Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

bio

Omar El Akkad is an Egyptian-Canadian writer born in 1982, author of the novel American War (2017), and the 2021 winner of the Giller prize for his second novel What Strange Paradise (2021). He is a former reporter for The Globe and Mail and recipient of Canada’s National Newspaper Award for investigative reporting (2006), as well as winner of the Goff Penny Memorial Prize for Young Canadian Journalists (2007). Omar El Akkad lives in Portland, Oregon.

quick points

• limpid, articulate
• spry wit
• holds a computer science degree from Queen’s
• credits Carolyn Smart for publishing his first creative work

synopsis

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is an essay that combines current events, identity politics, personal history, and the ethical dilemmas of the stories he has reported on, along with his lived experience of the literary publishing landscape.

exploration

I think I have been too angry at the world and too exasperated by the 24-hour news cycle to put down in words exactly how significant and growing in influence Omar El Akkad’s book is.

I agree with his cynicism when he said, “the smartest thing that a lot of writers can do right now is shut the hell up.” This feels like the same shut-the-hell-up ethos for Liberal Canadian writers that was in play when the Scotiabank genocide protest movement was unfolding, as well as in the wake of Andrea Skinner’s Alice Munro revelations, and Boydengate, among others.

What I mean by that is, in spite of the bulk of writers I know and colleagues of mine who spoke up and said something, time and time again, the silence from the quiet few has been loud. Just as it is now. Omar El Akkad writes:

I know now there are people, some of them once very dear to me, to whom I will never speak again so long as I can help it. It’s the people who said nothing, who knew full well what was happening and said nothing because there was a personal risk to it, a chance of getting yelled at or, God forbid, a chance of professional ramifications. It’s the people who dug deeply into the paramount importance of their own safety, their own convenience. I feel no anger toward these people, not even frustration or disappointment, simply a kind of psychological leavetaking, an unspoken goodbye.

To speak on the ethics of book reviewing: to characterize this as a “breakup letter with the West” is so deeply disingenuous to me. Like, if you’re reading this book all the way through, you know what he’s talking about.

Canadian and US literary scenes are riddled with quiet writers, unwilling to risk bursting out of their comfort zones and speak up about what’s going on. Where is North America’s Sally Rooney?

In the month since I began collecting notes on One Day and researching other books, interviews, and articles about it, so much has happened in the world, in Gaza, and in the West, that it exasperates me to reckon with even the contemporaneous context of his work within the scope of this review.

My original plan was to provide a corkboard investigation of each chapter in the book, to avoid lip service and grant each chapter its own space to unfurl its context along its own natural rhythm as I explored it, connecting factual exhibits, etc.

It quickly became infeasible to do this. I abandoned adding to my draft notes for weeks at length while I continued to engage with the world, the news, and other books about Palestine.

Since starting my review on Omar El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This:

• On June 8, a historically unprecedented show of mounting hostility for civil rights, the National Guard moved in on LA, which was then used by the Republican state media apparatus to manufacture a narrative, manufacture consent, and remind millennials that “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
• June 10, Greta Thunberg, among others, was deported from Israel after attempting to sail to Gaza to offer a symbolic token of aid.
• June 11, AP News reports that more than 55,000 Palestinians have been killed to date.
• June 13, Israel launches a surprise attack on Tehran, Fordow, Natanz, and other regions, with at least 78 killed and over 320 injured, signaling a sudden escalation in Israel’s aggression against the sovereign nation; Mark Carney’s statements on the strikes was a total misreading of the room in terms of Canada’s sentiment towards the apartheid state and genocide being conducted by Israel.
• Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist, who federal agents seized in his home on March 8 in New York, was released by judicial order on June 20, after more than 100 days in ICE detention in Louisiana, which included threats of deportation and missing the birth of his son.
• June 22, Trump unilaterally launches Operation Midnight Hammer, allegedly intended to strike Iranian nuclear sites in Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan. However, his administration has already initiated efforts to muddy the waters on this operation after it was carried out.
• June 23, Trump appears to admit he coordinated with Iranian military forces on the striking of a US base in Qatar as retaliation for Midnight Hammer; the same day, he announced a seemingly non-existent ceasefire between Israel and Iran.
• Zohran Mamdani won New York’s Democratic mayoral primary by ranked-choice vote count on June 24; the word ’unprecedented’ hardly does justice to the unexpected success of his campaign.
• June 24, Al Jazeera reports that Israeli forces and drones have killed 86 Palestinians since dawn, including 56 near aid distribution centres, in an uptick in targeted attacks taking place on aid seekers and those in the vicinity of aid distribution centres observed in June 2025.
• The reported impact in Palestine, according to the UN, reaches over 56,000 reported fatalities, with 100% of the 2.1 million population in the Gaza Strip identified as “to face high levels of acute food insecurity.”
• New study finds death toll in Gaza reaches 84,000, far higher than official counts.
• Mark Carney continues his campaign of glazing Israel after setting the record straight that he doesn’t recognize a genocide in Gaza.
• On June 28, Ramy Youssef, at a sold-out show at the Beacon Theatre, welcomed Zohran Mamdani and Mahmoud Khalil onstage, the momentous crescendo of which, in the current sociopolitical and cultural Zeitgeist, was marked by a tearful, multiple standing ovation from everyone in attendance.

I started reading One Day around the first week of June this year. It was only about 40% through where I encountered this line that I had a genuine chuckle:

I get on, he starts driving. A few minutes later we pull onto the tarmac, right up to the stairs of Air Force One, and I realize I’ve gotten on the wrong bus. The way everyone’s smiling faces change when they hear the sentence “Hi, my name’s Omar and I’m not supposed to be flying with the president today” is a sight to behold.

For as serious as Omar El Akkad can be, he is also pretty funny. All the folks characterizing this book as a breakup letter, a polemic, or an indictment have it all wrong.

This work represents a desultory and loosely thematic memoir-essay centered on his lived experiences as a human, a journalist, and a Scotiabank Giller Award-winning novelist. It is at times difficult, at other times informative, yet at others reaffirming (and simultaneously despairing), with a handful of moments of comedic relief in the form of anecdote.

There are moments in the text that echo the tone of voice of writers such as bell hooks, Paulo Freire, and Michel Foucault, as he criticizes the structure of the system we inhabit at large. Still, it is a revolutionary tone, then, that I am comparing his work to, not an incendiary or polemical one, as everyone else seems to do.

For those like me, admittedly not well-versed in the historical literature on Palestinian oppression, Edward Said, or even the revolutionary authors I mentioned just now, Omar El Akkad’s book is more like a heart-to-heart, like bumping into an old friend at a protest. It isn’t contrived, you’re both already here, and he does all the talking.

It’s so predictable and funny to me that reviewers would aim to sensationalize their headlines, blurbs and reviews on behalf of this book, which contains nearly everything you can’t say on radio or television in about 100 brief pages. The text isn’t the sensational part. Penguin is just in it for the sales, of course, although the fact that they published it is mildly remarkable.

No, all I am really getting at is there’s no need to mischaracterize this book in order to embellish or endear it to its readers. I think it is more challenging and more valuable to try to say with an even timbre and steady breath what El Akkad’s book accomplishes, depicts, and represents.

Omar El Akkad’s work is self-contained and revelatory in its own right. It’s an essay in ten chapters that declares: I am informed to a fault, and I am not okay with this.

Even the absent thrill of errant hope has impressed a particular burden of nihilism upon me: How complicit are those who oppose the systems they inhabit? What will those elitist emcees who banked everything on breathy mentions of hope into a mic say at launches and award ceremonies now? How come we can’t do more?

It’s the MS St. Louis all over again. It’s the Rwandan genocide all over again. It’s the Iraq War all over again.

I’ll end my exploration with a handful of excerpts from Omar El Akkad, which, upon revisiting weeks after highlighting them, I realize speak for themselves more than I could possibly unpack them, except the last one:

The problem with fixating on the abyss into which one’s opponent has descended while simultaneously digging one’s own is that, eventually, it gets too dark to tell the difference.

[I]f the Hillary Clintons of the world can muster great outrage at the fortunes of the Barbie movie at the Oscars but nothing at population-wide military murder sprees, then every Republican will always be able to say, truthfully: At least there’s no contradiction between what I am, what I claim concerns me, and what I plan to do.

If the system to which I am forced to appeal responds only to attacks on its self-interest, what is there to hope for but that the next glaringly obvious injustice just happens to not quite perfectly intersect with that self-interest?

This last excerpt, which is two paragraphs, spoke the most to me because of the loud silence of a quiet few I mentioned earlier in El Akkad; re: how fear operates as social control:

Fear obscures the necessity of its causing. No one has ever been unjustifiably afraid, not in their own mind. An old college professor of mine once said a fundamental tenet of logic theory is that, from a false premise, any implication is true. Fear functions this way, too, causes the whole of the world to flower in limitless, terrible possibility.

It has always been this way—not just in this moment, this culmination of so many previous moments, but as a precondition of existence within a system whose currency of justification is fear. And it is a currency. The exchange rate is very real.

This last excerpt resonates so deeply within me. I recall having read Simone de Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity in 2015, after reading an out-of-print interview with Quebec novelist Réjean Ducharme, in which he essentially recommended only this book of hers, along with the journals of André Gide and Julien Green.

In his novel, L’avalée des avalés, Bérénice Einberg is sent by her uncle, Zio, to Israel as punishment, and the story ends with her in the midst of armed conflict.

Ducharme’s sparsity speaks to a profound gravitas within his work, and all this likely says something about the conflict between Catholicism and Judaism in Canadian society, as symbolized by his protagonist, Bérénice, whose appearance led to him being blackballed in Canada before he won the Governor General’s Award and the Prix Goncourt in 1966.

In The Ethics of Ambiguity, Simone de Beauvoir says:

If we were to try to establish a kind of hierarchy among men, we would put those who are denuded of this living warmth — the tepidity which the Gospel speaks of — on the lowest rung of the ladder. To exist is to make oneself a lack of being; it is to cast oneself into the world. Those who occupy themselves in restraining this original movement can be considered as sub-men. They have eyes and ears, but from their childhood on they make themselves blind and deaf, without love and without desire. This apathy manifests a fundamental fear in the face of existence, in the face of the risks and tensions which it implies. The sub-man rejects this “passion” which is his human condition, the laceration and the failure of that drive toward being which always misses its goal, but which thereby is the very existence which he rejects.

Then, she continues:

In lynchings, in pogroms, in all the great bloody movements organized by the fanaticism of seriousness and passion, movements where there is no risk, those who do the actual dirty work are recruited from among the sub-men. That is why every man who wills himself free within a human world fashioned by free men will be so disgusted by the sub-men. Ethics is the triumph of freedom over facticity, and the sub-man feels only the facticity of his existence. […] The sub-man makes his way across a world deprived of meaning toward a death which merely confirms his long negation of himself.

But in concordance with sub-men, there are also serious men who live through fear:

It is in a state of fear that the serious man feels this dependence upon the object; and the first of virtues, in his eyes, is prudence. He escapes the anguish of freedom only to fall into a state of preoccupation, of worry. Everything is a threat to him, since the thing which he has set up as an idol is an externality and is thus in relationship with the whole universe and consequently threatened by the whole universe; and since, despite all precautions, he will never be the master of this exterior world to which he has consented to submit, he will be constantly upset by the uncontrollable course of events. He will always be saying that he is disappointed, for his wish to have the world harden into a thing is belied by the very movement of life. The future will contest his present successes; his children will disobey him, his will will be opposed by those of strangers; he will be a prey to ill-humour and bitterness. His very successes have a taste of ashes, for the serious is one of those ways of trying to realize the impossible synthesis of the in-itself and the for itself. The serious man wills himself to be a god; but he is not one and knows it. He wishes to rid himself of his subjectivity, but it constantly risks being unmasked; it is unmasked. Transcending all goals, reflection wonders, “What’s the use?” There then blazes forth the absurdity of a life which has sought outside of itself the justifications which it alone could give itself. Detached from the freedom which might have genuinely grounded them, all the ends that have been pursued appear arbitrary and useless.

Fear is not facticity; we do not have to will ourselves into becoming victims of the status quo.

However, this is how I perceive the perspicacity of Omar El Akkad, who states that this is the way the world has always been: run by fear.

The system requires it because it suckers thoughtless, serious and passionate men in with the same promise: give up your individuality, give up your ethical code, join the herd and profit from the fear trade.

Whether they’re sub-men actively avoiding participating with the world on their own terms or serious men who have set up some immovable facticity on the pedestal of their own worldview, whose self-imposed shadow they can never escape, who think they must act but must fall in line to do so.

The gist of it all is: fear makes you an asset to the oppressors who trade in fear and run the world with it. As El Akkad said: fear is a currency, the exchange rate is very real.

This sentiment is quite literally embodied by the idea of Military Keynesianism (as well as the return to accusations of weapons of mass destruction as justification for the strikes carried out by Israel and the US on Iran). CanLit operates on its own form of Military Keynesianism and it’s disgusting.

Globally, military spending has increased significantly since the end of the Cold War, with more than 100 countries raising their military budgets in 2024.

There are obvious criticisms of Zionism for being a death cult, as well as being inherently antisemitic in and of itself.

I hope Omar El Akkad would find it germane for me to quote Beauvoir’s closing line, then, on that note:

If it came to be that each man did what he must, existence would be saved in each one without there being any need of dreaming of a paradise where all would be reconciled in death.

This fear, this death cult of fascism, Zionism, and liberal democracy, is all traded on the same exchange, Omar El Akkad demonstrates.

Canadian-British writer Cory Doctorow put it succinctly the other day on Mastodon:

If there’s anything that illustrates the hollowness of the Democratic Party as an effective opposition for me, it’s this.

Yesterday, I watched a video of a sitting US Senator being thrown to the ground and cuffed by fed goons for asking questions of the fed official he has direct oversight authority over.

Within minutes, I’d gotten DOZENS of texts from Dems and Dem orgs asking for $5-$550 to “fight fascism.”

That’s it. “Are you terrified that your country is slipping into fascism? Pay me.”

As a Canadian, I don’t want to lib out anymore.

I don’t want to get behind jingoist liberal chants of “elbows up” and pretend I know more about sports than I actually do in order to feel included. I’m also pretty sure every Canadian basically hated SNL until Mike did that elbow thing.

It’s patently ridiculous how quickly people will glom onto ideas like this in times like these. Boycotting stone fruit at the supermarket and tolerating a prime minister who dodges questions on genocide is simply not good enough.

Shit’s fucked up.

Liberals in Canada and Democratic voters in America have this in common: they will always fall prey to the Conservatives and the Republicans, who can one-up them on their hypocrisy, like Omar El Akkad writes, and say, “at least we know who we are: the post-truth Machiavellian goon squad.”

And this is what makes moments like Zohran winning the New York primary such a teachable moment. It was a moment of genuine surprise (“Political lightning struck New York City...”), how Mamdani came out of nowhere in what felt like the last minute and defeated Andrew Cuomo.

It gives a feeling of saying what everyone is thinking: Kamala Harris couldn’t do it, Mark Carney hasn’t permanently won over NDP-lifers, and abroad..., etc.; the winning political maneuver for liberal democracy is not to make appeals to the political right, with things like cops, borders, and military spending—it’s connecting with people, speaking to everybody collectively, and focusing on economic policy rather than cultural issues.

If you are a user of social media already accustomed to sharing and reposting content about the genocide being livestreamed right now, seeing Zohran during the televised debate say he wouldn’t leave the city after becoming mayor, that he would meet people where they are, so he can begin to serve them, is a striking contrast.

This immediately led the questioner to ask him dog whistle questions about Israel, and it was borderline impossible not to empathize with Zohran. This is the institution in power today. There was no expectation that he would win the primary, even at this moment; only that there was an egregious injustice in how the debate host attacked him for having the most normal, reasonable, and qualified response to a leading and weird question.

Zohran Mamdani kicks ass.

Populism isn’t just for authoritarian heads of state and cryptobros—Zohran can do it, too.

El Akkad writes:

One day there will be no more looking away. Looking away from climate disaster, from the last rabid takings of extractive capitalism, from the killing of the newly stateless.

The pendulum can swing back from authoritarianism, the military-industrial complex, and empire, but it has to be the people who build the momentum.

The truth and reconciliation committees are coming. The land acknowledgments are coming. The very sorry descendants are coming.

This isn’t a celebration of those on the left of the political spectrum, nor a rallying cry for people to pull themselves up by ethical bootstraps to save the world.

This is my review of Omar El Akkad’s essay—it’s not haunting, it’s not shocking, it’s not bombastic. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is a lucid, candid, and no-nonsense narration of where Omar finds himself today, speaking his mind about what people often expect journalists to say in a stakeholder-laden newspaper or magazine but can’t.

It is deeply vulnerable, individualistic, and perspicacious. Owing not entirely to his worldliness nor his lack of ownership for his detachment from the world, One Day, in a word, is his memento for this moment in history.

One day the social currency of liberalism will accept as legal tender the suffering of those they previously smothered in silence, turned away from in disgust as one does carrion on the roadside. Far enough gone, the systemic murder of a people will become safe enough to fit on a lawn sign. There’s always room on a liberal’s lawn.

As citizens of the world, we have some profound, personal changes to make before it is too late—before the libs break their tacit vow of silence to proudly proclaim “we have always been against this.”

I’ll be the first to respond: No, you fucking haven’t, you weirdos.