One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

by Omar El Akkad

The starting point of history can always be shifted, such that one side is always instigating, the other always justified in response.

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 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.

What power assumes, ultimately, is that all those who weren’t directly affected by this, who only had to bear the minor inconvenience of hearing about these deaths from afar, will move on, will forget.

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.

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. Waves of progressives will take time out from pasting My Religion Is Love stickers to the bumpers of their Teslas to let you know that advocating this position makes you the enemy, that they hope you’re happy when Trump takes power and makes your life even more miserable, that you should just go back to where you came from.

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. It is a direct line of consequence from buildings that mysteriously collapse and lives that mysteriously end to the well-meaning liberal who, weaned on such framing, can shrug their shoulders and say, Yes, it’s all so very sad, but you know, it’s all so very complicated.

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.

It’s almost refreshing, then, when one is faced with the ugliest and yet most honest face of Western apathy, the face that knows full well the scale and severity of the horror but believes it to be absolutely justified, absolutely necessary. I know this face, too. It appears on talk shows and atop opinion pieces stating, euphemistically or not, that 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. And whatever disgust this equation, laid bare, might inspire, many know it to be true. 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.

I think of the hundreds upon hundreds of pictures and videos of the mutilated, the starved, the dismembered, and I am reminded that all of this is functionally invisible to so many in the part of the world where I now live. That if it were presented to them, some would undoubtedly respond the way Barbara Bush once did when asked about the Iraqi dead: “Why should we hear about body bags and deaths? It’s not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?”

We know it could be worse. We have been made to know. The parents whose children were stolen from them at the border under the direction of the Trump administration were not hypothetical (though such policies didn’t begin with Trump, and didn’t end after). The Muslims who had to watch loved ones die from afar because they could not leave or enter the country on account of a plainly racist law were not hypothetical. But neither were those kids a drone mistook for terrorists. Neither were those people killed by bad cops and left to drown by border agents and told—but, thank God, by a more liberal administration this time—those new oil-drilling leases are the best thing for their children’s future. And neither are the tens of thousands of people being shot and bombed and left to die cold and hungry when a single directive from the White House could end it.

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.

Where is the Palestinian Martin Luther King? I’ve heard said on more than one occasion, never accompanied by any self-reflection as to what kind of society necessitates a man like that, nor what that society ultimately did to him before his posthumous veneration. The implicit accusation is that certain people are incapable of responding to their mistreatment with grace, with patience, with love, and that this incapacity, not any external injustice, is responsible for the misery inflicted upon them.

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. Here is love born of pain, of the past century’s most horrific crime, love of one’s own spread outward into love of another. Whatever the empire is, it has no idea what to do with this kind of love, which adheres neither to the empire’s own central principle of self-interest nor to the adjoining principle that solidarity is only with one’s own, that love for one’s people may never become love for another.

Immigrants are supposed to be grateful. The narrative arc of immigration, in which one flees their own failing society to come to a better place, a country that was under no obligation to accept them but did, demands perpetual gratitude. And it exists, this gratitude, but the narrative makes no room for the many shapes it comes in, its many less straightforward forms. I harbor no ill will toward the immigrant who waves the miniature flag on the sides of the Independence Day parade, who says honestly and plainly: I love this country. But nor do I judge the immigrant who is as emotionless and pragmatic about the nation-state as the people who run that nation-state are so regularly emotionless and pragmatic about immigrants, who says honestly and plainly: I don’t love this country, don’t love any country, patriotism being the property of an entirely different kind of life than luck has given me; I live here because it will always be safer to live on the launching side of the missiles. I live here because I am afraid.

Colonialism demands history begin past the point of colonization precisely because, under those narrative conditions, the colonist’s every action is necessarily one of self-defense.

The machine swallows life and spits out convenience. If liberalism has finally decided it is safe enough to consider the Black people whose labor built the machine as human, and the Indigenous people whose obliteration made room for the machine as human, and maybe the distant foreigners who sew our clothes and solder our motherboards might be human, and the inconvenient occupied whose land and water might hold resources we implicitly know but cannot explicitly say would be so much better used in service of the civilized world might be human, and if even the natural world and its inhabitants deserve the rights of humans—well, what’s left to feed the machine? What’s left to manufacture convenience?

When the time comes to assign blame, most of those to blame will be long gone. There will always be feigned shock at how bad things really were, how we couldn’t have possibly known. There will be those who say it was all the work of a few bad actors, people who misled the rest of us well-meaning folks. Anything to avoid contending with the possibility that all this killing wasn’t the result of a system abused, but a system functioning exactly as intended.