One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

by Omar El Akkad

Where is the Palestinian Martin Luther King? I’ve heard said on more than one occasion, never accompanied by any self-reflection as to what kind of society necessitates a man like that, nor what that society ultimately did to him before his posthumous veneration. The implicit accusation is that certain people are incapable of responding to their mistreatment with grace, with patience, with love, and that this incapacity, not any external injustice, is responsible for the misery inflicted upon them.

But Palestinians do respond overwhelmingly with love. Just as the Indigenous populations of an entire hemisphere, subjected to the largest genocide in human history, responded overwhelmingly with love.

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.

Except it is a love that cannot be acknowledged by the empire, because it is a people’s love for one another. Anyone who has dragged a relative out from under the wreckage of a bombed building, who has held a friend bleeding to death in the street while the officer who pulled the trigger looks on, who has watched their water poisoned, their land burned, their communities starved, is intimately well versed in love. But in the eyes of the empire such a thing can never be called love, because the directive was never in the first place, Love, but rather, Love me. In spite of it all, love me.

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.

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.

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

In a hospital. In a refugee camp. In their beds. While making dinner for their children. While holding their siblings. While cycling. While playing on a beach. In a market. In an incubator. Struggling to breathe, under the rubble. While trying to drag a loved one from the middle of the road. While burying the dead. While scavenging for food. While selling vegetables. While swimming in the sea, trying to catch fish. While playing soccer. While waving a white flag. With their hands raised in surrender. With their hands tied. While running away. At a checkpoint. In a torture camp. In a safe zone. In a school. While delivering aid. While waiting on aid. While performing surgery. While sitting down in a chair. By drone, from the safety of great distance. Live on air. Away from sight.

And then I watch an interview with a Palestinian child who is asked what she misses most and answers: Bread.

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.”

One donates their speaking fees to a charity that attempts to get medical aid and food to starving children and there on the other side is only silence. One advises the director of a festival that any acknowledgment of the horror is better than none, knowing that what will almost certainly follow that acknowledgment is a silence or polite applause that becomes its own form of silence. No society in human history has ever donated or applauded its way out of a genocide.

When the Israeli military opens fire on starving civilians clambering for flour, The Guardian describes the killings as “food aid–related deaths.” One struggles to imagine how food aid could do such a thing.

“As with many events in the war between Israel and Hamas,” The Economist reports, “the facts are destined to remain fiercely contested.”

Legislators rush to pass bills outlawing boycotts, not only in obvious violation of the same freedoms those legislators are sworn to protect, but also a practical impossibility, this quest to stop people from not buying something. Terms like “economic terrorism” are tossed around by the same people who are quite happy to pull their donations from universities and literary festivals and anywhere that doesn’t sufficiently silence whatever voices they want silenced.

I’m reminded of what Susan Sontag is supposed to have said about the great lesson of the Second World War: that 10 percent of people are fundamentally good, 10 are fundamentally evil, and the other 80 swayable in either direction.

One day this will end. In liberation, in peace, or in eradication at a scale so overwhelming it resets history. It’ll end when sanctions pile up high enough, or the political cost of occupation and apartheid proves debilitating. 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.

whole histories and peoples must be ordered to make certain violence regrettable but understandable and other violence savage and infinitely punishable.