One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
by Omar El Akkad
Summary
The title is a prophecy and an accusation at once. In October 2023, as the bombardment of Gaza began, the novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad posted that one day, when it is safe, when there is no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it is too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this. The post traveled the world, and this book is its long form reckoning: a suite of essays written in the war's first year about watching, from the safety of the American Pacific Northwest, a destruction conducted with his adopted civilization's weapons and blessed with its language. El Akkad writes from the full length of his biography, born in Egypt, raised in Qatar, made a journalist in Canada, where he covered Afghanistan and Guantánamo, settled in the United States, where his acclaimed novel American War imagined his new country undone by its own methods, and the book's subject is finally not Gaza alone but the West as seen from inside its promises: the rules based order that suspends its rules, the liberalism that mourns selectively, the language, his own trade's language, of passive voices and both sides, deployed so that no one is ever doing the killing. Fintan O'Toole called it a distraught but eloquent cry, and reviewers praised its well earned rage. It is not a history and offers no policy; it is a moral record, written against the future absolution the title predicts. The book won the 2025 National Book Award for Nonfiction.
Historical Context & Significance
The book was published in February 2025, while the war it addresses continued, and became a bestseller amid the American argument over Gaza, the campus protests, and the language of news coverage, the exact terrain its essays dissect; the 2025 National Book Award, announced that November, placed the National Book Foundation itself inside the controversy, which the award's history suggests is where the nonfiction prize has often stood. El Akkad, who spent a decade at the Globe and Mail covering Afghanistan and Guantánamo before turning to fiction, became one of the war's most quoted witnesses in English. The title entered the language as shorthand for retrospective conscience, which was its design, and the book's underlying question, what the witness owes the witnessed, has outlived the news cycle it was written inside.