It all began with a tweet. 

In October 2023, weeks after Israel began bombing Gaza, the writer Omar El Akkad shared a video showing a destroyed city street in Gaza.

El Akkad wrote, “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 tweet went viral. 

El Akkad, who was born in Egypt and grew up in Qatar and Canada, now lives in Lake Oswego. His previous novels, American War and What Strange Paradise, received significant critical acclaim. The New York Times called America War, “a disturbing parable about the ruinous consequences of war on ordinary civilians,” and BBC named it one of the 100 most influential novels of all time. What Strange Paradise won the 2021 Giller Prize, an Oregon Book Award, and was a finalist for the 2022 Aspen Words Literary Prize. 

Now, what began within the constraints of 280 characters has become a blazing and feral work of nonfiction. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is El Akkad is at his most exacting. The book is the story of El Akkad’s immigration to the West, his lessons in hypocrisy working as a staff reporter for a paper in Canada and reporting on some of the biggest conflicts of the past two decades, and an evisceration of the entire concept of empire.  

In advance of the book's publication on February 25 and an appearance by El Akkad at Powell's City of Books, we spoke with the author about his new work, the performative aspect of caring, and the pressure to forget. 

PORTLAND MERCURY: I put off reading your book for as long as possible because I was scared of how distressing I might find it, but when I ended up reading it, it did not feel distressing. It actually felt relieving. To have the hypocrisy called out so clearly. Was there relief in writing this book, and getting to talk directly about this thing everyone is pretending isn’t happening?

OMAR EL AKKAD: I don’t know that I’ve felt anything like relief in the last year and a half. I’ve seen too many images of children slaughtered, entire families wiped out, the worst things human beings can do to one another, done over and over again. What I feel, overwhelmingly, I think, is shame. I’m the one who killed those kids. My tax dollars paid for it. How did it come to be that I and so many people I share this society with have become so well-versed in looking away from horror?

You have said that your first novel, American War, was an allegory for Israel and Palestine, but the reception discussed it solely as a book about America and American politics. Is that misconception part of what motivated you to write this book?

I’ve come to terms with that chasm between the American War I wrote and the American War most people on this side of the planet read. Ironically, I’m now braced for the likelihood that an opposite chasm will come to define this book: It’s going to be received as a book primarily about Palestine, but Palestinians can tell their own stories (and have been telling their own stories, even if so many in the West refuse to listen). In my mind, this book is very much about here, about the empire.

What is the experience of writing a book that is so timely about a moment that will soon be erased from public memory?

I don’t know if I’ve written an important book, or even a good one, but what drove me through the writing process was the expectation (as has certainly been the case in previous atrocities, most recently the horror of the war on terror years) that soon we will be told that this was all very long ago, and we need to just move on. 

The next few years, I think, will be defined by a kind of mass exhaustion—not only with respect to the slaughter of Palestinians, but what is about to happen and in some cases has been happening to migrants, trans folks, anyone the prevailing systems of power were never intended to serve. If only as a kind of psychological self-defense, we will all be tempted to just forget any of this ever happened. It’s understandable, and yet we need to do everything in our power to fight against it. 

The ceasefire of January 2025 seems to be the perfect performative opportunity for US politicians. Is this really the heart of what you mean by One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This? That this is all just performative?

I think the underlying commonality between capitalism and colonialism is an endless appetite for taking. The most tangible things are taken first: the land, the resources, the lives of those who oppose the taking of the land, and the resources. But there are other kinds of taking that come later, and one of the very last is the taking of narrative. Empires are very good at the performance of shame and contrition once all the horror is over, but this too is a kind of theft. It’s the taking of someone’s very real grief and saying, well after it’s too late to do anything meaningful about it, that this grief is mine now, too. It’s land acknowledgments after the land is taken, memoirs from Gulf War veterans about how sad it made them to kill all those Brown people. We’ve seen it all before, and long after the bones of thousands of dead Palestinians are pulled out from under the rubble, we’ll see it again.

In the last chapter, you seem to be pulled toward two conclusions—that we may come to acknowledge what we did in Gaza and even come to regret it, or we may just forget about it. But isn't there a third option: that this is who we actually are? That the polite liberal stance just collapses under the weight of this hypocrisy and that Trumpism isn't the peak of some reaction to it, but merely the beginning of a new era of Imperial America? As I write this, we just nominated a Secretary of Defense who once chanted "Kill all Muslims." Maybe this is America without the hypocrisy.

I think you might be right. But I should say, as much as the last 15 months have caused me to lose any shred of respect for or faith in the vast majority of the West’s political, academic, cultural, and corporate institutions, I’ve also been deeply inspired by what so many individuals have done in the face of this nightmare. I’ve watched college kids put their whole futures on the line for justice; I’ve watched people chain themselves to the gates of weapons manufacturers, shipworkers’ unions refuse to load missiles onto the boats. 

So yes, maybe this is exactly what we are, or maybe it’s just what we’ve allowed ourselves to become, and if that’s the case, maybe we can allow ourselves to become something better than this.

Omar El Akkad reads at Powell’s City of Books, 1001 W Burnside, Tues Feb 25, 7 pm, FREE