For Gaza, with Outrage and Hope: Twenty Minutes with Omar El Akkad

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
Omar El Akkad
McClelland & Stewart (2025)

Omar El Akkad is hardly the first renowned author to speak to the horrors unfolding in Gaza. Ta-Nehisi Coates’s 2024 book, The Message, criticized Israeli occupation of the region in no uncertain terms. In his book Coates drew parallels between Israel’s presence in Gaza to the racial segregation that defined America’s Jim Crow South and admits he’d been misled by Western propaganda.

“That it was complicated, he now understood, was ‘horseshit,’” journalist Ryu Spaeth explained in an October 2024 profile in New York Magazine upon the book’s release. “‘Complicated’ was how people had described slavery and then segregation. ‘It’s complicated,’ [Coates] said, ‘when you want to take something from somebody.’”

Coates’s press tour in support of The Message was fraught, to put it mildly. Coates made his case; interviewers and critics made ugly scenes — fools of themselves, in some cases — in response.

“Some of those reviews,” El Akkad told the Tyee, reached by phone while driving through Ontario, “were some of the most racist things that I've ever read in my life.”

But Coates was right, and somewhere down the road, the critics will insist they always knew it. Of this, El Akkad is no less convinced than he was in October 2023, when he composed the social media post that gives his latest work its title.

Writing in response to the Israeli government’s bombing of Gaza, as well as Western media’s unwillingness to confront the fact that our governments were supporting the unfolding genocide of the Palestinian people, the Egyptian-Canadian author posted the following to the social media platform X:

“One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.”

The Giller Prize winner’s new book, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, unpacks this emotionally charged viral statement. In a series of essays that expertly straddle the line between memoir and manifesto, it reveals the hopes and heartbreak of its emotionally exhausted, grieving author.

“It’s no use, in the end,” El Akkad writes, “to scream again and again at the cold, cocooned centre of power: I need you, just this once, to be the thing you pretend to be.”

El Akkad spoke to the Tyee about numbness, non-violence, breaking up with the West and why he believes his remarkable new book is the most hopeful thing that he’s written so far.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The Tyee: I paid close attention to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s press tour for The Message, where many were being wilfully misunderstanding and antagonistic, and I thought, I would not want to be promoting a book about the genocide in Gaza right now. I had a similar thought reading yours. How are you feeling?

Omar El Akkad: I mean, there’s an element of numbness involved, I suppose, precisely because of the kind of thing that you just talked about. I think, also, in the case of someone like Ta-Nehisi — I got to interview him twice when he came to Portland and then again in Seattle — that guy’s gotten it so much worse than I ever will.

But I was asking him about it, and he said, yeah, there’s been a lot of bad stuff, but there’s also been a lot of love. And that’s one thing I didn't realize.

You know, there’s obviously the “go back where you came from” crowd, and people who have not read the book at all making deliberately disingenuous arguments.

But there’s also been an immense amount of support. And I’m not saying that people love the book or anything. I think one of the purposes that it seems to be serving is as a space for people to grieve, and to feel a little less crazy about what the last year-and-a-half has done to them, to their communities, to their relationships. So that's been the defining effect so far.

I’d have to agree. Rather than, say, pitching a solution to the horrors, your book invites readers to sit in that “numb, overriding grief,” that despair, and to reflect, as you write, on “the moment millions of people looked at the West, the rules-based order, the shell of modern liberalism and the capitalistic thing it serves, and said: I want nothing to do with this.” Admittedly, it sounded very jaded, but it feels revolutionary.

Some of the most thoughtful discussions I’ve had about the book so far have been discussions in which everyone involved is ready to change their minds about something. To me, the defining aftertaste of this book isn’t rage or anger, it’s uncertainty.

Now I’ve spent my entire adult life orienting myself towards a particular part of the world, towards a particular kind of liberalism, and I feel unanchored from that.

But the problem is that I don't know who I am on the other side of that. So there’s a deep uncertainty that runs through the entire book.

As an adoptee, that uncertainty jumped out to me. When you talk about assimilation, and the distance between “Who one is and who they must become”, I thought, I’ve done that work too, only to reach the point where, looking back, it was all just deeply irrational. And then there’s a coming apart. I wonder how you begin to rebuild when you step out of that fog, so to speak.

I don’t need to tell you this, right? You know it better than I ever will: this notion of not just what costumes you’re asked to wear so as to assimilate or supposed to better fit in, but also the degree to which you’re rewarded for that. I spent a lot of my life being rewarded for being acceptable in that way, and it’s quite possible that the opposite is now true with respect to this book. But I think it is a weight to carry.

Honestly, the most profound reactions I’ve gotten about the book are from folks who have been in that position. Folks who, maybe, their parents came from another part of the world, and they have that lineage, but they grew up here, and they very much are oriented towards this place, and now don’t know who they are.

Because they’ve been waking up every day for the last year and a half and watching evidence of the worst things human beings can do to one another, and knowing that a big part of being acceptable here is being okay with that.

And not speaking out about it. I’m thinking about the line early on where you talked about the man who “violated the bounds of his assumed nonexistence,” which is what you’re doing with this work.

I suspect that a lot of us in any given situation are facing some version of that, where the reward for looking away from something just greatly outweighs the personal benefits of trying to do something about it.

That’s certainly true within journalism, where the performance of centrism often means looking away. Especially when one’s very existence is leftist, when the racialized body is leftist and the onus is on me, as a Black journalist, to prove that I can “do centrism” despite coming into the industry with literal skin in the game.

I think that, in a vacuum, this idea of non-partisanship as it applies to something like journalism, is fantastic. It’s a great idea. But when the entirety of your context is deeply partisan, it can’t help but fail.

You see it up-front, right? The collateral damage of it is not just the integrity of the news being reported, but it’s the well-being of the people who are put in these positions where they have to engage with a system that is deeply invested in its own performance of non-partisanship, while being structured on top of something that is deeply, deeply unequal.

And I just don't think those two things can sort of inhabit the same space.

It’s like we live in different realities. I had to laugh at your fear that the book would cause headaches for the publisher, and then the publisher saying, 'well, you know, the situation will probably be different by the time the book comes out.' When I was writing Invisible Boy, I was told, it’s a shame that you can’t get this book out now during the Black Lives Matter protests, because these issues might be sorted out by the time your book is ready. Sorted out? What world do you live in that racism won’t still be timely a year from now?

In the thick of finishing up the first draft and then editing the first, second, third draft, which was sort of the early part, and then the middle of last year, I was getting that kind of comment so frequently — this notion that, yeah, but by the time it comes out, that’ll all be over. I kept thinking, like, I don’t think this will be over. I think your tolerance level for continuing to not look away from it is going to be over.

Yes. You will have moved on.

That might be where we are.

It does feel like people have moved on, and that includes many of our leftist heroes, who are not spared from your criticism. At one point, you talk about the Arab leader in American War whose speech is read as comically insincere — but you just copied it from Barack Obama's speech in Cairo. Later, you quote Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez saying, “I don't associate myself with what's happening [in Gaza],” only to respond, “It must take great courage to disassociate so fully.” It's been hard to explain to people why losing faith in, say, the Democratic Party is not the same thing as voting for Donald Trump. But I think you did a good job of explaining: everyone is disappointing.

I have been amazed at the number of people who read that section and assumed that I went out and voted for Trump or something. It’s a bizarre kind of situation to be in. When the system has been created to serve you, an attack on the system feels like an attack on you. And all of this, I think, is compounded by the specific situation I live in, in the U.S., where there’s a real sort of binary power structure where there are only two political parties that have any chance in hell of running the thing.

By definition, one of them is labelled a left-wing party, and one of them is labelled the right-wing party, when there’s no real relationship with reality. We don’t have a left-wing party and right-wing party: we have a centre-right party and a quasi-fascist cult.

When the former tethers itself to being better than the latter, well, the latter is just getting worse. The trajectory is horrifying.

If Trump wants to build 50 internment camps at the border to imprison migrants and the Democrats work him down to 25, that's not a victory. But that’s centrism.

Speaking of Trump, it’s very strange to be meeting on the day that the U.S. tariffs come into effect. As a Canadian, I’ve watched my whole life while the Americans wreaked havoc elsewhere, all the while assuming it could never happen here. But it can, and it already was before today, because oppression anywhere is oppression everywhere. It’s like you said: “a terrible thing is happening to you now.”

It's fascinating watching people respond with justified and near-apocalyptic rage to being on the receiving ends of the whims of an empire, being told that they are subservient and they are to be a kind of resource to the empire. Because you’re sitting there watching it, and you’re thinking: this isn’t far away for you anymore.

I don’t know how this ends. I genuinely don't know what’s coming, and I think that’s going to be true at least for the next four years.

But I am learning something about the necessity of proximity when it comes to people's outrage at injustice.

Because I’ve been watching horrific things happen to far away people for a very long time now, and I’ve seen a very muted response on the part of people who — when it is close, when the horror is even orders of magnitude less, but near — are very capable of generating that outrage.

On that note, I want to ask you about non-violence. “One of the most lasting consequences of the war on terror,” you write, “is the utter obliteration of the obvious moral case for nonviolence.” At another point you say that revenge and consequence warp beyond recognition once one has been made to bury their child. I’m reminded of Nina Simone shouting at MLK: “I’m not non-violent!” And he says, “Sister, you don’t have to be.” It seems like you’re saying something similar.

It’s been one of the most legitimate sources of criticism levelled at the book: you talk about resistance to injustice, and then you get real squishy around the idea of armed resistance. And I have no defense against that. I really don’t.

The more I think about it, the more I come to a certain set of conclusions. The first being that I have no right to tell anyone how to resist their occupation anywhere in the world. But the second being that I can sit here and tell you what a total pacifist I am, and how I abhor all forms of violence, but by virtue of how my tax money is spent, I’m one of the most violent human beings on earth.

It’s real easy to say all of this stuff when you live on the launching side of the missiles. I'm not sure that there's a single belief I have, or a single piece of certainty that I hold onto, that might not be immediately obliterated the second someone hurts a loved one of mine.

I would love to live in a world where I could make the case that non-violence is a moral imperative. I can make it for myself, but increasingly, I'm shown that I don’t live in that world. My argument now for nonviolence is much more pragmatic. The state has the bigger guns.

This is something Baldwin talked about towards the end of his life. It’s an asymmetric arena of engagement. Whereas love, compassion, joy — those are all asymmetric in the other direction. The state has no idea what to do with that. Non-involvement.

The state has a much harder time punishing you for what you don’t do, what you don’t buy. But I do wish I lived in a world where I didn't have to make the pragmatic argument for non-violence, where the moral one was enough.

I like non-involvement as a concept, and as a counter to the current sense of powerlessness that many of us feel. As you said: “It doesn't matter what or how vigorously I condemn.” It seems a bit like nihilism, and you acknowledge that, but in the end, this book isn’t about nihilism at all. It's the present system that's nihilistic — the oppressive sense that there’s nothing better than this, no alternative. In the end, you’re arguing against that, for hope.

I’ve spent so much of the last year and a half listening to arguments in favour of the least-worst option, and they’re valid arguments in the sense that there is a least-worst option, but what I find myself allergic to now is the idea that we should always be choosing between the lesser of two evils. Because that evil is getting more evil every day, and so the trajectory is not particularly promising.

With respect to the book, I think of it as the most hopeful thing I’ve ever written, despite the subject matter. Because, in a sense, while I’ve become so disillusioned with the institutional load-bearing beams of this part of the world, be they political, academic, cultural, you name it, I’ve had the exact opposite reaction to acts of individual and communal bravery.

You're watching people risk their livelihoods, risk their social standing, in some cases, risk their freedom to stand up for something. And that’s been incredibly inspiring.