One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

by Omar El Akkad

I’m reminded of what Susan Sontag is supposed to have said about the great lesson of the Second World War: that 10 percent of people are fundamentally good, 10 are fundamentally evil, and the other 80 swayable in either direction. I don’t know if I agree. There are young people all over the West risking expulsion and defamation, risking their livelihoods, their entire careers, to protest the killing. There are Jews being arrested on the streets of Frankfurt, blocking Grand Central Station in New York, fighting for peace. There are Indigenous communities who have suffered the Western world’s most unspeakable atrocities and still find the will to stand up for an occupied land on the other side of the planet, who recognize a thing for what it is. I think instead of Virginia Woolf’s conversation with that lawyer over the images of the war’s dead: I cannot argue with you, cannot convince you of anything, because when you and I look at these pictures we see, fundamentally, different things.