One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

by Omar El Akkad

Because it is the middle of the empire that must look upon this and say: Yes, this is tragic, but necessary, because the alternative is barbarism. The alternative to the countless killed and maimed and orphaned and left without home without school without hospital and the screaming from under the rubble and the corpses disposed of by vultures and dogs and the days-old babies left to scream and starve, is barbarism.

The girl on the stretcher believes she has ended. A man says to her: Inti zay el amar. You are like the moon. Again, translation fails. There is no English equivalent to the lineage of this phrase, a lineage that runs through generations of old movies and love songs and family gatherings. Listen to the sly setting joy and pleading, raw pleading that carries the words as this man tells the girl who lived when so many others died that she is beautiful beyond the bounds of this world.

It is a hallmark of failing societies, I’ve learned, this requirement that one always be in possession of a valid reason to exist.

Your papers, he said. My father pulled out his paperwork. Without reading it, the soldier tore it in half and threw it on the floor. Your papers, he repeated.

One of the hallmarks of Western liberalism is an assumption, in hindsight, of virtuous resistance as the only polite expectation of people on the receiving end of colonialism. 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.

It was an impulse that remained with me through the very dark years of my early adulthood. It remained even during the War on Terror years where, first as a college student and then for ten years as a journalist, I saw the terrible wrath of the place, saw it obliterate hundreds of thousands of people with names and ethnicity and religion like mine, knew for certain that there were deep ugly cracks in the bedrock of this thing called “the free world.” And yet I believed the cracks could be fixed, that the thing at the core, whatever it was, was salvageable. Until the fall of 2023. Until the slaughter.

The barbarians instigate and the civilized are forced to respond. The starting point of history can always be shifted, such that one side is always instigating, the other always justified in response.

In the year or so between when I write these words and when they are published, perhaps so many innocent people will have been killed, so many mass graves discovered, that it will not be so controversial to state plainly what is plainly known. But for now we argue, in this part of the world, the part not reduced to rubble, about how words make us feel. It’s a kind of pastime. Almost every day an influential opinion columnist or think tank expert or spokesperson for the president of the United States will feign outrage at how hurtful words such as “genocide” and “occupation” are, how disparaging, how uncouth.

And at every moment of arrival the details and the body count may differ, but in the marrow there is always a commonality: an ambitious, upright, pragmatic voice saying, Just for a moment, for the greater good, cease to believe that this particular group of people, from whose experience we are already so safely distanced, are human.

That’s not why such a proposal deserves condemnation. It deserves condemnation because it is morally repugnant. But morals complicate the matter. They introduce an obligation to oppose. They also force everyone involved to confront the fact that a significant swath of the American electorate does indeed consider the affected group to be so threatening, so inherently barbaric, that making them carry special identification cards becomes perfectly acceptable. And that, in turn, forces a reckoning with what the United States has become, or has always been. So instead, the coverage shifts to a flattened mode, listing claim and counterclaim, measuring the impact on the poll numbers. Everything becomes a horse race.

The result is absurdity: articles in which the reporter has had to pretzel their way to a level playing field between the claim that fewer guns would reduce gun violence and the claim that more guns will reduce gun violence. Neatly wrapped-up paragraphs of what in the industry is called “M-copy,” explaining the background of a conflict by listing an act of aggression by one party and then an offsetting one by the other, absent historical context, so as not to be seen as taking sides. A deranged Republican talking point presented with at best mild rebuke because there are only two major political parties in America and one of them just happens to be populated with the sort of people who muse about whether wildfires are caused by Jewish space lasers.

A woman’s leg amputated, without anesthesia, the surgery conducted on a kitchen table. A boy holding his father’s shoe, screaming. A girl whose jaw has been torn off. A child, still in diapers, pulled out of the tents after the firebombing, his head severed from his body. Is there distance great enough, to be free of this? To be made clean?

I am reminded of what the actor Helen Mirren said of her time in Israel in 1967: “I saw Arabs being thrown out of their houses in Jerusalem. But it was just the extraordinary magical energy of a country just beginning to put its roots in the ground. It was an amazing time to be here.”

Everyone involved—the dead, their killers, the arbiters of the exchange rate—knows this for what it is. In 2014, when an Israeli newspaper runs an opinion piece in which the writer describes Palestinian children as “the explosives of the future,” there’s no ambiguity as to what is happening, what is desired to happen. Seven months before the Hamas attacks of October 2023, when the same newspaper publishes and then quickly deletes a post titled “When Genocide Is Permissible,” the bedrock of polite intellectual discourse that liberalism so desperately and invariably sees as a hallmark of its own enlightenment is shown to be a phantom thing—a premise that, when most needed, cedes the floor to the concrete vocabulary of violence.

is a reminder that the Democratic Party’s relationship with progressivism so often ends at the lawn sign: Proclaim support for this minority group or that. Hang a rainbow flag one month a year from some White House window. Most important, remind everyone at every turn of how much worse the alternative would be.

it also establishes the lowest of benchmarks: Want my vote? Be less monstrous than the monsters. But to say this—that mainstream liberal parties will never develop a moral compass until they are punished for not having one—produces a level of antagonistic vitriol unmatched in almost any other context. Waves of progressives will take time out from pasting My Religion Is Love stickers to the bumpers of their Teslas to let you know that advocating this position makes you the enemy, that they hope you’re happy when Trump takes power and makes your life even more miserable, that you should just go back to where you came from.

The moral component of history, the most necessary component, is simply a single question, asked over and over again: When it mattered, who sided with justice and who sided with power? What makes moments such as this one so dangerous, so clarifying, is that one way or another everyone is forced to answer.

It becomes impossible to accurately count the dead. The infrastructure that might have once done such a thing—the health ministry, the few functioning hospitals, the institutional fabric of society—is in ruins.

It may as well be the case that there exist two entirely different languages for the depiction of violence against victims of empire and victims of empire. Victims of empire, those who belong, those for whom we weep, are murdered, subjected to horror, their killers butchers and terrorists and savages. The rage every one of us should feel whenever an innocent human being is killed, the overwhelming sense that we have failed, collectively, that there is a rot in the way we have chosen to live, is present here, as it should be, as it always should be. Victims of empire aren’t murdered. Their killers aren’t butchers, their killers aren’t anything at all. Victims of empire don’t die, they simply cease to exist. They burn away like fog.

No one, during those years, was ever tortured, only subjected to enhanced interrogation. When a soldier pulling at a joystick thousands of miles away mistook a wedding party for a terror cell and sent a missile-wielding drone to incinerate the lot, nobody was killed; there was only some collateral damage (a term first coined to describe the killing in Vietnam). No prisoners, who require a prison sentence, only detainees, who can be held forever without charge. And when those detainees, after years of confinement to cells not much bigger than broom closets, went on hunger strikes, they were engaged in “asymmetric warfare” against their captors.

To preserve the values of the civilized world, it is necessary to set fire to a library. To blow up a mosque. To incinerate olive trees. To dress up in the lingerie of women who fled and then take pictures. To level universities. To loot jewelry, art, banks, food. To arrest children for picking vegetables. To shoot children for throwing stones. To parade the captured in their underwear. To break a man’s teeth and shove a toilet brush in his mouth. To let combat dogs loose on a man with Down syndrome and then leave him to die. Otherwise, the uncivilized world might win.

He is forced in that moment to confront the reality that so much of the American self-image demands a narrative in which his country plays the role of the rebel, the resistance, when at the same time every shred of contemporary evidence around him leads to the conclusion that, by scope and scale and purpose of violence, this country is clearly the empire.

There is an impulse in moments like this to appeal to self-interest. To say: These horrors you are allowing to happen, they will come to your doorstep one day; to repeat the famous phrase about who they came for first and who they’ll come for next. But this appeal cannot, in matter of fact, work. If the people well served by a system that condones such butchery ever truly believed the same butchery could one day be inflicted on them, they’d tear the system down tomorrow. And anyway, by the time such a thing happens, the rest of us will already be dead.

And it is important, too, that this amoral calculus rise and fall in proportion to the scale of the killing, so that one might always be able to say, “Well, we could never have known it would get this bad, but now, now everything has changed.”

It was not particularly new: we’d all watched George W. Bush declare that Islam isn’t the enemy as he launched an illegal war that left hundreds of thousands of predominantly Muslim civilians dead. Twenty years later, we’d all watch a smirking White House press secretary claim that no one has done more for the Palestinians, as the same White House helped facilitate their eradication.

In one scene in the book, the United States, amid complete institutional collapse, is visited by the president of a new pan-Arab empire. The president delivers a speech venerating the two nations’ shared desire for basic democratic rights. Years later, after I sold the manuscript, one of my editors returned the section to me and suggested it would hit harder if the speech itself were not so transparently insincere, if it seemed the head of this empire had at least some belief in the platitudes he was espousing. I had copied the text, almost word for word, from Barack Obama’s 2009 speech in Cairo, the one titled “A New Beginning.”

What good are words, severed from anything real?

The letter sets off a small firestorm of newspaper articles and rival open letters. I suppose it makes sense: people were made momentarily uncomfortable at a black-tie gala—someone has to pay.

this is where the poets will interject they will say: show, dont tell but that assumes most people can see.

The main event sees a CNN moderator lob questions at nine Republican hopefuls, all of whom take turns doing the sort of thing Republicans have been doing for most of the twenty-first century, painting the United States as simultaneously the greatest country on earth and a nightmare place. An enormously powerful, God-chosen nation in which families are too scared to leave their houses at night.

A few months into the genocide, protesters are regularly interrupting Democratic Party events. Dozens of major universities across the country come to a standstill as students build encampments to protest the killing. It harkens most clearly to the anti-apartheid movement of the eighties and the antiwar and civil rights protests of the sixties—all of them, too, led overwhelmingly by young people and derided as naive and inconsequential until they weren’t, until they became central facets of the story the United States tells itself about how, inevitably, justice prevails.

On January 26, 2024, the International Court of Justice rules that Israel must stand trial for genocide. Not long after, the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and six other nations decide to cut off all funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, one of the few organizations providing any aid to Palestinians. The decision is supposedly based on allegations that about a dozen of the UNRWA’s 30,000 or so workers were involved in the October 7 Hamas attacks. The allegation is enough. Hundreds of millions of dollars are withheld. More people will starve to death because of this decision, taken in the halls of power far away from where the starvation will happen, taken by people who will never be held responsible for any of it, who will live out the rest of their lives in total comfort. And should some activist interrupt their night out at a restaurant to show them pictures of the children they’ve helped kill, they will be deeply offended. Civilized people shouldn’t behave so rudely.

It’s a kind of thinking predicated on the implicit belief that, for certain people, the only choice is between negations of varying severity. The system does not work for you, was never intended to work for you, but as an act of magnanimity on our part, you may choose the degree to which it works against you.

No, I don’t want a candidate who’s the embodiment of me. I want a candidate who doesn’t bankroll genocide. Failing that, I want the superhuman powers of dissociation that even the Democratic Party’s progressive vanguard seem able, in a pinch, to conjure. One day the killing will be over, either because the oppressed will have their liberation or because there will be so few left to kill. We will be expected to forget any of it ever happened, to acknowledge it if need be but only in harmless, perfunctory ways. Many of us will, if only as a kind of psychological self-defense. So much lives and dies by the grace of endless forgetting. But so many will remember. We say that, sometimes, when it’s our children killed: Remember. And it may seem now like it’s someone else’s children, but there’s no such thing as someone else’s children. The problem with fixating on the abyss into which one’s opponent has descended while simultaneously digging one’s own is that, eventually, it gets too dark to tell the difference.

The rainwater is the property of the state. Certain roads are for some but not others. Certain buses are for some but not others. Cinnamon is fine and can be brought in, cardamom is a security threat and cannot. The list of prohibited items changes according to the whims of those enforcing it—dried fruit, cattle, chocolate. At the checkpoints some pass, others are made to wait hours and hours, just for the hell of it, just as a reminder. A woman miscarries, waiting. A cancer patient dies, waiting. An area is designated safe, then bombed. A soldier shoots a teenage girl seventeen times and is found not guilty. Life goes on, for some but not others.

I fear, for example, large flags of the Western world, in almost any context. When I see them hanging off the backs of pickup trucks anywhere in the United States, I have an instinctual negative reaction. In Canada, over the last few years, as a pale imitation of the U.S.’s right wing has taken over more of the public sphere, I’ve come to develop the same reaction (despite the well-worn trope of slapping a Canadian flag on your luggage when traveling abroad as a preemptive declaration of niceness). The flags of France and the United Kingdom I can’t help but imagine looming over the homes and neighborhoods and nations of my ancestors in the Arab world. (Though I realize, as I write this, that I have no similar fear of Arab nations’ flags. Not a single one, including that of the country of my birth, induces any emotion at all, positive or negative.)

What this particular bromide is intended to mean, when Western officials trot it out time and time again, is that one party in these proceedings got a little too big for its britches, and if these perpetually angry people only understood the generosity with which they were being treated, they would not be in this mess. Anyone who has ever been forced to contend with the empire’s footprint knows this argument by heart. We treat you so much better than we have to; why are you so angry? Why did you make us do this to you?

Where is the Palestinian Martin Luther King? I’ve heard said on more than one occasion, never accompanied by any self-reflection as to what kind of society necessitates a man like that, nor what that society ultimately did to him before his posthumous veneration. The implicit accusation is that certain people are incapable of responding to their mistreatment with grace, with patience, with love, and that this incapacity, not any external injustice, is responsible for the misery inflicted upon them.

Except it is a love that cannot be acknowledged by the empire, because it is a people’s love for one another. Anyone who has dragged a relative out from under the wreckage of a bombed building, who has held a friend bleeding to death in the street while the officer who pulled the trigger looks on, who has watched their water poisoned, their land burned, their communities starved, is intimately well versed in love. But in the eyes of the empire such a thing can never be called love, because the directive was never in the first place, Love, but rather, Love me. In spite of it all, love me.

She says she doesn’t think so, in large part because the soonest this book could go out into the world is the following year, and the situation will almost certainly be different then.

...

What frightens me about my publisher’s argument that things will be different next year isn’t that I don’t believe her; it’s that I do. But that too is a useless fear. It buys nothing.

The basics of every citizenship exam are the same. There’s an English-language test, a civics/history quiz, and a rapid-fire set of questions about whether the applicant has ever engaged in human trafficking, kept someone from practicing their religion, or served in a foreign army, among other transgressions. For months, my wife and I spent our evenings preparing. When the day comes, I find myself as nervous as I thought I’d be. There’s a kind of anxiety that kicks in whenever one has to submit to the whims of a system that can alter the trajectory of one’s life. A sense that things only have to go wrong once.

And it exists, this gratitude, but the narrative makes no room for the many shapes it comes in, its many less straightforward forms. I harbor no ill will toward the immigrant who waves the miniature flag on the sides of the Independence Day parade, who says honestly and plainly: I love this country. But nor do I judge the immigrant who is as emotionless and pragmatic about the nation-state as the people who run that nation-state are so regularly emotionless and pragmatic about immigrants, who says honestly and plainly: I don’t love this country, don’t love any country, patriotism being the property of an entirely different kind of life than luck has given me; I live here because it will always be safer to live on the launching side of the missiles. I live here because I am afraid.

Colonialism demands history begin past the point of colonization precisely because, under those narrative conditions, the colonist’s every action is necessarily one of self-defense.

The director of a literary organization I admire, acknowledging at the start of a reading that so much of what we do right now feels so pointless, returns still to the rallying cry issued by the Palestinian poet Rasha Abdulhadi: “Wherever you are, whatever sand you can throw 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.”

For the moment, whatever will bring an end to this killing is worth doing, but one cannot help but ask: If the system to which I am forced to appeal responds only to attacks on its self-interest, what is there to hope for but that the next glaringly obvious injustice just happens to not quite perfectly intersect with that self-interest? What is the ethical legitimacy of any system in which one has to hope the most privileged sliver of global society decides, in large enough numbers, that a sufficient number of children have been murdered to warrant choosing a different brand of couscous? That enough migrants have been caged or drowned to make a particular vacation spot unappealing? That the well-being of Congolese children outranks the desire for ever more powerful smartphones?

every small act of resistance trains the muscle used to do it, in much the same way that turning one’s eyes from the horror strengthens that particular muscle, readies it to ignore even greater horror to come. One builds the muscle by walking away from the most minor things—trivial consumables, the cultural work of monsters, the myriad material fruits grown on stolen ground—and realizes in the doing of these things that there is a wide spectrum of negative resistance. Maybe it’s not all that much trouble to avoid ordering coffee and downloading apps and buying chocolate-flavored hummus from companies that abide slaughter.

It’s a compelling position, or would be in anything like a justly ordered world. But within the confines of this world, one in which our political, institutional, and corporate leaders—people who could do something about this right now—simply feign concern at an ongoing genocide or actively cheer it on, it cannot be anything but the straightforward manifestation of an imaginative desert. The system, predicated on endless feeding, is unable to imagine anything outside itself, let alone forms of resistance to itself. Since all benefit under such a system is individualistic, it becomes equally impossible to imagine any benefit to an individual walking away from it—What is to be gained? Some kind of moral cleanliness? Be serious.

The obvious charge of hypocrisy looms over this work, always. Refrain from engaging with one organization because of its ties to a genocide but not the uncountable number of other organizations who do as well? Call for divestment from fossil fuel companies and yet still use electricity? Agitate for a better world in any way and yet continue to exist within it? The purpose of this kind of accusation is never moral concern. To be accused of speaking too loudly about one injustice but not others by someone who doesn’t care about any of them is to be told, simply, to keep quiet.

What to do with someone who says: I will have no part of this, when the entire functionality of the system is dependent on active participation?