One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

by Omar El Akkad

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 killed on October 7, are human beings, their loss an utter indictment of the systems and leaders and world that allowed it.

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.

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.

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.

I’ve seen this person many times—they occupy a hallowed place in American culture, catered to by so many of the nation’s dominant cultural forces, from Monday Night Football to the Country Music Awards to the entirety of AM radio. It’s the person who in self-image professes to be a rule-breaker, untamable, wild—and in the next breath sides unquestioningly with every facet of state power. I’ve seen the Punisher decal on the bumper, the stylized American flag denoting the thin blue line: I’m an outlaw; also, anyone who disobeys the cops deserves to be killed. My first impulse is to mock the contradiction, but there’s no contradiction, not really, because the bedrock of this particular identity isn’t conformity or nonconformity—it’s self-interest. Anyone who buys into both the narrative of American rebelliousness and the reality of American authority understands that both have been created to serve them. The man in the action movie looks one way, the man the cops just shot in a traffic stop another.

The reality is that an ally of the West is killing civilians by the tens of thousands and it would be politically inconvenient to call this wrong now when for months, years, decades it has been deemed perfectly fine.

No, there is no terrible thing coming for you in some distant future, but know that a terrible thing is happening to you now. You are being asked to kill off a part of you that would otherwise scream in opposition to injustice. You are being asked to dismantle the machinery of a functioning conscience. Who cares if diplomatic expediency prefers you shrug away the sight of dismembered children? Who cares if great distance from the bloodstained middle allows obliviousness. Forget pity, forget even the dead if you must, but at least fight against the theft of your soul.

the same world in which you can buy avocados all year round and your iPhone keeps getting more powerful and you never have to live in fear of an occupying force obliterating your family with missiles is the world in which an insignificant group of people you’ll never meet simply have to die.

I read an op-ed in which a writer argues that the model for Palestinian-Israeli coexistence is something like Canada’s present-day relationship with the Indigenous population, and I marvel at the casual, obvious, but unstated corollary: that there is an Indigenous population being colonized, but that we should let this unpleasantness run its course so we can arrive at true justice in the form of land acknowledgments at every Tel Aviv poetry reading. And yet there’s at least a banal honesty about it.

And then I think of a line that has always stayed with me, from Marwa Helal’s “poem for brad who wants me to write about the pyramids”: this is where the poets will interject they will say: show, dont tell but that assumes most people can see.

That in the end there is no international rules-based order, no universal human rights, no equal justice for all, simply fleeting arrangements of convenience in which any amount of human collateral is deemed acceptable so long as it works in the empire’s interest.

There exists no other remotely plausible explanation for a moral worldview in which what a protester might hypothetically do to a hospital deserves the strongest condemnation, while what a military does—has done—to multiple hospitals deserves none.

stand in a ballroom amid hundreds of cheerful, celebratory people and it occurs to me I’ve lost the ability to be here. I have spent the entirety of my life stitching together costumes to make Westerners feel at ease in my presence—a massive internal compendium of cultural references and jokes and shorthand and all these alternate means of saying, Don’t worry, I’m not foreign, I’m like you—and suddenly I’ve run out of things to wear.

inconvenience is tantamount to apocalypse. The second is inward: 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

I know. I know but will do nothing so long as this benefits me. Only later, when it ceases to benefit me, will I proclaim in great heaving sobs my grief that such a thing was ever allowed to happen. And you, all of you, even the dead in their graves, will indulge my obliviousness now and my repentance later because what affords me both is in the end not some finely honed argument of logic or moral primacy but the blunt barrel of a gun.

How can you hope for anything to change if you won’t participate in the work of changing it? How can you have any moral standing if you are so susceptible to abandoning hope?

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 idea that walking away is childish and unproductive is predicated on the inability to imagine anything but a walking away from, never a walking away toward—never that there might exist another destination. The walking away is not nihilism, it’s not cynicism, it’s not doing nothing—it’s a form of engagement more honest, more soul-affirming, than anything the system was ever prepared to offer. ■