One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
Omar El Akkad
From award-winning novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad, an urgent and necessary reckoning with what it means to live in the West today.
As an immigrant, Omar El Akkad believed the West would be a place of freedom and justice for all. But in the past twenty years, reporting on the various Wars on Terror, climate change, Black Lives Matter protests, and more, and watching the unmitigated slaughter in Gaza, he has come to the conclusion that much of what the West promises is a lie. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is a chronicle of that painful realisation, a moral grappling with what it means – as a citizen of the US, as a father – to carve out some sense of possibility during these devastating times.
This is El Akkad’s nonfiction debut, his most raw and vulnerable work to date. It’s a heartfelt breakup letter with the West, a brilliant articulation of the same breakup we are watching all over the world, in family rooms, on university campuses, on city streets. This book is for everyone who wants something better than what the West has served up. This is the book for our time.
andOne Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
‘This book is a howl from the heart of our age. I struggle to find more precise wording that might capture its ferocious, fracturing rage, as it seeks to describe the indescribable, make coherent an increasingly incoherent world.’
‘It is difficult to understand the nature of a true rupture while it is still tearing through the fabric of our world. Yet that is precisely what Omar El Akkad has accomplished, putting broken heart and shredded illusions into words with tremendous insight, skill and courage. A unique and urgently needed book.’
‘I feel inadequate to describe a book like this with the right superlatives – I don’t want to reduce the book down to one thing in doing so…but I hope Omar El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This will find a large audience.’
‘I can’t think of a more important piece of writing to read right now… I found hope here, and help, to face what the world is now, all that it isn’t anymore. Please read this. I promise you won’t regret it.’
‘A startling, shocking, beautiful and essential book.’
‘I urge you to read Omar El Akkad’s astonishing book.’
‘Part elegy, part rallying cry, this magnificent book should, and will, be required reading for future generations trying to reckon with one of humanity’s darkest chapters.’
‘If we, as humans, are lucky enough, we will someday be ashamed of ourselves for what is happening in the world today before our eyes. Some of us can already see that day and are deeply disgusted by the collective hypocrisy that waits until it is safe to shout out the crimes. It is not easy to write or talk when you feel that disgust; it chokes you and breaks your faith in humanity. One can hear that all-too-human disgust in Omar El Akkad’s words. However, what is more audible in his words is his determination to keep his faith in humans. Only those who can write with such rage and love will give a heart to a heartless world. His poetic verse, with its elegant power, can only come from those who are one with the world, with its joy and pain.’
‘It this the most urgent book you can read right now? Yes, it is. Is this the most moral book you can read right now? It sure is. Is this the most eye-opening book right now. Yep. Is this the most needed book for our times? Absolutely.’
‘A landmark of truth-telling and moral courage, One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is the truest most necessary book you will ever read.’
‘In this powerful indictment of Western complicity in the genocide of Palestinians, Omar El Akkad asks: how are we supposed to go on living in the world? He looks for his answer to the worlds colonised and oppressed, who have always lived according to a love that “cannot be acknowledged by the empire because it’s a people’s love for one another.’
‘One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This wants us to answer its questions with the greatest possible honesty, and to embrace those answers as our true companions. What it gives us is nothing less than lionhearted, dauntless, unembellished love.’
‘An extraordinary, essential work of fury and humanity, as well as a damning indictment of Western hypocrisy and institutional malignity. I cannot conceive of a more important book to read right now, or a more incisive and elegant articulation of this dark time. Every page contains a sentence or a paragraph I wanted to tear out and nail to the wall. I wish I could send a copy of El Akkad’s moral call to arms to every person in America, every person in the West—the outraged and the apathetic alike.’
‘Omar El Akkad has produced something close to impossible with this elegiac and deeply personal book. With barely contained fury at the depths of Western hypocrisy, El Akkad manages to speak not just for himself but for all of us in the face of Israel’s unspeakable violence against the Palestinians.’
‘El Akkad’s propulsive and damning indictment of Western violence and sanctimony in Palestine and beyond reads as a cry from the heart. He carefully dissects what it means to be an immigrant writing about the brutality of a system he has chosen to be part of and all the ensuing psychological harm that follows.’
‘Omar El Akkad’s devastating new book lays bare the deliberately distorted twists of language and logic that have allowed us to sustain a politics of extermination. The care, grief, anger and intimacy that Akkad brings to every page implicates all of us and is a testament to the moral and intellectual courage that make this desperately needed book absolutely necessary.’
‘Lays bare and eviscerates the genocidal logics of fascism and liberalism. Here, language does what we need it to do: it clarifies, it condemns, it names, it grieves. Here, too, is a lexicon for what might survive this. Devastating and scathing; you will want to read, will want to have read, this book.’
‘Omar’s book is riveting in its honesty. I found it to be a brilliant mosaic of heartfelt reflections on the sad state of the world, one that dared to end in hope.’
‘This book is a reckoning. The lie that the West is founded upon—from the beginning—blooms in blood on the pages. This book is a love story in the face of genocide—a love born between the very peoples we have always colonised and killed as if they are the raw material of building nations. What a furious, perfect heart it took to stare into the abyss we call being human and emerge with a revolution song.’
‘A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.’
‘Terrifying, shameful, and necessary testimony.’
‘A furious, intimate, profound articulation of the soul ache so many of us have been feeling every single day for the past fifteen months as we watch the Israel/US assault on Gaza unfold. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is a book I wish I could gift to everyone in America. I have honestly never recommended a work of nonfiction as strongly as I do this one. There is no doubt in my mind that it will become one of the essential texts of this unfathomably dark time. A painful but essential indictment of a broken world.’
