Review: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, by Omar El Akkad

Omar El Akkad was born in Cairo, grew up in Qatar and moved to Canada when he was 16. He became a journalist with the conservative paper The Globe and Mail, one of the top two dailies in Canada. El Akkad covered mainly Middle Eastern matters such as the war in Afghanistan and the Arab Spring. He then turned to fiction with American War (2017), a novel set in a future America wracked by a civil war. This was followed by the prize-winning What Strange Paradise (2021) about a young boy on a sinking ship full of refugees.

Shortly after Israel's attack on Gaza, Omar El Akkad tweeted: ‘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 was viewed over 10 million times. The tweet became a book: One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. I could not find any negative reviews of this, not even in the Daily Mail or the Telegraph or the Times. Perhaps I am wrong, but there were no reviews in The Jewish Chronicle (surprise, surprise). Even TheJ.ca (a Canadian-based, strongly Zionist platform) was moderate in its criticisms. The book is not so much about Gaza, but rather an angry denunciation of Western hypocrisy and double standards, littered with fascinating and relevant autobiographical references. El Akkad came to realise that people like him, non-Westerners who once believed in Western ideals, had been fooled. He began to distrust the values of the so-called ‘international community’, the self-adopted name of a handful of countries responsible for most of the savage wars of the last two centuries. In this sense, One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is part of a literature which embraces Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth (1961), James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time (1963) down to Viet Thanh Nguyen's masterful 2015 novel (and Pulitzer Prize-winner) The Sympathiser.

Once, El Akkad thought that there were what he calls ‘deep ugly cracks’ in the so-called ‘free world’, but he thought such cracks could be fixed. October 2023 changed all that: this is when the Israeli military, following the massacre of 7 October, ‘with the support of the vast majority of the Western world's political power centres, enacted a campaign of active genocide against the Palestinian people, one of the most openly, wantonly vicious campaigns in the near century-long occupation, and easily the most well documented’. The book has been rightly described as a ‘heartsick breakup letter with the West’.

This was not a solitary revelation. Many who had looked to the West as the cradle of civilisation and of the ‘rules-based order’ (another enduring cliché) turned against it while reluctant to recognise that they, too, like El Akkad, are part of Western culture—all outsider-insiders. Outsider-insiders are those who have an insider's perspective in mainstream culture, while originating from outside that culture. This gives them an extra advantage: they can see what the others—the insiders—cannot. El Akkad is definitively an outsider-insider, since he has had all the advantages of a western education while not quite ‘fitting in’.

Some outsiders remain outside without ever abandoning their insider's frame of mind. El Akkad notes that many Westerners who move to the Middle East (self-described as expats, rather than immigrants—expats are white, immigrants are dark) ‘immediately cocoon themselves in gated compounds and gated friendships. So normalised was this walling-off that a Westerner could spend decades in a place like Qatar and only briefly contend with the inconvenience of their host nation's ways of living.’ As the author remarks, ‘it would come as a genuine surprise to me, years later, when I came to the West and found that this precise thing was a routine accusation lobbed at people from my part of the world. We simply did not do enough to learn the language, the culture. We stubbornly refused to assimilate.’

It is not strange, then, that many of those in the West who oppose the genocide in Gaza are classic outsiders such as the Jews. And they pay the price for it. Some have even been suspended or expelled from the Labour Party for ‘antisemitism’. El Akkad reminds us that the English (and Jewish) film director Jonathan Glazer, accepting the Oscar for Best International Film for The Zone of Interest, set in Nazi Germany, denounced the hijacking of Judaism and of the Holocaust to justify the mass killing in Gaza. He was in turn denounced in a letter signed by over 1,000 film and TV professionals (mainly Jewish).

In mid-October 2023, the Frankfurt Book Fair cancelled a ceremony in which the Palestinian writer Adania Shibli was to receive a prize for her novel Minor Detail, based on the true story of a Palestinian girl raped and murdered by Israeli soldiers.

In 2024, while accepting an award for excellence, Hesen Jabr, a Palestinian-American nurse at New York University Langone hospital, described the killing in Gaza as a genocide. She was immediately fired.

More recently, Claire Raizen, a Jewish social worker (whose family suffered during the Holocaust) was fired from Mount Sinai Hospital in New York for having a postcard on her desk that read ‘Gaza must live’. After 7 October, the hospital administration had sent a message to its employees declaring that they ‘stand with Israel’.

In 2024, the documentary film No Other Land, about the destruction of a Palestinian village by Israeli settlers facilitated by members of the Israel Defense Forces, won the Oscar for Best Documentary. The film, made by Basel Adra, a Palestinian, and Yuval Abraham, an Israeli, could not find a distributor in the USA. It was widely denounced as ‘antisemitic’ after it was applauded at the Berlin Film Festival where it won a prize. Germany's Green Party minister of culture, Claudia Roth, who was there, declared that she had only applauded the Israeli author, not the Palestinian. Supporters of the German Christian Democratic Party asked that the festival be defunded. On 28 July 2025, Awdah Hathaleen, a consultant on the film, was fatally shot by Yinon Levi, an Israeli settler who had previously been sanctioned by the EU and the US (though Trump lifted the sanction when he assumed office). Yinon Levi, whose shooting was videoed, was released after the film, praised by both the Telegraph and the Guardian, was shown on Channel 4. The Israeli police said they would not release Hathaleen's body until his family agreed have a small funeral and to bury his body outside his village.

In February 2025, the BBC, with characteristic cowardice, pulled the documentary Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone from iPlayer when it was realised the 13-year-old narrator was the son of a Hamas official. The film contained no praise or defence of Hamas. The sky did not fall—and Israel continued its massacre in Gaza and elsewhere.

In the 2016 election campaign, which he won, Donald Trump proposed that American Muslims should carry identification cards. He eventually drew back, probably realising that that would have been too reminiscent of the Nazis forcing Jews to wear a Star of David.

‘Ms Rachel’ (Rachel Accurso), an American children's entertainer with over 15 million YouTube subscribers, became increasingly outspoken about the plight of children in Gaza. In May 2025, she shared a post and videos of her meeting with Rahaf, a three-year-old girl who lost both her legs when her home was struck by Israeli bombs. Unsurprisingly, Jewish organisations such as StopAntisemitism accused Ms Rachel of spreading ‘Hamas propaganda’. This is what you get for showing compassion toward Palestinians.

In many places, advocating boycotts of Israeli products has become an indictable offence. More than thirty-five US states have passed laws against supporting the boycott of Israeli goods. In 2019, the German parliament passed a resolution declaring BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) antisemitic, though it rejected a motion from the far-right Alternative for Germany party (AfD) that called for BDS to be banned entirely. This did not prevent Jewish academics and authors such as Nancy Fraser and Masha Gessen to be ‘deplatformed’ because of their criticisms of Israel—Fraser by the University of Cologne, Gessen by the Heinrich Böll Foundation.

An academic article by Rabea Eghbariah on the Nakba (the expulsion of Palestinians from their land in 1948) set to be published in the Harvard Law Review was withdrawn because the editors feared reprisals.

And on and on.

On 9 July 2025, Secretary of State Marco Rubio barred the fearless Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, from entering the US for having had the audacity to criticise Israel publicly. Rubio, of course, accused Albanese of spewing ‘unabashed antisemitism’ and supporting terrorism. The previous year, Benjamin Netanyahu, wanted for prosecution by the International Criminal Court for war crimes, received a thunderous welcome (almost fifty standing ovations during his speech) by the US Congress.

While this happens, as El Akkad points out, those who are killed in Gaza and the West Bank are often regarded by Israel and its supporters as terrorists—or at least as terrorist sympathisers—or just as victims of accidents, with all of this pre-emptively justified in the name of ‘fighting terrorists who are terrorists by default’. He notes the general outrage when the Russians unjustifiably jail a Western journalist and the different stance when Israel murders hundreds of Palestinian journalists. Yet Palestinian journalists are the main source enabling us to know what is going in Gaza, since Israel does not allow any outside journalists from entering Gaza and Israeli media barely reports the extent of the massacres there. Israelis know less about what is going on in Gaza than viewers in Europe and the USA. As the BBC international editor Jeremy Bowen said on 4 June 2025, ‘Israel doesn't let us in because it's doing things there … that they don't want us to see, otherwise they would allow free reporting.’ CNN's Jeremy Diamond concurred.

It was enough for Israel to declare (with no evidence) that a dozen of the 30,000 workers of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) were involved with Hamas for the United States, the United Kingdom and seven other nations to cut all funding to UNRWA. Now they (minus the USA) are horrified that people are starving and are being shot while trying to reach the scarce food distributed by the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, resulting in 1,400 people killed in the first two months (more than on 7 October). Israel, of course, hardly ever investigates crimes committed by settlers or its soldiers.

The real heroes of the book are the doctors who stay with their patients while the bombs fall, the journalists who risked their lives to report the truth and ‘the congresswoman who stood her ground in the face of censure, of constant vitriol, of her own colleagues’ indifference’—a reference, presumably, to Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian American in Congress, who was reprimanded in a vote by the House of Representatives (234 to 188).

The riots in many English towns in August 2024 against asylum hotels included arson and looting and resulted in the arrest of more than 1,800 people, with many sentenced to prison. The riots were supported by, among others, the National Front. None of these were accused of terrorism. Yet, the following year, the House of Commons declared Palestine Action, a direct-action protest group, to be a ‘terrorist’ organisation, though all they did was damage property, not people. Supporters of Palestine Action risk up to fourteen years in detention.

States that invoke a ‘rules-based order’ are losing credibility even among their own (young) citizens. El Akkad's prediction that ‘one day … everyone will have always been against this’ is being fulfilled. After almost two years of bombs falling on Gaza, Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron and others expressed their outrage in no uncertain terms and were ready to recognise a Palestinian state—an important, though largely symbolic, gesture. In fact, almost every state in the world has or is about to recognise a Palestinian state—the USA being the most notable exception. David Lammy, the UK foreign secretary until September 2025, who calls himself a ‘liberal, progressive Zionist’ (whatever that may mean), commented in late 2023 that the Israel Defense Forces’ (IDF) bombing of the Jabalia refugee camp might have been ethically wrong, but legally justifiable if there was ‘a military objective’. By May 2025, he finally realised that the Israeli siege of Gaza was ‘abhorrent’ and ‘heartbreaking’, but, as former Conservative cabinet minister Rory Stewart pointed out, ‘we continue to train IDF soldiers, RAF planes continue to fly over Gaza.’

While the USA is about to remain Israel's last ally—albeit by far the most important—the situation is changing even there. Far-right conspiracy theorist Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, a staunch ally of Donald Trump, has suggested that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Still out of the fold is Congressman Randy Fine, who advocated nuking Gaza while calling reports about starvation among Palestinians ‘Muslim terror propaganda’. His post was condemned even by the arch-pro-Israel Jewish lobby AIPAC.

In the UK, matters are changing too: Piers Morgan, who constantly urged Palestine defenders to ‘condemn Hamas’, appeared to change his tune. Having long upheld Israel's ‘right to defend itself’, he finally realised that Netanyahu had crossed the line with its aid blockade (The Spectator, 12 June 2025). In his programme, ‘Uncensored’, in July 2025, he asked the lunatic far-right Israeli settler leader Daniella Weiss how she felt about the killing of over 20,000 Palestinian children in Gaza before concluding, faced with her indifference, that Weiss ‘doesn't give a damn’. Weiss featured in Louis Theroux's documentary on Israeli settlers (The Settlers, BBC). She has now been sanctioned by the British government.

There was a shift in the press as well: the Guardian explicitly declared the situation in Gaza as a genocide, as did The Independent. On 20 May 2025, the pro-Israeli Times declared that Israel ‘needs to pay attention to the growing horror among its friends abroad about its actions in Gaza’. On 6 May, an editorial in the Financial Times deplored ‘the West's shameful silence on Gaza’, adding, on 28 July, that ‘the world is failing the Palestinian people.’

Even Jonathan Freedland (Guardian) and Daniel Finkelstein (Times) seem to have had second thoughts about their unwavering support for Israel and Zionism, often using the ancient trope of ‘on the one hand, on the other hand’ (not so even handed when Freedland was attacking Corbyn with false allegations of antisemitism).

Here, politicians do not lead. These days, they seldom do; they follow the crowd: a YouGov survey in June 2025 revealed that ‘net favourability towards Israel’ in key western European countries was its lowest since surveys started in 2016. In March 2025, in the US, Gallup recorded Israel's lowest level of support since the pollster began measuring it in 2001. In October 2023, Keir Starmer, speaking on LBC, appeared to suggest that it was acceptable for Israel to withhold power and water from Gazans. Today, he condemns Israel. Josep Borrell, the EU's foreign policy chief until 2024, criticised the EU for ignoring evidence of ‘genocide’ by Israel ‘carrying out the largest ethnic-cleansing operation since the end of the second world war.’ In a tweet in early August 2025, he declared that ‘those who do not act to stop the genocide in Gaza are complicit in it. The @EUCouncil must finally decide to sanction Israel without further delay. This is the only thing that can bring Israeli leaders to stop committing crimes against humanity.’

By contrast, Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission and generally regarded as totally incompetent, has persistently defended Israel and was widely criticised by 841 EU staff in an open letter. She should have listened to two Israeli human rights organisations, B'Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, which judged Israel's attack on Gaza to be genocide. She should have also listened to David Grossman, the celebrated Israeli novelist, who denounced the Israeli ‘genocide’. Maybe she did because, having defended Israel for a year and a half, she wrote on X that ‘the images from Gaza are unbearable… Civilians in Gaza have suffered too much, for too long. It must stop now. Israel must deliver on its pledges’, in July 2025.

Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor, has begun to query his government's heretofore unquestioning support for the Israeli government's war (Germany is the second largest supplier of arms to Israel): ‘I cannot see the goal of Israel's military operation in Gaza. The suffering of the civilians cannot be justified any more by fighting Hamas terror.’ But these, so far, were just words—and Germany continues to supply arms to Israel. The German people, however, are not fooled. According to a poll by the Allensbach Institute (June 2025), the majority of Germans have negative attitudes toward Israel, with 73 per cent of respondents accepting that there is ‘some truth’ in the assertion that Israel is guilty of genocide.

As the news of starvation in Gaza got grimmer, the tide began to turn even in the liberal wing of the Democratic Party in the US. As John Nichols wrote in The Nation (31 July 2025), ‘in the summer of 2024, Democratic Party leaders refused to let even a single Palestinian American speaker address their presidential convention about Israel's horrific assault on Gaza’, but, a year later, ‘a majority of Democratic members of the US Senate has voted to block arms shipments to Israel.’ If people really wanted hostages to be released, they should call for a ceasefire, since hostages were released when there was a ceasefire, not when Israel bombs Gaza, so bombing Gaza prevents the release of hostages. As for starvation, famine expert Alex de Waal (‘How to measure famine’, London Review of Books, 6 February 2025) had already explained that starvation in Gaza is deliberate and the liberal Israeli daily Haaretz ran an editorial (‘Israel is starving Gaza’, 24 July 2025) which stated bluntly that ‘Gaza is starving, and Israel is responsible’.

Even, even, even (but for how long?) Donald Trump has finally acknowledged, having watched television, that Netanyahu's claim that there was ‘no starvation’ is bogus. Perhaps he will forget about his plan to evacuate Gaza and turn it into a ‘beautiful’ riviera. He seems to have done so with his new plan which brought about a pause in the war.

Another who ‘changed’ has been Ehud Olmert. When he was prime minister of Israel, he was himself responsible for a bombing of Gaza known as Operation Cast Lead. This resulted, according to human rights organisations (including Israeli ones such as B'Tselem) as well as the US State Department, in ‘1,400 Palestinians killed, including more than 1,000 civilians’—numbers which are in line with those of the 7 October massacre. By May 2025, Olmert wrote in Haaretz, ‘what we are doing in Gaza now is a war of devastation: indiscriminate, limitless, cruel and criminal killing of civilians… Yes, Israel is committing war crimes.’

When the history of this genocide is written, some will be astonished that Europe (and the USA) did next to nothing. They sent soldiers to Iraq, to Afghanistan under the banner of ‘liberal’ interventionism. Why did Britain not send the Royal Navy with food to feed the starving people of Gaza?

Gaza has not encountered any Western solidarity, but there has not been much Arab solidarity either. Arab countries have paid lip service to the condemnation of Israel—as they have always done and welcomed with open arms the man (Donald Trump and before him Joe Biden) who supplies weapons to Israel to destroy Gaza and ethnically cleanse the West Bank. Muslim countries like Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, Turkey, Morocco, Algeria, Jordan, Pakistan and Indonesia avert their eyes from the Israeli plan to reshape the West Bank, where armed Jewish mobs burn homes and olive groves, torch cars (Reuters, 4 November 2024) and kill Palestinians. And, despite everything, in August 2025, an Israeli company struck a $35bn gas deal with Egypt. And this, though Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the Egyptian president, described the Israeli offensive on Gaza as a genocide.

El Akkad is right: ‘one day it will be considered unacceptable, in the polite liberal circles of the West, not to acknowledge all the innocent people killed in that long-ago unpleasantness.’ Eventually everyone will regret, but usually those who apologise are not guilty of anything. The ‘others’ were, occasionally, on the (morally) wrong side of history. Over the last thirty years or so, a new ritual has surfaced—the ritual of apology. Apologies have been proffered by the US government to Native Americans, by the Canadians to the Inuit people, by the Australians to its Indigenous people and by the New Zealanders to the Māori. The Japanese have repeatedly apologised to Korea and, a little less often and less forthrightly, to China. In June 1997, the British prime minister, Tony Blair, acknowledged that the British government did bear some responsibility for the Irish famine of the 1840s. Eventually, in 2008, the US House of Representatives issued a formal apology for slavery. In 2019, one hundred years after the Amritsar massacre, one of the worst atrocities of Britain's colonial rule in India, the British high commissioner declared, ‘we deeply regret what happened’ while laying a wreath, though no formal apology was issued.

Yair Golan, leader of the Zionist left party the Democrats, declared ‘a sane country does not fight against civilians, does not kill babies as a hobby and does not give itself the aim of expelling populations.’ Faced with an avalanche of criticism—Netanyahu immediately accused him of ‘blood libel’—he soon regretted this (The Times of Israel, 25 May 2025). When the Israeli newspaper Haaretz published soldiers’ testimonies about being told to shoot those approaching food sites, the paper was subject to the same accusation.

One day they will all regret this. But, by then, it will be too late.