“One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This”: Omar El Akkad on Gaza & Western Complicity

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. That’s the title of the new book by award-winning author and journalist Omar El Akkad. The book is a powerful reckoning with the West amidst its monumental moral failures as the war on Gaza has unfolded.

AMY GOODMAN: Omar El Akkad is also the author of two novels, the most recent titled What Strange Paradise. He’s joining us now from Portland, Oregon.

Omar, welcome to Democracy Now! This is a powerful, poetic, probing work. And why don’t we start with that title, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This? Explain what you mean.

OMAR EL AKKAD: Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.

I was thinking in — this was in late October of 2023. I was thinking about how I fit into this part of the world. I’ve been sort of attuned to the West from a very young age. I grew up on the culture of this part of the world. It’s the reason I sound the way I do. And I was trying to figure out how I fit into this part of the world, given that it’s my tax money that’s killing those Palestinian kids, that I’m doing this.

And I was thinking in terms of pattern recognition. I was thinking in terms of how it’s very difficult to find someone today who will tell you that they were always in support of South African apartheid or segregation in this country, and how, once it’s safe enough, everyone can go back in hindsight and talk about how awful the awful thing was. And a lot of the book is about that, is about trying to think in those terms when you’re still in the moment where the horrible thing is happening, where the slaughter is happening.

And so, the book comes out of that. And it’s in large part trying to figure out my place in a society and in an ordering of the world where I happen to live on the launching side of the missiles — and as a result, it’s very, very easy for me to look away — and what happens when you decide you’re not going to look away.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Omar, you also say that the book is, quote — this is your words — “This is an account of a fracture,” you say about the book, “a breaking away from the notion that the polite, Western liberal ever stood for anything at all.” If you could elaborate on what you mean by that and what Western liberal you have in mind?

OMAR EL AKKAD: To be perfectly honest, I mean, I have a previous version of myself in mind. I don’t think there’s a single thing in this book that is indicted or interrogated or autopsied in which I am not personally complicit or haven’t been at a certain point in my life. I mean, look, to be perfectly honest with you, for the majority of my time living in this country, I was very much one of those people who picked up the ballot and looked at who has the “R” next to their name and then voted for whoever had the “D” next to their name, because, hey, lesser of two evils.

And that’s, I suppose, perfectly fine, up until a point — up until a point where you are waking up every morning, opening up your computer and witnessing evidence of the worst things human beings can do to one another, and then being told, again, by the lesser of two evils, that this is necessary and that this is good. And I think, at a certain point, there comes a kind of fracture.

And look, I spent the last two-and-a-half months on the road doing the book tour for this book, and we had these massive audiences. And look, I draw about five people to my book events, on average. I am not that guy. I don’t draw hundreds of people. Most of your viewers have no idea who I am. It wasn’t because of the book. It wasn’t because of me. I think it’s because a lot of people in this country, and in the West, in general, have spent the last year and a half feeling like they’re losing their minds, being told repeatedly that this grotesque atrocity after atrocity is something that they have to support, and that if they don’t, they’re the bad guys.

And I think there’s a kind of disconnect that eventually causes you to sever from this idea of, “Well, I’ll just be the centrist, and I’ll vote for the lesser of two evils,” and so on and so forth. That works up until a point. And I think over the last year and a half, that’s sort of fallen apart. And there’s a lot of people who are deeply uncertain about where they stand now, given that they can no longer maintain this sort of veneer of centrism or mainstream liberalism that has failed so spectacularly time and time again.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Yeah, Omar, we’ll definitely go back to that point, because it’s something that you also present very beautifully in the book, the demand for a kind of dissociation, which, as you say, in your own case, became at a certain point impossible to sustain, the contradiction. But if we could talk a little bit more about your own genealogy? The book is, of course, about this massive failure of the West, the kind of — “discomfort” is too light a word almost — insanity that this split has produced in many people, including yourself, as you said, in, on the one hand, seeing every day the worst, as you said, that humanity can do to one another, humans can do to one another in Gaza, and at the same time hearing statements that either deny that something like that is happening at all or say that what’s happening is absolutely essential to happen. You intersperse stories of your own childhood growing up, born in Egypt, raised in Qatar, until you moved to the West. Explain where you see your own story and how you’ve come to think of this, how that’s important.

OMAR EL AKKAD: So, when I was about 5 years old, my father had to get out of Egypt. The political situation was really bad. The economic situation was really bad. And we ended up in Qatar, in the Middle East. And that’s where I grew up. That’s where I spent sort of my teenage years. And one of the things about growing up in a place like Qatar is that, essentially, all culture is censored to some degree. You know, the first time I watched Titanic, it was about an hour long and very poorly edited, and it took me a long time to realize that this had actually been sort of chopped to pieces by the government censors. You know, that sort of thing.

And when you grow up in that kind of environment, the projection of what you need the other place to be becomes really, really important. And so, my first thoughts about what the West is, what the United States is aren’t so much about what the place is as what it isn’t. And so, I can go there, and these movies won’t be censored. The music won’t be censored. I can be left alone. I can go to the library and pick out whatever book I want. And so, you project what you need the place to be onto the place. And that was — that’s how I first thought of the West. And I think, for a long time, that’s enough for me.

One of the issues about finally coming to this part of the world, which I did when I was 16 years old, is that you then have to contend with what it actually is. And I think the reason I end up writing a book like this about this part of the world, as opposed to, say, about Egypt, is because I’m not criticizing something because I love to sit around and criticize. And I get all of the responses that have been, essentially, one version or another of, “Well, go back where you came from.” I get that. I’ve been getting that for most of my life. But there is, to me, a sense of there being something worth saving here, of there being something really, really important, and that the avenue toward saving it and toward salvaging it cannot come independent of criticism, because I grew up in a place where that was the case. And I can tell you that complete abolishing of criticism accomplishes exactly what you think, which is nothing at all. And so, to me, the reason to write something like this in the first place is because I know what it looks like when you excise all criticism and all dissent from a society. I know exactly what that looks like, and it is a terrifying thing.

AMY GOODMAN: Omar, I wanted to end on a specific point: on Palestinian journalists. You write about the rightful indignation of the capture of Evan Gershkovich in Russia, and the world renunciation of that. He was held for about a year and a half. Then you talk about the comparison to the response to the deaths of Palestinian journalists, when you say, “When every last Palestinian journalist has been killed, maybe there will never have been any Palestinian journalists at all.” Talk about the response in both cases.

OMAR EL AKKAD: So, I was a journalist. That’s the only real job I’ve ever had. I was a journalist for 10 years. And I don’t say anything I’m about to say in terms of trying to just blanket criticize the institution of journalism. I have immense respect for the vast majority of journalists.

There’s a chapter in the book about fear and about the idea of what that word means, because one morning I woke up, and I found an audio recording of a Palestinian girl begging for her life, before the car she was in was shot at least 355 times by Israeli soldiers. And then I read a column from a columnist who was scared about protesters at college campuses. And I can’t use the word “fear” to describe both of those situations. If that word can be used to encompass the entirety of that spectrum, that word has no meaning at all.

And the reason I bring this up is because the same is true of journalism. I am watching Palestinian journalists give their lives to report this information, and they are the sole source of news about what is happening in a killing field. And then I’m watching columnists and I’m watching reporters on this side of the planet essentially pretend that those folks don’t exist, because, hey, it’s controversial, and who knows, and maybe they’re linked to Hamas and whatever. And I can’t use the word “journalism” to describe all of that. I need a different word, because right now, while I’m watching such fundamental failures of journalism, I’m also watching some of the best examples of journalism in the world. And again, we go back to this idea of the disconnect, the dissociation —

AMY GOODMAN: We have 15 seconds.

OMAR EL AKKAD: — the chasm between two things. And for me, that’s what it comes down to, is: What does that word mean? Because it’s describing two very different things right now.

AMY GOODMAN: And we’re going to talk more about that in Part 2 of our discussion, and we’re going to post it online at democracynow.org. Omar El Akkad is a journalist and award-winning author. His new book is just out. It’s called One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.