everyone would be against this. I sent that tweet late one night and thought nothing of it—and then it went into that strange viral place.

How did that turn into a book? In November of 2023, my editor was in Portland for a book festival. We went out for dinner, and I was ranting and raving about all of this. A few days later, he called and said, “Why don’t you put this down on paper?” So I started writing, and I had a first draft by the beginning of March. Sometime later, at a meeting at Penguin Random House, someone said the tweet would make a good title. So the tweet didn’t turn into a book directly—but for the rest of my life, people will probably think it did.

Related: How a Palestinian mother escaped Gaza with her newborn baby

You immigrated to Canada from Qatar at 16, and in the book, you talk about your slow realization that the West’s liberal self-image is delusional. What are some of the moments that led you there? I was 19 when September 11 happened. Essentially, the entirety of my adult life has taken place in the shadow of the war on terror. I’ve covered the war in Afghanistan and been to Guantanamo Bay several times. I’ve had people comment on my stories online saying, “I don’t trust a story on terrorism written by a guy named Omar.” Those moments shook my faith, but they didn’t break it. Only over the past year has something broken in me.

You point out that much of the language we use today to talk about war—like the word “terrorism” itself—comes from the post-9/11 era. How does that affect our understanding of current events? Language is inherently insufficient. Good writing happens when people struggle in good faith between the thoughts in their head and the inadequacy of words to express them. But that dissonance can be used in bad faith as well, particularly in institutional language. At Guantanamo, there were no “interrogations,” only “reservations.” Last year, a British TV anchor described the Israeli military killing a four-year-old girl in the West Bank by saying, “A stray bullet found its way into a van and killed a four-year-old young lady.” In that kind of fog, anything can be allowed. Most of the reporting, criticism and opinion that has come out of the Western media over the past year makes perfect sense if you don’t consider Palestinians to be human beings. But, if you do, every word becomes grotesque.

You mention other examples of how American and British media twist words to avoid holding Israel accountable. Is Canadian media any better? A while ago, I was asked by an editor to write an op-ed for a Canadian newspaper about the then-looming US election. I said, “Look, this probably isn’t going to work out.” When they asked why I was pre-emptively declining, I said, “Because I’m going to call what’s happening in Palestine a genocide, and I’m going to say that the Canadian government is complicit. And you’re going to go to your editor, and they’re going to say no. So let’s skip all of that and just stop it here.” And the editor agreed. It was one of the more honest interactions I’ve had with Canadian media over the past year. Everyone knew what was happening. Related: “We can throw a wrench into the war machine”—Why pro-Palestine Canadian authors are boycotting the Giller Prize

You’ve made a point of observing the death and destruction in Gaza. What’s our responsibility to bear witness to atrocities? I have a very difficult time answering this question. My first instinct is to say that it’s the absolute least we can do. At the same time, waking up every day, turning on my computer and seeing evidence of the worst things human beings can do to one another has broken me in an irreparable way. It’s affected my personal relationships. It’s made me a worse person. But I can’t overstate the relative meaninglessness of that burden. At no point in writing this book was I worried about my house being bombed or my children being torn apart. The other day, I saw what it looks like when a child in a wheelchair is sniped by a quadcopter. The soldier who operated that drone probably still thinks he’s a good person. I don’t know how to live in a world like that, much less how to live in one where that’s condoned and even celebrated. I can’t tell someone that they need to watch these videos and hear the screams, but god, I want to.

You write that there comes a point when it’s necessary to step away from electoral politics for the sake of preserving one’s moral soul. Do you still feel that way after the US election? One of the fascinating things about the US election is that it crystallized this hierarchy of human value. In the months leading up to the election, all of my liberal friends told me that no matter how bad the genocide got, I had to vote Democrat because the alternative would be so much worse. But I can’t maintain the dissociation necessary to choose between active bloodlust and passive bloodlust. I can’t participate in the charade, and I’m going to suffer for it, because Donald Trump is indeed going to be worse. But there’s a line for me that’s absolute, not relative, and this is it.

If that means walking away from politics, how do we get anything done? I’ve become much more politically engaged since I decided to walk away from this system that considers me subhuman. I’ve found a community of activists doing ground-level work here in Portland. Some of my writer friends have gone door-knocking for city council candidates, and some of those candidates have even won. But you’d never know it, because it’s so small scale. It may look like I’m taking my ball and going home, but really I’m walking somewhere else.

If there’s so much wrong with our core institutions, is it even possible to preserve one’s moral soul in the way you’re describing? To me, that’s like saying, “Ah, you oppose air pollution and yet you continue breathing air! Hypocrite!” Every facet of my life could be considered hypocritical under that lens, and that accusation is always going to be a tool in the arsenal of anybody who believes that the current system works for them. But the people who make that argument don’t actually care about the hypocrisy. They want me to shut up. My advice to activists is: don’t take advice from people who hate you and your cause.

Are we arriving at the point you referenced in your tweet? No. Ever since advance copies of the book came out, the reaction I’ve received is, “This is too optimistic.” The US only apologized for its imperial actions in Hawaii 100 years later. This book involves more than 75 years of apartheid, segregation, expulsion and extermination, all of which is still ongoing. We won’t get to a point of actual reckoning with all of that in a matter of weeks. That said, among those whose greatest stake in the conflict is avoiding an argument at a dinner party, things may be changing. A year or two ago, nobody in their right mind would bring up the plight of the Palestinian people. Now, that’s not the case. Over the next few years, avoiding friction may mean taking a stand against the genocide.

Do you believe this book can help cause meaningful change? I don’t know anymore. Every day I wake up and see evidence of horror, but I also see the doctor who goes into the warzone to perform reconstructive surgery on kids. I see people chaining themselves to the fences of weapons manufacturers. This is what keeps me functioning. I was on a Zoom call for a non-fiction climate anthology I contributed to, and the final question was, “What gives you hope?” The last guy to answer, whose home had burned down in the California wildfires, said, “We’ve screwed things up so badly that there is no hope. But we must proceed as though there is.” That’s the only way I’ve been able to move forward.

What’s next for you? I don’t know who I am on the other side of this book. There’s a good chance it will wreck my career, and a previous version of me would have seen that as a disaster. But I have a very different sense now of what the “worst thing” is. I’m never going to be the same guy I was before this. That’s just what happens when you don’t look away.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.