One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

by Omar El Akkad

the first thing that kills when a bomb goes off isn’t shrapnel or fire. It’s the overpressure wave: air forced violently outward from the site of the blast. What you’re supposed to do, he said, is drop to the ground and cover your ears, breathe out, empty your lungs before the air collides with and flattens them.

the most effective thing you can do to avoid getting killed by a missile or a mine or a grenade is to be far away when it goes off.

An eighteen-month-old with a bullet wound to the forehead. Maybe the sniper was aiming elsewhere. Maybe there’s some explanation. Maybe it was necessary.

My daughter pauses, midway through drawing the Vs of a swing set in the park of her stuffies’ imaginary suburb. She gets up, walks over to where I’m sitting in the living room scrolling through photographs and videos taken in the aftermath of yet another atrocity in Gaza. She wants to double-check the spelling of “Welcome.”

(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.”

It is a hallmark of failing societies, I’ve learned, this requirement that one always be in possession of a valid reason to exist.

this same framing can always be used. The barbarians instigate and the civilized are forced to respond.

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.

This is an account of a fracture, a breaking away from the notion that the polite, Western liberal ever stood for anything at all.

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.

In the pauses between onslaught, they arrive at what’s left of the hospitals, missing limbs, skin burned away, maggots crawling out of the wounds. The medics are forced to create a new acronym for them. WCNSF—Wounded Child, No Surviving Family.

In articles about atrocities committed by groups or nations that are not Western allies, nobody ever perishes in a blast. Buildings don’t collapse of their own volition. Civilian victims aren’t ordered by their interviewers to performatively condemn groups with which they have no affiliation. The violence is named, as is its perpetrator. Why this sudden clarity becomes utter fog when the subject is an Arab child torn to shreds by shrapnel

A woman’s leg amputated, without anesthesia, the surgery conducted on a kitchen table. A boy holding his father’s shoe, screaming. A girl whose jaw has been torn off. A child, still in diapers, pulled out of the tents after the firebombing, his head severed from his body. Is there distance great enough, to be free of this? To be made clean?

As always, the dead will be made to pay the moral debt born of their killing.

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,

Tomorrow more Palestinians will die, but the unsaid thing is that it is all right because that’s what those people do, they die.

And yet there is a deranged honesty about the cult to which the likes of Pence—and former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, who signed her own message, “Finish them!,” to similar bombs—belong. American liberalism demands a rhetorical politeness from which the fascistic iteration of the modern Republican Party is fully free. 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.

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.

“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.”

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.

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.

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

No one, during those years, was ever tortured, only subjected to enhanced interrogation. When a soldier pulling at a joystick thousands of miles away mistook a wedding party for a terror cell and sent a missile-wielding drone to incinerate the lot, nobody was killed; there was only some collateral damage

every failed peace agreement is the fault of these intransigent, unreasonable people and not the state whose officials to this day gloat openly about never allowing a Palestinian state to exist.

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.

noncompliant” prisoners live in isolation cells for upward of twenty-three and a half hours a day. Inside the cells, near a small metal bed and toilet, there’s a little coat hook on the wall. It’s designed to flip downward if weighted too much, so that the prisoners are not able to hang themselves.

I travel to Guantánamo Bay on assignment eight times in 2008, mostly to cover the pretrial hearings of Omar Khadr. He’s a Canadian who was captured after a firefight in Afghanistan and charged with killing a special forces medic. He was fifteen when he was captured and sent to Gitmo. He will spend the next decade of his life there, awaiting trial.

Beyond relief and recognition, there is a more complicated thing—an understanding that the machinery of the West has never had much of a capacity for self-diagnosis.

People who call for a ceasefire are demoted, fired, called anti-Semites and terrorist-supporters. It all feels so petty, the stakes so low. On the other side of the planet entire bloodlines are being wiped out and here in the sheltered world we are subject to relatively pathetic indignities—loss of income, disinvitations, cold shoulders from people who in a different time might have been quite proud of themselves for having a Brown friend.

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,

“Accidentally, a stray bullet found its way into the van ahead, and that killed a three- or four-year-old young lady.”

During the time I reported from Egypt, I had started work on American War. In one scene in the book, the United States, amid complete institutional collapse, is visited by the president of a new pan-Arab empire. The president delivers a speech venerating the two nations’ shared desire for basic democratic rights. Years later, after I sold the manuscript, one of my editors returned the section to me and suggested it would hit harder if the speech itself were not so transparently insincere, if it seemed the head of this empire had at least some belief in the platitudes he was espousing. I had copied the text, almost word for word, from Barack Obama’s 2009 speech in Cairo, the one titled “A New Beginning.”

what shocks the most isn’t the cruelty or indifference. Many people’s governments are cruel, many people’s governments are indifferent. It’s this relentless parachuting of virtue.

The Pulitzer Prize, which in previous years issued special citations to the journalists of Ukraine and Afghanistan, will instead commend the work of “Journalists and Media Workers Covering the War in Gaza”—avoiding the word “Palestinian”

The cartoon character on her shirt is still visible. Her face is not. She’d hurt no one.

In mid-January 2024, with Gaza’s health system essentially collapsed and no one left to count the dead, The New York Times publishes an article detailing a drop in the number of Palestinian casualties—marking a change in Israel’s approach, it is said.

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.

Beyond self-interest, what do you believe in?

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.

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.

A few days after the ICJ decision, 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

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?

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.

there’s no such thing as someone else’s children.

At the checkpoints some pass, others are made to wait hours and hours, just for the hell of it, just as a reminder. A woman miscarries, waiting. A cancer patient dies, waiting. An area is designated safe, then bombed. A soldier shoots a teenage girl seventeen times and is found not guilty. Life goes on, for some but not others.

a fundamental tenet of logic theory is that, from a false premise, any implication is true.

Near the end of February, Israeli soldiers open fire on Palestinians lined up for food aid, killing more than a hundred. The Gaza Health Ministry reports another six have died of malnutrition.

Will the wholesale murder of tens of thousands of kids prove a tactical blunder? Is the child who had to bury every member of his family now a future threat? Will Hamas benefit?—but

there has been no greater totem of fear in the Western world than the terrorist. So overwhelming is this construction that not only has it justified without question or consequence one of the largest killing sprees in modern history, but has imposed onto entire swaths of people a binary existence. Are you, as someone who looks like those people who blow themselves up, for or against this? Will you condemn it, condemn it ceaselessly and no matter how unrelated to your existence it may be? Are you one of the bad ones who hate us, or one of the good ones who will tell on the ones who hate us? Should you be caught in the crossfire of our efforts to weed out the bad people, will you understand we had no choice but to do this? What is your relationship with the limitless violence of which you have always been capable in our minds?