One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

by Omar El Akkad

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.

Shortly after I was born, in 1982, the man who killed Sadat went before the firing squad, and for years the whole country lived under the suffocating gravity of martial law. To be outside at night required a formal reason, or else one risked harassment by the soldiers who seemed to make a military checkpoint out of every intersection. It is a hallmark of failing societies, I’ve learned, this requirement that one always be in possession of a valid reason to exist.

It has been, for as long as I can remember, the memory that anchors my overarching view of political malice: an ephemeral relationship with both law and principle. Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power. Otherwise, they, like all else, are expendable.

One of the hallmarks of Western liberalism is an assumption, in hindsight, of virtuous resistance as the only polite expectation of people on the receiving end of colonialism. While the terrible thing is happening—while the land is still being stolen and the natives still being killed—any form of opposition is terroristic and must be crushed for the sake of civilization. But decades, centuries later, when enough of the land has been stolen and enough of the natives killed, it is safe enough to venerate resistance in hindsight.

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?

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. Until the fall of 2023. Until the slaughter. Beginning in October of that year, the Israeli military, at the direction of the country’s government and with the support of the vast majority of the Western world’s political power centers, enacted a campaign of active genocide against the Palestinian people, one of the most openly, wantonly vicious campaigns in the near-century-long occupation, and easily the most well documented.

On October 7, 2023, armed groups led by Hamas’s military wing launched a coordinated attack on multiple cities near the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip. Fighters killed 1,195 people, of which 815 were civilians, according to an analysis by Agence France-Presse, including at least 282 women and 36 children. They abducted more than 250 people. It was a bloodbath, orchestrated by exactly the kind of entity that thrives in the absence of anything resembling a future. Immediately afterward, Israel began a campaign of obliteration throughout Gaza. Almost all the region’s 2.3 million residents have been displaced. Virtually every school, hospital, and university was either damaged or destroyed. The deliberate withholding of aid and destruction of infrastructure have resulted in widespread famine and death by disease. Over and over, residents were ordered from their neighborhoods into “safe zones” and then wiped out there. Some people are afforded precision in death, but not these: there is no accurate count of the murdered. There may never be.

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.

But this is not an account of that carnage, though it must in its own way address it, if only to uphold the most pathetic, necessary function of this work: witness. This is an account of something else, something that, for an entire generation of not just Arabs or Muslims or Brown people but rather all manner of human beings from all parts of the world, fundamentally changed during this season of completely preventable horror. This is an account of a fracture, a breaking away from the notion that the polite, Western liberal ever stood for anything at all.

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.

To watch the leader of the most powerful nation on earth endorse and finance a genocide prompts not a passing kind of disgust or anger, but a severance. The empire may claim fear of violence because the fear of violence justifies any measure of violence in return, but this severance is of another kind: a walking away, a noninvolvement with the machinery that would produce, or allow to produce, such horror. What has happened, for all the future bloodshed it will prompt, will be remembered as the moment millions of people looked at the West, the rules-based order, the shell of modern liberalism and the capitalistic thing it serves, and said: I want nothing to do with this.

But this story, of beheaded babies, will in the early days of the genocide come to define an essential unburdening. Almost a quarter century earlier, reports of phantom uranium helped garner support for a war that killed upward of a million people. Now, once more, an essential truth of calamity journalism is made clear: In the earliest days, in the chaos that precedes systemic annihilation, it is not what the party deemed most malicious has actually done that matters, but rather what it is believed capable of doing.

Neatly wrapped-up paragraphs of what in the industry is called “M-copy,” explaining the background of a conflict by listing an act of aggression by one party and then an offsetting one by the other, absent historical context, so as not to be seen as taking sides. 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.

The afflicted don’t need comforting, they need what the comfortable have always had.

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. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

But as much as the mainstream liberal parties might be far less deranged and cruel than their right-wing opponents on virtually every policy issue, it is the case of Palestinian suffering—or more precisely, utter indifference to it—where the two sides seem to be most in agreement.

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.

Language is never sufficient. There is not enough of it to make a true mirror of living. In this way, the soothing or afflictive effect of the stories we tell is not in whether we select the right words but in our proximity to what the right words might be. This is not some abstraction, but a very real expression of power—the privilege of describing a thing vaguely, incompletely, dishonestly, is inseparable from the privilege of looking away.

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.

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.

Again, it didn’t much matter. Except that it does, over time—this glaring disconnect between cultural self-image and pragmatic reality. 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.

It’s no use, in the end, to scream again and again at the cold, cocooned center of power: I need you, just this once, to be the thing you pretend to be. There is an impulse in moments like this to appeal to self-interest. To say: These horrors you are allowing to happen, they will come to your doorstep one day; to repeat the famous phrase about who they came for first and who they’ll come for next. But this appeal cannot, in matter of fact, work. If the people well served by a system that condones such butchery ever truly believed the same butchery could one day be inflicted on them, they’d tear the system down tomorrow. And anyway, by the time such a thing happens, the rest of us will already be dead. 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.

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.

Priebus, like most Republican Party insiders, hates Donald Trump. It is an ongoing mockery of the entire Republican establishment that this man is so thoroughly humiliating what Priebus and his ilk have tried to paint as the deepest, most qualified lineup of candidates in American history. And so Priebus wants us all to know, to believe, that this early momentum won’t last. Order will be restored. The glaring chasm between the dignified thing Republicanism pretends to be and the exclusively hate-catering thing it really is will soon stop being so glaring.

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. This chasm between the thing one pretends to be and the thing one really is—it’s not an exclusively Republican phenomenon.

It’s difficult to live in this country in this moment and not come to the conclusion that the principal concern of the modern American liberal is, at all times, not what one does or believes or supports or opposes, but what one is seen to be. From this outcome, everything is reverse-engineered. Being seen as someone who believes in justice—not the messy, fraught work of achieving it—is the starting point of any conversation on justice. Saying the right slogans supersedes whatever it is those slogans are supposed to oblige. It makes sense—when there are no real personal stakes, when the missiles are landing on someone far away, being seen as good is good enough.

When a white man kills dozens of people in a concert or a synagogue or a school, it’s a crime. A hate crime, sometimes. But terrorism requires a distance between state and perpetrator wide enough to fit a different kind of fear. The kind of fear that justifies the creation of entirely new laws, new modes of detention, new apparatuses of surveillance, anything, anything at all.

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.

A chasm has developed, these last few months, one of many but one that cannot be bridged. On one side is a portion of society that fears nothing more than the discontinuation of normalcy. That believes, regardless of what horror each new day brings, what matters most is to live as one had lived before, answering emails and meeting deadlines and maintaining productivity. On the other is that portion which, having witnessed the horror, is simply unable to continue as before. How does one live, hearing the screams, bearing witness to the bodies? How does anything else matter? The fear of some comfort disappearing collides with a different fear—a fear that any society whose functioning demands one ignore carnage of this scale for the sake of artificial normalcy is by definition sociopathic.

I 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. The defining emotion, as it has been for months, is bewilderment: What is wrong with me that I can’t keep living as normal? What is wrong with all those people who can?

and town councils—matters. Negative resistance—refusing to participate when the act of participation falls below one’s moral threshold—matters. And yet there are days when both negative and active resistance feel pointless. A political system that won’t restrict firearms even after a shooter massacres classrooms full of children, a system that shrugs when a regime murders and dismembers a journalist because that regime controls an inordinate amount of oil, a system that won’t flinch at the images of starving babies when it has the power to save their lives—what manner of resistance can’t such a system learn to abide? What use is any of it, what use? But there is a use, always. The first is outward: every derailment of normalcy matters when what’s becoming normal is a genocide. It doesn’t take much: by the standards of Western normalcy, where the possibility of a missile landing on one’s house or a military sniper murdering one’s children is so implausible as to be indistinguishable from science fiction, even minimal 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.

It is this realization that renders negative resistance most terrifying to political and economic power—the simple fact that, having taken these small steps, a person might decide it was no great sacrifice, and might be willing to sacrifice more, demand more. That having called for justice in one instance, one might do it again and again, might call for a just world. It is probably the case that most mainstream Western politicians don’t actually care one iota about Israelis or Palestinians and, were the calculus of electoral self-interest to shift, would happily back whatever position serves their own interests best. But what about a population whose inability to countenance genocide spreads outward, becomes an inability to countenance what the same political systems do and will always allow to happen to so much of the planet in the name of endless extraction, endless more? Such a thing puts the entire ordering at risk.

It is not simply the case that, seeing this kind of thing up close, one is made to contend with some new, terrible degeneration of the West, a corruption of its ideals or stated ethical orientation. It is that, upon seeing this, time and time and time again—in beautifully catered awards ceremonies celebrating apartheid, and in the killing fields of Gaza, and in the blunt knowledge that the two are not all that disconnected—one cannot help but realize that there has been no degeneration, no corruption. That so far as the West stands in historical reality, nothing has evolved, nothing has become more enlightened, nothing has been learned. It has always been this way.

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 purpose of this kind of accusation is never moral concern. To be accused of speaking too loudly about one injustice but not others by someone who doesn’t care about any of them is to be told, simply, to keep quiet.

But the notion that individuals who walk away might find common cause, might use that cause to build something that, if not entirely separate from the system, is at least not completely aligned with it, reads to the system—to any system of empire—as fantasy. For someone fortunate enough to be born wearing the boot, the capacity for mercy may well extend only to how hard one chooses to step on the neck. That anyone should take the shoe off entirely, walk from the site of the trampling, is unthinkable.

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.

But none of this changes the reality that revenge has always been a universal resource. When the state enacts it, it will be deemed proportional and measured. When the individual does, it will mark a brand-new starting point of history and everyone who looks or sounds or in any way resembles the author of that violence will be commanded in perpetuity to condemn it, knowing full well no amount of condemnation will ever be enough.

One day the social currency of liberalism will accept as legal tender the suffering of those they previously smothered in silence, turned away from in disgust as one does carrion on the roadside. Far enough gone, the systemic murder of a people will become safe enough to fit on a lawn sign. There’s always room on a liberal’s lawn.