Book: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad
Genre: Nonfiction
Publisher: Knopf
Publication date: 2025

Source: E-book borrowed from the library

Summary: In One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, El Akkad takes a look at Western imperialism and hypocrisy. His perspective is partly as an outsider looking in, seeing things that I find it hard to see myself without this kind of guidance. There are lots of personal stories to ground us in his experiences in Egypt, Qatar, Canada, and the US.

His observations demonstrate how the internal clashes in Western culture impact actions of people and nations in the world, often with hidden agendas. Sometimes the agendas are hidden from ourselves because we just don’t want to look at the places where our philosophies apply to us but not to others.

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2025. That’s why it showed up frequently in Nonfiction November and how it got on my list of books to read.

Thoughts: 

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This came along at just the right time for me.

Our book group read two books of poetry by Palestinian authors for April, National Poetry Month. As I started to read them, I realized that I haven’t been thinking nearly enough about Palestine. The poetry was fine but it wasn’t going to help me think about it in the way I wanted. I experienced a frustration that had nothing to do with the books we read: Forest of Noise: Poems by Mosab Abu Toha and Rifqa by Mohammed El-Kurd.

Fortunately, my turn came up at the library to check out One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This and it proved to be the perfect companion for the poetry.

El Akkad’s viral tweet in October 2023 about the destruction in Gaza was the source of the title of this book. The book helped me with my thinking about Gaza, but it’s also much more general.

Quotes like this one pretty much described where I was before I started reading the book:

Once far enough removed, everyone will be properly aghast that any of this was allowed to happen. But for now, it’s just so much safer to look away, to keep one’s head down, periodically checking on the balance of polite society to see if it is not too troublesome yet to state what to the conscience was never unclear.

Reading El Akkad’s book required some of the skill that I’ve learned from anti-racism instruction in recent years. When I’m feeling defensive, I remind myself that I’m not to blame for the mental patterns that my culture gave me. I didn’t have much choice in that. My choice comes in what I do with what I learn from the broader perspectives that writers like Omar El Akkad provide for me.

As hard as it is to read, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This manages to take us to a slightly more hopeful possibility. A better world comes if we pay attention instead of looking away, if we notice courage in others and emulate it ourselves, and if we engage with our fellow humans from a spirit of compassion and solidarity.

Another bit of good timing came with two recent shows on the topic that were clarifying. The Fresh Air episode, in particular, made the case for striving to be a loud and committed peacemaker.

• Reckoning With Israel’s ‘One-State Reality’ on The Ezra Klein Show
• Israeli and Palestinian activists share a vision for peace in Gaza on Fresh Air

Appeal: If the Israel and Palestinian conflict and/or the Middle East feels like a scary topic to even think about, much less learn about enough to discuss, then One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is a good starting point.

I recommend taking it in with some other perspectives, like the ones I mentioned above, because I found that helpful. Part of my Western instinct is to question things that come from one source, but if I can get at it from different angles, my brain is more receptive.

Have you read this book? What did you think?