One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

by Omar El Akkad

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

the centrist who simply cannot understand why a good upstanding student at Columbia would risk their job prospects to protest some distant unpleasantness: These people making trouble are not like you.

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.”

wonder what it must feel like. It must take great courage, to dissociate so fully, and under such difficult circumstances.

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.

When a Palestinian American congresswoman calls for Palestine to be free, she’s censured—her colleagues, however, are free to call for the eradication of Palestinians without consequence.

No, I don’t want a candidate who’s the embodiment of me. 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. But so many will remember. We say that, sometimes, when it’s our children killed: Remember. And it may seem now like it’s someone else’s children, but there’s no such thing as someone else’s children. The problem with fixating on the abyss into which one’s opponent has descended while simultaneously digging one’s own is that, eventually, it gets too dark to tell the difference.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman writes a piece comparing Iran, the nation of more than 87 million, to a wasp. What laces the entire racist, nonsensical premise is fear.

In early February 2024, The Wall Street Journal publishes an opinion piece titled “Welcome to Dearborn, America’s Jihad Capital.”

Look what I can say about these people; look how far beneath me they are.

We treat you so much better than we have to; why are you so angry? Why did you make us do this to you?

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.

None of these same politicians have issued any condemnation of the obliteration of Gaza’s hospitals, which seemingly in the Western conception are not sites of healing, not sites at all.

How does one finish the sentence: “It is unfortunate that tens of thousands of children are dead, but…”

As a matter of course, Western officials are generally untroubled when they say things like this, that a ceasefire resolution represents a greater threat to lasting peace than the ongoing obliteration of an entire people.

When the world’s wealthiest nations decide, on the flimsiest pretext, to cut funding to the one agency that stands between thousands of civilians and slow, hideous death by starvation, it is a prudent anti-terrorism measure. But when voters decide they cannot in good conscience participate in the reelection of anyone who allows this starvation to happen, they are branded rubes at best, if not potential enablers of a fascist takeover of Western democracy.

rallying cry issued by the Palestinian poet Rasha Abdulhadi: “Wherever you are, whatever sand you can throw on the gears of genocide, do it now. If it’s a handful, throw it. If it’s a fingernail full, scrape it out and throw. Get in the way however you can.”

The gears will grind to a halt one day, and the silence that waits then, for those who commended this killing and for those who said nothing, will be of a far more burrowing kind. It will take the form of grandchildren who, when the subject comes up, will pretend not to know how their grandparents behaved, will awkwardly try to talk about anything else. It will take the form of previous statements quietly deleted, previous opinions abandoned and replaced with shiny new ones about how, yes, it was such a terrible thing that happened. And finally, it will take the form of a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul. And there will be no words exchanged then, only a knowing.

What are you willing to give up to alleviate someone else’s suffering?

the prevailing answer echoing from the mouths of so many of one’s own neighbors is: Nothing at all.

How can you hope for anything to change if you won’t participate in the work of changing it? How can you have any moral standing if you are so susceptible to abandoning hope?

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,

Virginia Woolf’s conversation with that lawyer over the images of the war’s dead: I cannot argue with you, cannot convince you of anything, because when you and I look at these pictures we see, fundamentally, different things.

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.

One day this will end. In liberation, in peace, or in eradication at a scale so overwhelming it resets history.

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.

One day it will be considered unacceptable, in the polite liberal circles of the West, not to acknowledge all the innocent people killed in that long-ago unpleasantness.

The land acknowledgments are coming. The very sorry descendants are coming. After all, grief in arrears is grief just the same.

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.