While the terrible thing is happening–while the land is still being stolen and the natives still being killed–any form of opposition is terroristic and must be crushed for the sake of civilization. But decades, centuries later, when enough of the land has been stolen and enough of the natives killed, it is safe enough to venerate resistance in hindsight.
Chapter One: Departure, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar Al-Akkad
Table of Contents
Preamble
I think the first time I heard about One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This was earlier this year, before it had come out and was on preorder on the Kobo ebook store. At that point I must have put it in my to-be-read pile. More recently I saw the book in new book sections of local book stores and I got curious enough about the book to move it up in my queue.
This book is in the same vein of books I’ve read previously – The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi, and The Question of Palestine by Edward W. Said. Or even the Palestine section of The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Let’s get into it.
The Book
The first thing I noticed about One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is that it hits the ground running. It is a /loud/ book and it doesn’t stop being loud till the very end. The author pulls no punches here and the emotion in it is jumping off the page, barely contained by the prosaic prose that is on display here.
The book’s chapters are series of polemics that critique various structures of our society in relation to their various degrees of complicity in the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Anger, frustration, disappointment, disillusionment for the various structures that prop up neoliberal hegemony and the naked hypocrisy at its very core.
From the first chapter, Departure.
I wanted for that other place. I wanted for the part of the world where I believed there existed a fundamental kind of freedom. The freedom to become something that what you were born into, the freedom that comes with an in inherent fairness of treatment under law and order and social norm, the freedom to read and write and speak without fear. And more than any of these things, the freedom to be left alone.
Chapter One: Departure – One Day, Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This by Omar Al-Akkad
Perhaps most poignant critique here is the one of the journalistic establishment.
The price of reporting under these conditions is everything. As of July 2024, at least 108 Palestinian journalists have been killed, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. There is nowhere else on earth with an even remotely comparable death toll. For the crime of reporting in a way the Israeli government disapproves of, Al Jazeera correspondent Wael Dahdouh sees his family summarily executed in a missile strike. He continues reporting the next day. Shortly thereafter he himself is wounded. He continues reporting the next day. That most every major Western journalism prize that emerges from the coverage of this onslaught will overlook or at best offer glancing recognition of the work of men and women like Dahdouh for fear of being labeled biased is as clear an indictment of the industry’s cracked moral compass as exists anywhere.
Chapter Two: Witness – One Day, Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This by Omar Al-Akkad
When I finished One Day, Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This I knew that the review for it was going to be another one of those reviews filled with quotes as this is a book where quoting the author does a better job of providing a review of the book than I can. I have a lot of quotes annotated for this book.
Here’s another one from the chapter about the use of language and more specifically how language is used in mainstream Western media to sanitize violence and obfuscate the perpetrators of said violence. Passive voice, euphemisms, vague descriptors like “extremist” of “terrorist” are common tools used in such linguistic malpractice.
To watch the descriptions of Palestinian suffering in much of mainstream Western media is to watch language employed for the exact opposite of language’s purpose–to watch the unmaking of meaning.
Chapter Four: Language – One Day, Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This by Omar Al-Akkad
Omar also has pointed critiques of his fellow writers in a chapter titled Craft where he criticizes established authors who take safe centrist positions so that they can preserve their careers.
Meanwhile, so many of the most established writers are either totally silent or engaged in the tritest finger-wagging about just how terrible it would be for the art if we get too shrill about this sort of thing. Yes, the killing happens now, but there’ll be plenty of time later to write very moving stories about the shape and shade of the bones.
Chapter Six: Craft – One Day, Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This by Omar Al-Akkad
You would be forgiven for thinking that this book leads to a bleak conclusion devoid of hope considering the tone of the book that you can glean from the quotes I have provided so far but the book ends on a rather optimistic note despite the weapons grade pessimism that is present throughout the book.
It is not so hard to believe, even during the worst of things, that courage is the more potent contagion. That there are more invested in solidarity than annihilation. That just as it has always been possible to look away, it is always possible to stop looking away. None of this evil was ever necessary. Some carriages are gilded and others lacquered in blood, but the same engine pulls us all. We dismantle it now, build another thing entirely, or we hurtle toward the cliff, safe in the certainty that, when the time comes, we’ll learn to lay tracks on air.
Chapter Ten: Arrival – One Day, Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This by Omar Al-Akkad
I could keep going with the quotes but I think I have demonstrated well enough why this is a good book.
Conclusions
This book is not an easy read, in fact it is quite the harrowing one. Omar Al-Akkad’s critique here of Western liberal hegemony is well thought out and written in a direct style that eschews euphemisms and instead gets right to the crux of the matter at hand. This is a book that a lot of people would do well to read and internalize; especially those among us who still hold on to the mirage of neoliberal ideals.
I’ll leave y’all with another quote, this one is from the Palestinian poet Rasha Abdulhadi which Omar himself quotes in this book.
Wherever you are, whatever sand you can thrown on the gears of genocide, do it now. If it’s a handful, throw it. If it’s a fingernail full, scrape it out and throw. Get in the way however you can.
Rasha Abdulhadi as quoted in Chapter Nine: Leavetaking – One Day, Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This by Omar Al-Akkad
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