One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

by Omar El Akkad

Language, too, forces the air from the lungs. Beyond the high walls and barbed wire and checkpoints that pen this place, there is the empire. And the empire as well is cocooned inside its own fortress of language—a language through the prism of which buildings are never destroyed but rather spontaneously combust, in which blasts come and go like Chinooks over the mountain, and people are killed as though to be killed is the only natural and rightful ordering of their existence. As though living was the aberration. And this language might protect the empire’s most bloodthirsty fringe, but the fringe has no use for linguistic malpractice. It is instead the middle, the liberal, well-meaning, easily upset middle, that desperately needs the protection this kind of language provides. 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.

(In the hierarchy of migration, “expat” is largely reserved for white Westerners who leave their homes for another country, usually because the money’s better there. When other people do this, they might be deemed “aliens” or “illegals” or at best “economic migrants.” As with most criteria of segregation, everyone knows, instinctively, how they will be labeled. It’s a matter of self-preservation, to know.)

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

Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power. Otherwise, they, like all else, are expendable.

It’s a frequent, nauseating political inheritance: come to experience the world under the reign of someone who thinks of you as subhuman, as undeserving of a future, and an ugly impression is settled that true power is the ability to do the same to someone else.

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.

But it’s a fiction, the most malicious kind: a fiction of moral convenience. Some, maybe most, might resist the wanting whims of empire, but all must figure out a way to survive them. And survival is not clean, does not subscribe to any one narrative. For every victim of colonialism who resisted, there might be another who, like countless members of my parents’ and grandparents’ generations, looked to the French and the British and thought: This is what winners look like.

Whose nonexistence is necessary to the self-conception of this place, and how uncontrollable is the rage whenever that nonexistence is violated?

(The very history of the word “genocide,” meant as a mechanic of forewarning rather than some after-the-fact resolution, is littered with instances of the world’s most powerful governments going to whatever lengths they can to avoid its usage, because usage is attached to obligation. It was never intended to be enough to simply call something genocide: one is required to act.)

Once far enough removed, everyone will be properly aghast that any of this was allowed to happen. But for now, it’s just so much safer to look away, to keep one’s head down, periodically checking on the balance of polite society to see if it is not too troublesome yet to state what to the conscience was never unclear.

This is an account of a fracture, a breaking away from the notion that the polite, Western liberal ever stood for anything at all.

I knew none of this was for my benefit, but I could make a home within it. I believed, firmly, not in any ceiling on what this society would allow to be done to people like me, but in what it would allow done to itself, its own rights and freedoms and principles.

Now, once more, an essential truth of calamity journalism is made clear: In the earliest days, in the chaos that precedes systemic annihilation, it is not what the party deemed most malicious has actually done that matters, but rather what it is believed capable of doing.

There’s always been a contradiction at the heart of this enterprise. In the modern, well-dressed definition, adhered to in one form or another at almost every major newspaper, the journalist cannot be an activist, must remain allegiant to a self-erasing neutrality. Yet journalism at its core is one of the most activist endeavors there is. A reporter is supposed to agitate against power, against privilege. Against the slimy wall of press releases and PR nothingspeak that has come to protect every major business and government boardroom ever since Watergate. A reporter is supposed to agitate against silence. To maintain both these realities at the same time—of the neutral agitator—requires a cognitive dissonance that can be seen in every corner of the industry.

More than a few of my former colleagues, in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the Hamas attacks on Israel, proudly boasted of their support for both Ukraine and Israel. When Russian authorities detained and eventually convicted Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich in an obvious sham of a judicial process, almost every Western media outlet called it what it was. But as the Israeli military wiped out both Palestinian journalists and their entire families in a deliberate campaign to silence the flow of information out of Gaza, virtually all the same colleagues, all the same outlets, took a very different approach. The profession of journalism necessitates a capacity to understand things, and all who watched the killings understood what was happening.

As I write this, Palestinian reporters are in effect the world’s sole source of information about the reality of the obliteration of Gaza, the plain truth of the horror in the face of a mass propagandist effort that at one point included the president of the United States claiming to have seen pictures of dead babies he never saw, claiming a United States ally did not bomb a hospital among the myriad hospitals it now regularly bombs. 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.

The afflicted don’t need comforting, they need what the comfortable have always had.

On a day in late December 2023, as the killing in Gaza nears its third month, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken posts a short missive on social media lamenting what a deadly year it has been for journalists around the world, and noting how sad it is that reporters can be killed for simply doing their jobs. It is, of course, pablum, utterly meaningless and of a particularly amoral quality given the U.S. government’s unwavering support of Israel, the nation responsible for killing more of those journalists than any other. Blinken knows this, knows that a significant part of his job involves parroting ethical stances in the abstract that his own administration actively undermines in reality. I understand this is just how things are, ethical double-jointedness being a necessary requirement for the daily debasements of modern political life. And yet I still wonder how someone can maintain this particular facade and sleep at night. The journalists who bring the reality of the world to light are daily slaughtered. Meanwhile, an embarrassing number of their Western colleagues, who for the most part fear no such outcome but accept it as the sad lot of those distant others, travel within the protective cocoon of people like the very concerned secretary and measure his vacuous declarations of solidarity with their craft as just another part of the horse race, just another part of the game.

Years later it dawns on me that the immigrant class, which in one form or another describes (or will come to describe, in the looming, cataclysmic decades of the Anthropocene) most of the world, is segregated by many things, chief among them narrative. Some are afforded the privilege of an arrival story, a homecoming. Others, only departure after departure.

In the West whose stories I had grown up consuming, so much depended on the cleansing power of righteous anger. And it occurs to me then, maybe for the first time in my life, that when Rambo leveled that small Washington town, or when Hunter S. Thompson made the cop chase him for miles along the desert highway just for the hell of it, it was never just an expression of ballsiness or rebellion or righteous anything. What the men who’d lived or dreamed up these stories understood was that the plausibility of such transgression depended on who the system being rebelled against was made to serve. Narrative power, maybe all power, was never about flaunting the rules, yelling at a cop, making trouble—it was about knowing that, for a privileged class, there existed a hard ceiling on the consequences.

I begin to suspect that the principles holding up this place might not withstand as much as I first thought. That the entire edifice of equality under law and process, of fair treatment, could just as easily be set aside to reward those who belong as to punish those who don’t. A hard ceiling for some, no floor for others.

As always, the dead will be made to pay the moral debt born of their killing.

At the start of this campaign, one oft-parroted justification was the nonsensical contrivance that Palestinians in Gaza were subject to a collective guilt on account of their voting for Hamas. It is somewhat pointless to note that most Gazans are too young to have voted for Hamas in the most recent election, or that collective punishment of a civilian population for their electoral choices would be subject to a far higher standard of scrutiny if that population weren’t a politically powerless contingent of Brown people, or that the very same terror group had long received support from the Israeli government as a matter of strategy so as to keep an entity in power that at least partially shared the government’s disdain for peace or a two-state solution, or that the occupation and terror inflicted on Palestinians long predates the creation of Hamas.

It is pointless, even, to make the obvious analogies, to imagine the response had almost any other country on earth killed hundreds or thousands of civilians on a hostage rescue mission, or flattened every hospital in a city on the hunt for a terror group, and then bragged about its success. Pointless because such things assume a conversation anchored in facts or reason or even the thinnest presupposition that the people being killed, like those kille...

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. And then following the attacks, when Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant says Israel is fighting “human animals,” it is not a statement of belief so much as permission. When those dying are deemed human enough to warrant discussion, discussion must be had. When they’re deemed nonhuman, discussion becomes offensive, an affront to civility.

In the context of self-interest—and maybe there never was any other context—it is utter madness to risk one’s own prospects standing up for people who can offer nothing in return. Tomorrow more Palestinians will die, but the unsaid thing is that it is all right because that’s what those people do, they die.

In moments such as these, when the lies are so glaring and the bodies so many, millions will come to understand that there is no such thing as “those people.” Instinctively this will be known to those who have seen it before, who have seen their land or labor stolen, their people killed, and know the voracity of violent taking. Those who learned not to forget the Latin American death squads, the Vietnamese and Cambodian and Laotian villages turned to ash, the Congolese rubber then and Congolese coltan now, the nice clean beach an hour north of Tel Aviv that sits atop a mass grave.

American liberalism demands a rhetorical politeness from which the fascistic iteration of the modern Republican Party is fully free. There is something stomach-churning about watching a parade of Biden administration press secretaries offer insincere expressions of concern for Palestinians as the same administration bankrolls their butcher. It 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. Against such hollow gesturing, even the most unhinged Republican will always be able to say: Look, these people have no interest in your suffering, only in empty gestures; I’ll do away with gestures, and make the right people suffer. It is an astoundingly effective technique, but would not be if the leadership of the Democratic Party had come to realize that sloganeering without concrete action means nothing.

When a growing number of staffers begin to publicly bristle about their boss’s support for mass killing, the White House’s solution is to throw a morale-boosting party. It is a reminder that, in times like these, one remarkable difference between the modern Western conservative and their liberal counterpart is that the former will gleefully sign their name on the side of the bomb while the latter will just sheepishly initial it.

Fight it, then. Propose something to meet the nature of the moment. It can’t be the case both that the Supreme Court is an unaccountable neoconservative body intent on rendering the whole country unrecognizable and that there’s simply no way to do anything significant about it. It can’t be that climate change is the single most important issue facing the world, with our entire species at risk, and drilling licenses need to continue. It can’t be that innocent Palestinians have faced unbearable suffering and we care very deeply about their plight, and absolutely nothing will stop the arming of the nation responsible. It can’t be both rhetorical urgency and policymaking impotence.

What the mainstream Democrat seems incapable of accepting is that, for an even remotely functioning conscience, there exists a point beyond which relative harm can no longer offset absolute evil. For a lot of people, genocide is that point. Suddenly, an otherwise very persuasive argument takes on a different meaning: “Vote for the liberal though he harms you because the conservative will harm you more” starts to sound a lot like “Vote for the liberal though he harms you because the conservative might harm me, too.” In reality, not a single Western politician or party, not a single government anywhere in the world, can be expected to change when constantly rewarded this way. The argument in favor of voting for the lesser evil is frequently made in good faith, by people who have plenty to lose should the greater evil win. But 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.

(It’s a fascinating directive, Go back to where you came from.

Overwhelmingly, it’s employed against anyone who tries to make use of the freedoms on which the West so prides itself: the freedom to speak and to criticize, to hold power accountable. In this way, it shares a deep bond with the approach to free expression that can be found in most dictatorships and authoritarian regimes, the places so many immigrants fled: You are free to say so long as what you say is acceptable.

As with all such acts of disobedience, the usual cavalry of talking heads emerges to note that these protests only inconvenience people, and that inconveniencing people is not an effective way to change their minds. Never is this logic applied to the past, to the demonstrations that shut down bridges to call for an end to segregation, for example. Because if applied to a moment already deemed righteous in hindsight, such an argument would be shown immediately for its spinelessness.

Either hundreds of millions of people have always been predisposed to the lure of the fascist, in which case the entire democratic endeavor is doomed anyway, or something of corporate liberalism has brought us here. Whatever the quality of its rhetoric, any politics that buckles at the prospect of even mildly inconveniencing the rich, or resisting an ally’s genocidal intentions, will always face an uphill battle against a politics that actively embraces malice. “Yes We Can” is a conditional. “Yes We Will” is not.

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’s impossible to do the work of journalism, or at least serious journalism, and not be forced to make some kind of peace with the reality that you will be, many times over, a tourist in someone else’s misery. You will drop into the lives of people suffering the worst things human beings can do to one another. And no matter how empathetic or sincere or even apologetic for your privilege you may be, when you are done you will exercise the privilege of leaving.

Surely any rational narrative assessment of the situation would conclude that the center of the story is not the sniper, but the person on the other side of the scope, whose life hangs in the balance. But the dead, unnamed, serve their purpose. It is the purpose of Westerners to contend with stakes, it is the purpose of everyone else to establish them.

The inner wire protects the base proper, and then, after a middle space of chicanes and other barriers, the outer wire acts as the interface between the base and the wider world. As a result, it’s almost always the outer wire that bears the brunt of the violence, of car bombs and ambushes. And it is almost always Afghans assigned to protect it. One of the soldiers shows me his weapon: an AK, ancient-looking, almost a caricature of a gun. They have body armor, they have good equipment, he says, why don’t we? We protect this place.

Language is never sufficient. There is not enough of it to make a true mirror of living. In this way, the soothing or afflictive effect of the stories we tell is not in whether we select the right words but in our proximity to what the right words might be. This is not some abstraction, but a very real expression of power—the privilege of describing a thing vaguely, incompletely, dishonestly, is inseparable from the privilege of looking away.

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.

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. When The Guardian runs a headline that reads, “Palestinian Journalist Hit in Head by Bullet During Raid on Terror Suspect’s Home,” it is not simply a case of hiding behind passive language so as to say as little as possible, and in so doing risk as little criticism as possible. Anyone who works with or has even the slightest respect for language will rage at or poke fun at these tortured, spineless headlines, but they serve a very real purpose.

There is an art to this sort of thing. Of all the aftereffects of the War on Terror years, the most frequently underestimated is the heightened derangement of language for the purpose of sanitizing violence. It’s a phenomenon that’s by no means unique to that one moment in American history, but anyone who lived through the NATO invasion of Afghanistan and the decimation of Iraq will be familiar with the hallmark uses of this shadow vocabulary. 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.

The Bush- and Obama-era practice of labeling just about any man killed by the U.S. military as a terrorist until proven otherwise is one of the most pernicious policies to come of the post-9/11 years, and for good reason. It doubly defiles the dead, first killing then imposing upon them a designation they are no longer around to refute. It also renders them untouchable in polite society. Should a drone vaporize some nameless soul on the other side of the planet, who among us wants to make a fuss? What if it turns out they were a terrorist? What if the default accusation proves true, and we by implication are labeled terrorist sympathizers, ostracized, yelled at? It is generally the case that people are most zealously motivated by the worst plausible thing that could happen to them. For some, the worst plausible thing might be the ending of their bloodline in a missile strike. Their entire lives turned to rubble and all of it preemptively justified in the name of fighting terrorists who are terrorists by default on account of having been killed. For others, the worst plausible thing is being yelled at.

Allowed to wield silence so freely, any institution will become insatiable. It’s not only that the absence of information allows those complicit in but unaffected by wrongdoing to look away. The silence itself becomes an empty canvas, onto which any fantasy can be painted. When every last Palestinian journalist has been killed, maybe there will never have been any Palestinian journalists at all. Maybe they will have all been terrorists or supporters of terrorists or whatever adjacency to terror is sufficient to scare off those who, in possession of something approximating a soul, might otherwise look upon such obvious assassination and say: This is wrong. Absent an act to describe and the language to describe it, we are capable of believing nothing, or multiple contradictory things, or anything at all.

There is, and has been for decades, a version of this phantom reality imposed on the Palestinian people, one in which they left their land willingly and were never expelled, never terrorized into movement. One in which, as Golda Meir stated and so many Israeli politicians have echoed since, there was no such thing as Palestinians. One in which Palestinian identity, if it did exist, was meaningless, and certainly conferred no rights. One in which these nonpeople were nonetheless treated well by the government and institutions that now rule over them, given good laborer jobs and sometimes even afforded free passage on the roads they’re allowed to drive on and the buses they’re allowed to board and behind the walls that are there purely to keep everyone safe. One in which every failed peace agreement is the fault of these intransigent, unreasonable people and not the state whose officials to this day gloat openly about never allowing a Palestinian state to exist. One in which every round of violence is the sole consequence of the last Palestinian act of violence. One in which tens of thousands of dead children have only their support of Hamas to blame—an organization that last won an election before those kids were born.

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.

Over and over, the justification for all this—the secrecy and the censorship and the treatment of prisoners outside the realm of what the country’s foundational legal principles would ever allow—is justified by the threat these prisoners are said to represent. In reality, the majority of them were never charged with anything, let alone convicted. Many of them the U.S. government freely admits were of no threat at all, wrongly imprisoned during the frenzy of those early War on Terror years.

With relative (logistical, if not political) ease, pretty well every prisoner in Gitmo could all be transferred to facilities in the continental United States at any time, and the whole shameful legacy of the twenty-first century’s most notorious prison camp be ended.

Almost a quarter century in, most of the prisoners are elderly now, frail and suffering from so many injuries and illnesses that one of the storerooms in Camp 5, when we visited, was packed full of artificial legs—but that doesn’t matter. Whatever crimes they may have once been accused of, their mistreatment becomes, eventually, its own kind of self-perpetuating indictment.