One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

by Omar El Akkad

When students at the most prestigious universities in North America build encampments in solidarity with Palestine, it’s difficult to believe the institutional response isn’t colored by a sense of betrayal. These young people have been afforded entry into the heart of the system, with all the privileges that entails. That they should jettison such a privilege in favor of a people on the other side of the planet who are able to offer nothing in return—to an ideology fixated on self-interest, it must seem like an embrace of nihilism. In reality, what is happening is the opposite of an embrace. It’s a shoving aside of the present system, a system that makes it more and more clear there is no future, no community, for this or any other generation to come. Only endless taking—and if these young people must pay for it by forfeiting hope or possibility or clean air or a livable planet, so be it. A system more petulant and intransigent than any protester who ever lived. A system that can only ever say: There is nothing better than this.