Description
The book everyone was arguing about in 2025. In One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, novelist Omar El Akkad — author of the acclaimed What Strange Paradise — turns his unsparing gaze from fiction to the present moment: the war in Gaza, and what the West’s response revealed about the values it claims to hold. The title comes from a bitter prediction about how history will remember our excuses.
El Akkad writes from an unusual vantage: born in Egypt, raised in Qatar, long a journalist in the West, now a celebrated novelist in America. That in-betweenness gives these essays their charge — intimate with Western liberalism’s promises, furious at its betrayals. Whether you agree with every argument or not, the moral clarity is impossible to ignore, and the prose is blazing.
Provocative, personal, and urgently argued, this is essential reading for anyone trying to understand the fracture in our public conscience. You will finish it unsettled — which is exactly the point. The most necessary polemic of recent years.
In October 2023, novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad posted a tweet about Gaza that went viral: one day, he wrote, when it is safe, everyone will have always been against this. That prophetic sentence became the foundation of this searing work of nonfiction.
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is El Akkad’s unflinching examination of Gaza’s devastation and the West’s moral collapse around it — the gap between professed values and real action, the media’s sanitized language, and the distance that allows comfortable societies to look away from suffering.
Drawing on his background as both an award-winning novelist — author of American War and What Strange Paradise — and a former war correspondent, El Akkad brings a reporter’s clarity and a storyteller’s moral force to questions of complicity, conscience, and what it costs to speak the truth before it is safe.
A demanding, urgent book for readers willing to confront uncomfortable questions about power, accountability, and the responsibilities of witness.
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