One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

by Omar El Akkad

Still, we knew we were not in the middle of this war, the air would not be pushed out of our lungs. Quickly, the conflict eventually known as the Gulf War, and later the First Gulf War, transformed from a thing no one talked about to a normal mechanic of everyday life, no different than humidity or dusk. The endless footage on CNN that at first provoked such shock—these shadowed Baghdad cityscapes detonating sporadically in balls of pale white light—soon caused no reaction at all. It was just what happened to certain places, to certain people: they became balls of pale white light. What mattered was, it wasn’t us.

My father loved Egypt. He knew it for exactly what it was and loved it still.

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. These are the languages they speak and these are the customs they practice and if our own children are to have any chance at all they must become fluent in these things because anything less than fluency is a sentence to a life of something lesser. It is this impulse, to give your child a fighting chance at privilege by immersing them in the myriad languages of the privileged world, that makes me who I am, that lands me in the American International School at age eight, writing thank-you letters to American soldiers. We are all governed by chance. We are all subjects of distance.

One must also believe that, no matter the day-to-day disappointments of political opportunism or corruption or the cavalcade of anesthetizing lies that make up the bulk of most every election campaign, there is something solid holding the whole endeavor together, something greater. For members of every generation, there comes a moment of complete and completely emptying disgust when it is revealed there is only a hollow. A completely malleable thing whose primary use is not the opposition of evil or administration of justice but the preservation of existing power.

There were of course other routine indignities—people instinctively speaking louder and slower once they heard my parents’ accents, the kids at my high school who asked if everyone got around by camel where I came from—but these you learn to flatten into the normal workings of the day, the price of admission. The smallness, though, it warps the bones.

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. But this is centrism. This is the high-minded middle ground. The only serious, nuanced position, in such circles, is to plant oneself firmly halfway between what is assumed to be the standard left and standard right. Should one party propose stripping immigrants of all rights and the other propose stripping them of only some rights, the intellectually rigorous thing to do is to consider that what’s best is stripping immigrants of most rights. To compromise.

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

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.

For now, a motorist made late for work or a colonizer’s portrait disfigured provokes more of a political response than any number of dead foreign kids can.

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 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’s safety in this story, safety from one’s own conscience. Because in this story the weight of indictment shifts onto the dispossessed, the disappeared, the dead, and one can continue as is, comfortable in the knowledge that history, narrative, language itself demands the killing continue. Or, better yet, has nothing to say at all.