One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

by Omar El Akkad

The girl on the stretcher believes she has ended. A man says to her: Inti zay el amar. You are like the moon. Again, translation fails. There is no English equivalent to the lineage of this phrase, a lineage that runs through generations of old movies and love songs and family gatherings. Listen to the sly setting joy and pleading, raw pleading that carries the words as this man tells the girl who lived when so many others died that she is beautiful beyond the bounds of this world.

There’s an unbridgeable distance. I know it, and I think my children can already sense it. I tell my daughter one day I’ll take her to the place I was born, and she can see the pyramids for herself, figure out what’s really going on with the Sphinx’s nose. I tell her about the beaches along the north coast where the coral’s neon bright and you can swim right up and pet the fishies. I warn her it won’t be like anything she’s experienced before. You know how people stop at red lights here? I ask. Well, when we get there, don’t be surprised if…I pause, try to figure out how to prepare a child for what, relative to all she’s known so far in life, would come across as complete chaos. People there have made a language out of honking horns, I say, and she laughs, and I know deep down I might never take her back.

(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.”

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I tell stories for a living, and there’s a thick thread of narrative by well-meaning white Westerners that exalts the native populations in so many parts of the world for standing up to the occupiers, makes of their narrative a neat reflexive arc in which it was always understood, by the colonized and (this part implied) the descendants of the colonizer, that what happened was wrong. It’s a comforting thing, this narrative, and at my most susceptible to whatever the West is, I want so dearly to partake in it. 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 A...

I return to the memory of that moment often, the way we watched and laughed, didn’t think for a second to stop, to interfere, as the man in the Mercedes assaulted someone whose existence he had been so rudely forced to acknowledge. It’s come to shape the way I think about every country, every community: Whose nonexistence is necessary to the self-conception of this place, and how uncontrollable is the rage whenever that nonexistence is violated?

On the cover of Nevermind, the naked baby in the pool has been blacked out by a government censor’s marker; on the cover of In Utero, only the angel’s head and wings are visible. Such was the experience of consuming culture throughout my adolescence, a tiring cat-and-mouse of books and films smuggled into the country from abroad at great personal risk, of magazines held up to the light bulb in the hopes of seeing through the black ink, of this impotent rage at some anonymous government hack who was deciding what was too dangerous for me to hear, to watch, to read. (I learned later that the chief government censor during those years was the mother of one of my closest friends—just the sweetest woman.) Brought up this way, I held on to the thought that elsewhere, in the part of the world where these books and films and songs that so shaped my life were made, things were different. The mind outlines better than it shades. England, Canada, the United States, the West, these places—or rather ideas of places—became in my imagination the negative space of all I despised about the Middle East: the repression, the sheer docility expected of everyone on all matters political or social, the gaggle of idiot Dear Leaders whose embellished jawlines were plastered on most every vertical public surface.

I wanted for that other place. I wanted for the part of the world where I believed there existed a fundamental kind of freedom. The freedom to become something better than what you were born into, the freedom that comes with an inherent fairness of treatment under law and order and social norm, the freedom to read and write and speak without fear. And more than any of these things, the freedom to be left alone. It was an impulse that remained with me through the very dark years of my early adulthood. It remained even during the War on Terror years where, first as a college student and then for ten years as a journalist, I saw the terrible wrath of the place, saw it obliterate hundreds of thousands of people with names and ethnicity and religion like mine, knew for certain that there were deep ugly cracks in the bedrock of this thing called “the free world.” And yet I believed the cracks could be fixed, that the thing at the core, whatever it was, was salvageable.

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.

In the Middle East I’d seen North Americans and Europeans arrive and immediately cocoon themselves into gated compounds and gated friendships. So normalized was this walling off that a Westerner could spend decades in a place like Qatar and only briefly contend with the inconvenience of their host nation’s ways of living. (It would come as a genuine surprise to me, years later, when I came to the West and found that this precise thing was a routine accusation lobbed at people from my part of the world. We simply did not do enough to learn the language, the culture. We stubbornly refused to assimilate.)

Instead, something else changes most radically in the psychology of someone who leaves home: a relative distance between the person one is and the person they must become. Westerners in Qatar left the smallness of past selves behind. They were handed large offices and important-sounding job titles and Filipina housemaids and a sense of grandeur that I suspect many of them always knew, deep down, was little more than the formal dressing of life in a petrostate. And just as they (and we, and most everyone who comes to places like Qatar to do anything other than manual labor) became bigger, in Montreal my family settled into our smaller selves. My father’s work credentials meant nothing here, he struggled to find a job. 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.

articles that read like traditional news stories, but would not exist had the advertiser not paid for them. Can management force reporters to take on such assignments, treat them no different than real news? The two sides of the bargaining table had very different opinions on the matter. At the time, the reporters were livid. Today, after countless rounds of layoffs and the prospect of AI-generated noise coming to replace human-written stories of any kind, it almost seems quaint. Journalists are human. They have mortgages and bills. They work jobs so precarious, demanding, and poorly paying that about half the cohort of reporters I began my career with now work in public relations. There’s a reason journalism boasts one of the highest divorce rates of any industry. You work weird hours. You get yelled at a lot. You’re asked to write five listicles a day for the web traffic. You’re asked to do a professional videographer’s job on the side, with your iPhone. Your mistakes are a matter of public record, forever.

It’s a common refrain that the news industry has failed to come up with a functioning business model in the Internet age, but that’s not entirely true. Jettisoning the requirement to report news in favor of inciting the rage and fear and hatred of your audience before serving them up ads for guns and bunkers is a perfectly functional business model. It might not be journalism, might be the opposite of journalism, but the checks clear.

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. For the crime of reporting in a way the Israeli government disapproves of, Al Jazeera correspondent Wael Dahdouh sees his family summarily executed in a missile strike. He continues reporting the next day. Shortly thereafter he himself is wounded. He continues reporting the next day.

On the car ride home from the police station, he seems quite proud that the Canadian officers were baffled as to why their American counterparts had asked he be taken in and investigated. The following year, in 2001, my father receives a job offer in Wisconsin. It’s a good job. It pays well and the hotel where he’d work is in a city several times bigger than Harrison Hot Springs. The only logistical hurdle is a work visa, which his prospective employer tells him won’t be an issue, they do this sort of thing all the time. Then September 11 comes. Suddenly the application stalls. For months and months everyone waits. Finally, the hotel manager has to find someone else for the job. There’s the same vague undercurrent of pride in my father’s voice as he tells me what happened, how apologetic the manager sounded. A wrong had been done but at least everyone acknowledged it was not rational.

I watch footage of people bringing their kids to a party of sorts. Only it’s not a party, it’s a blockade. The people are here to stop aid trucks from entering Gaza. But the atmosphere is festive. Someone on the other side of these walls is going to starve to death or be operated on without proper medical equipment because this aid won’t pass, but there is something festive here. Ten years earlier, when I watch footage of settlers with folding chairs up on the hillside, viewing the bombing of Gaza as one would view a summer blockbuster, again there is a celebratory air. I am reminded of what the actor Helen Mirren said of her time in Israel in 1967: “I saw Arabs being thrown out of their houses in Jerusalem. But it was just the extraordinary magical energy of a country just beginning to put its roots in the ground. It was an amazing time to be here.”

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...

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. Tomorrow more Palestinians will die, but in the places where the bombs are built and launched it will have no bearing on mortgages, bills, employment. Indeed, in many of these places, what will have a real economic effect is if the bombing stops. In social and professional circles there will be limited tolerance for any talk about the fortunes of some exotic, dangerous-sounding people. 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,

It’s become difficult to find a single Democratic campaign appeal that doesn’t lean hard on the warning that the Trump wing of the GOP—which is now the only viable wing of the GOP—represents an existential threat to democracy, the United States itself. 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.

Of course the Republicans would be worse. 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.

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. Some reporters learn to make peace with it, justify it (How else will the public know what’s happening here? How else will change come about?).

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 everyon...

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.

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. And yet every time the idea is floated, a slew of lawmakers raise hell about the dangers of letting the most dangerous, evil people on the planet anywhere near the homeland. 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. If they didn’t hate the West before decades of their lives were taken from them, mustn’t they hate it now? What is the statute of limitations on resentment, on rage, on revenge?

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 American flag denoting the thin blue line: I’m an outlaw; also, anyone who disobeys the cops deserves to be killed.

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. Should the violence become politically burdensome, they can simply expand that part of the statement as necessary, like one of those dinner tables you lengthen to accommodate more guests than you expected. And it is important, too, that this amoral calculus rise and fall in proportion to the scale of the killing, so that one might always be able to say, “Well, we could never have known it would get this bad, but now, now everything has changed.” 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...

Watching footage of the demonstration later, what fascinates me isn’t the smattering of boos from the audience as the protesters take to the stage, it isn’t even the protest itself—it’s all the people in that room, so many of them either involved in or so vocally supportive of literature, who keep their heads down, say nothing, wait for it all to just be done. A room full of storytellers, and so many of them suddenly finding common cause in silence.

And yet there’s at least a banal honesty about it. Some of the least established writers I know, the ones who have to work all manner of side jobs just to make ends meet, are actively putting their literary careers at risk by calling for an end to the wholesale murder of a people. Meanwhile, so many of the most established writers are either totally silent or engaged in the tritest finger-wagging about just how terrible it would be for the art if we get too shrill about this sort of thing. Yes, the killing happens now, but there’ll be plenty of time later to write very moving stories about the shape and shade of the bones.

There was a time, mostly forgotten now, when almost every centrist institution in this country bent over backward to describe Donald Trump’s appeal as a function of some kind of “economic anxiety.” The alternative—that millions of Americans want desperately for people who don’t look and live and believe the way they do to suffer without end—was too unpleasant to consider, too much an indictment of something bigger than one man’s campaign.

Among the more troubling trends of twenty-first-century American politics is the normalization of every election as the existential one, the one upon whose results rests the very survival of American democracy. In one way or another, there is some truth to this claim. Almost without fail, whatever deranged position sat on the periphery of the Republican Party a decade ago now resides in the center. Does anyone truly believe the same party, in another decade’s time, will be more moderate and reasonable? When will any Democratic candidate not be able to say: Elect me or they will dismantle everything, will wreak unimaginable

It is an admirable thing, in a politics possessed of a moral floor, to believe one can change the system from the inside, that with enough respectful prodding the establishment can be made to bend, like that famous arc, toward justice. But when, after decades of such thinking, decades of respectful prodding, the condition one arrives at is reticent acceptance of genocide, is it not at least worth considering that you are not changing the system nearly as much as the system is changing you?

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. And should some activist interrupt their night out at a restaurant to show them pictures of the children they’ve helped kill, they will be deeply offended. Civilized people shouldn’t behave so rudely.

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.

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.

But the word “radicalize” feels wrong, seems to imply an element of extremism, as though rage at this kind of blatant hypocrisy is the abnormal thing, when what is plainly abnormal is to accept it.

I want to live in a world where the worst thing imaginable is a protest nearing a hospital. I want the narcotic capacity to unsee mangled bodies, surgeons sniped in their operating room, a handcuffed prisoner ordered into a hospital to tell everyone to leave and then, on his return outside, executed—so that I too might calibrate my condemnations accordingly. It would be good to live in that world. In reality, it doesn’t much matter what or how vigorously I condemn. I am of an ethnicity and a religion and a place in the caste ordering of the Western world for which there exists no such thing as enough condemnation.

I know now there are people, some of them once very dear to me, to whom I will never speak again so long as I can help it. It’s the people who said nothing, who knew full well what was happening and said nothing because there was a personal risk to it, a chance of getting yelled at or, God forbid, a chance of professional ramifications. It’s the people who dug deeply into the paramount importance of their own safety, their own convenience. I feel no anger toward these people, not even frustration or disappointment, simply a kind of psychological leavetaking, an unspoken goodbye.

It remains, to this day, the most scared I’ve ever been. We had access to some of the best medical facilities in the world and the insurance to pay for them and in a few days she was fine and it was still the most scared I’ve ever been. I don’t know how to make a person care for someone other than their own. Some days I can’t even do it myself.

When finally there is no other means of preserving self-interest but to act, the powerful will act. The same people who did the killing and financed the killing and justified the killing and turned away from the killing will congratulate themselves on doing the right thing. It is very important to do the right thing, eventually. 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.

One day there will be an accounting, even as so often those who did the worst things imaginable in the killing fields were allowed to meld back into polite society. The man who put the bullet in the little girl’s head might return to coach Little League games. The patrol that opened fire on the starving civilians might meet up every now and then for karaoke nights, might celebrate what they did when it is still acceptable, but over the years grow quieter, and finally bond over a shared silence thicker than blood. The soldier who drove the tank over the handcuffed body, who heard the sound and felt the rupture, might come home to a high school sweetheart and get down on one knee and might have children of his own one day. People who proved themselves capable of the most monstrous things human beings can do to one another might be granted one final immunity, because what’s the alternative? To look into a neighbor’s eyes and see, barely visible, the kind of stain no amount of repentance will ever wash away? Who can live like that? Better to move on.