One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

by Omar El Akkad

In a 2016 essay, the writer and former soldier Roy Scranton describes watching Star Wars while stationed in Baghdad. 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.

A central privilege of being of this place becomes, then, the ability to hold two contradictory thoughts simultaneously. The first being the belief that one’s nation behaves in keeping with the scrappy righteousness of the underdog. The second being an unspoken understanding that, in reality, the most powerful nation in human history is no underdog, cannot possibly be one, but at least the immense violence implicit in the contradiction will always be inflicted on someone else.

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...

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 ...

Time and again, in conversation with friends, some of whom have lost family members in this killing spree, there is a sense that one must be going mad: to see so plainly the destruction, the murdered children filmed and presented for the world to look upon and then to hear the leaders of virtually every Western nation contend that this is not happening, that whatever is happening is good and righteous and should continue and that in fact the well-being of the Palestinian people demands this continue—it’s enough to feel like you’re losing your mind.

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.

And so we must watch the impotent pantomime of a Canadian prime minister declaring that while his government absolutely supports the International Court of Justice, it doesn’t support the premise of the South African case, whatever that tortured rhetorical construction is supposed to mean. We must watch the German government—whose police forces, in the name of fighting anti-Semitism, arrested Jewish protesters calling for a ceasefire—come to Israel’s defense at the court.

There’s a convenience to having modular opinions; it’s why so many liberal American politicians slip an occasional reference of concern about Palestinian civilians into their statements of unconditional support for Israel.

This is the world we’ve created, a world in which one privileged sliver consumes, insatiable, and the best everyone else can hope for is to not be consumed. It is not without reason that the most powerful nations on earth won’t intervene to stop a genocide but will happily bomb one of the poorest countries on the planet to keep a shipping lane open.

On a British television network, a newscaster describes the scene at an Israeli checkpoint: “Accidentally, a stray bullet found its way into the van ahead, and that killed a three- or four-year-old young lady.” It was tragic, he says.

I read piece after lengthy, erudite piece about the need for a nuanced, both-sides discussion of a genocide, about how words are so easily weaponized, and we must be very careful because weapons can hurt—as all the while very real weapons raze entire Palestinian neighborhoods and their occupants.

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.

In mid-October 2023, the Frankfurt Book Fair decides to cancel a ceremony in which the Palestinian writer Adania Shibli was to be presented with an award for her novel Minor Detail. The book is based on the true story of a Bedouin Palestinian girl raped and murdered by Israeli soldiers.

An academic article by Rabea Eghbariah on the Nakba—the calamitous, violent expulsion of Palestinians from their own land in 1948—set to be published in the Harvard Law Review is pulled at the last minute. When the Columbia Law Review agrees to publish the article, and refuses pressure from its own board of directors to delete it, the board takes the journal’s entire website down.

The Pulitzer Prize, which in previous years issued special citations to the journalists of Ukraine and Afghanistan, will instead commend the work of “Journalists and Media Workers Covering the War in Gaza”—avoiding the word “Palestinian” altogether. A memo from the standards editor at The New York Times, leaked to The Intercept, cautions against using the word “Palestine.”

The cartoon character on her shirt is still visible. Her face is not. She’d hurt no one.

Even years later, as the same man, now convicted or indicted for a litany of crimes, still easily controls the base of the Republican Party, there is great care on the part of many mainstream liberals to focus on the destructive potential of Trump as a singular entity, a freak storm somehow returned to shore, rather than a symptom of an entirely different climate.

In a perfect world, politics is boring, informed by debate but assured of a mutual understanding that the civic good matters. It’s tree-cutting permits and public transport levies and people who go to school for years and years to learn how to best pass a thoroughfare through a residential area. Republicanism, in its current form, proposes the exact opposite—treason trials for political opponents, the stripping away of any societal covenant, a war on expertise. In the right-wing vision of America, every societal interaction is an organ harvest, something vital snatched from the civic body, sold for one kind of profit or another. It’s a vision that produces an almost unmatched clarity in the base, an unmatched loyalty: Which side of this operation do you want to be on?

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.

A few days after the ICJ decision, Nancy Pelosi floats the theory that some of the people who are calling for a ceasefire have Russian ties. Later she’ll add China to the mix—the real source of this phantom treason of not much concern, in the grand scheme of things. The carefree quality of the accusation, the ease with which it can be lobbed, is as powerful as the accusation itself. Anyone who came to the West from the places where such charges are commonplace recognizes it immediately. In the country of my birth, where, as of this writing, inflation rages somewhere around 130 percent and a substantial portion of the population doesn’t have enough to eat, everything is the fault of an insidious plot hatched by Israelis and Americans, by the West, by some outsider jealous of Egypt’s potential or intent on its destruction. It’s a prized tool in almost every failed regime’s workshop. It’s a source of great disillusionment, to see it so casually repurposed by a democratically elected Western politician.

I watch an interview with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York. “I think, right now what is happening in Gaza, I can’t, I just, I can’t go on every single day seeing this,” she says. “I don’t associate myself with what’s happening.” I wonder what it must feel like. It must take great courage, to dissociate so fully, and under such difficult circumstances.

And the obvious centrist refrain—But do you want the deranged right wing to win?—should, after even a moment of self-reflection, yield to a far more important question: How empty does your message have to be for a deranged right wing to even have a chance of winning?

Of all the epitaphs that may one day be written on the gravestone of Western liberalism, the most damning is this: Faced off against a nihilistic, endlessly cruel manifestation of conservatism, and somehow managed to make it close.

I want a candidate who doesn’t bankroll genocide.

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.

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.

Near the end of February, Israeli soldiers open fire on Palestinians lined up for food aid, killing more than a hundred. The Gaza Health Ministry reports another six have died of malnutrition.

Because the point is not the violence. Violence comes later, most often at the hands of someone who reads enough of these pieces and decides to act explicitly on what is only implicitly implied. The point, the fundamental prerequisite, is to say: Against those people, those lesser people, anything can be justifiably done. The point is to flaunt permission.

But Palestinians do respond overwhelmingly with love. Just as the Indigenous populations of an entire hemisphere, subjected to the largest genocide in human history, responded overwhelmingly with love. Just as the Black communities in much of the United States, a country that quite simply would not exist in its current form were it not for the theft of their labor, responded overwhelmingly with love. Just as every people everywhere deemed acceptable collateral in service of the empire’s interest responded overwhelmingly with love.

Today I watched footage of a man kissing his son’s foot as he buried the body so torn apart by the missiles that the foot was one of the only pieces the father could find in the rubble. Tell me this man doesn’t know love, hasn’t been made to know it in a way no human being should.

It’s not surprising, I don’t think, that in the midst of this indiscriminate killing, many of the Westerners doing the most active work in opposing genocide are Jews.

On the second weekend of February 2024, the decomposing body of five-year-old Hind Rajab, whom the Israeli military murdered, is found in a car with her family, next to a burned-out ambulance that was dispatched to rescue her. Later, an independent investigation will find 355 bullet holes in the car Hind was in. But early on, the story is reported in multiple media outlets as though it were a missing-person’s case, as though this child simply walked out of sight and then walked straight out of this life. She had called for help. She had picked up a phone and begged for help. She cried, said she’d wet herself. She was five years old.