The title of Egyptian-born Canadian author Omar El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, succinctly lays out the thesis of the book: that those in the West who have facilitated the destructive cruelty of Israel’s war in Gaza, or remain silent about it, will in time declare they thought it indefensible all along.
El Akkad, whose bestselling debut novel American War recounted a future civil conflict in a post-collapse United States, was moved to write this book partly out of horror at the daily images coming out of Gaza and partly out of frustration at the silence of many Canadians and Americans of his acquaintance on the matter, and at the cancellation of events involving those who did speak out. This, he says, was largely as a result of writers, literary festivals and prizes being reluctant to incur the costly wrath of wealthy pro-Israel benefactors, resulting in what he calls a “cascade of institutional gutlessness”.
El Akkad, a foreign correspondent for a decade with Canada’s paper of record, the Globe and Mail, is also scathing of his former profession. He blasts the “cracked moral compass” of the North American press for not responding to the deaths of Palestinian journalists during the war (167 at the most recent count, 59 higher than the mid-2024 figure, El Akkad cites), in sharp contrast to its mobilisation in support of the Wall Street Journal’s Moscow correspondent Evan Gershkovich during his detention in Russia. While there has been a perceptible shift in public opinion on Israel-Palestine in the United States over the past two decades, the media, government and elites have not kept pace with it, as El Akkad well knows.
This confluence of trends, and the Biden administration’s wilful countenancing of Israel’s disproportionate response to the October 7th attacks, has led El Akkad to view the cracks in the Free World, which he had continued to believe in – even through the major damage wrought by the war on terror – as no longer salvageable. And he sees the gap in perceptions between the developed West and the rest of the world as unbridgeable, noting at one point that “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”.
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This might make El Akkad’s book sound like a strident jeremiad, but it is a considered and superbly written volume, interleaving his observations on the discourse surrounding Gaza with an elegant memoir of his experience as a migrant, first as a child in Qatar, then in Canada, where he moved as a teenager, and finally the United States. He also brings his novelist’s eye for detail to the narrative, in particular to one marvellous DeLillo-esque passage where he imagines the phalanx of personal assistants, chauffeurs and door-openers that buffer the United States ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield from her everyday surroundings on her way to vetoing a Security Council resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.
El Akkad mentions Zionism only once in One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, the sole mention being in reported speech. This might be because he wishes to stay focused on his main theme, but also perhaps because he anticipates the raft of bad-faith responses that criticism of Zionism would undoubtedly engender.
Pankaj Mishra, in his stimulating and brilliantly researched The World After Gaza, is not so reticent. Mishra charts the history of Zionism from its early days in the Kaiser’s Germany to the present, and the attitudes of both western countries and Jewish intellectuals towards it. He also recounts his own support for Israel as a young man, commonplace in the Indian Brahmin milieu in which he grew up, before a trip to the West Bank in 2008 prompted him to revise his opinion.
The World After Gaza, like El Akkad’s book, looks to the future in its title, but it is mostly an intellectual genealogy of how Israel’s line, even as it has hardened under a far-right government, has become so readily accepted by western elites who were not so receptive in the early years of Israel’s existence. Mishra outlines an instrumentalisation of the Holocaust by Israeli governments from Menachem Begin on, which has maintained a sense of existential peril as an argument for supporting or tolerating Israel’s excesses. Not surprisingly, the brutality of the Hamas-led October 7th attacks reinforced this notion.
He also notes that Israel became integrated as a component of western geopolitical interests, something that has not been lost on former colonial subjects. People in the West generally, not without reason, tend to view the situation in Israel and Palestine as “complicated”. But in the Global South, as Mishra delineates, it has always been seen in starker terms: as a continuation of western colonial practices. Israel’s close ties with the apartheid regime in South Africa, which culminated in welcoming the formerly pro-Hitler South African prime minister John Vorster to Yad Vashem in 1976, only cemented this perception further.
Mishra in one chapter eviscerates the rigidity of Germany on the matter of Gaza, and more broadly Israel. Germany’s Staatsräson, as Angela Merkel called it, of defending Israel no matter what, was born of an expeditiously concocted postwar philo-Semitism that the Federal Republic substituted for any real attempt to denazify its society. It was a stance that, Mishra shows, repulsed Holocaust survivors such as Jean Améry, Manès Sperber and Peter Gay, and also Hannah Arendt when covering the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. She told Karl Jaspers that the “unpleasant overeagerness” of the German press made her want to throw up.
In recent years, this “obdurate philo-Semitism”, as Améry called it, has hardened into a reflexively anti-Palestinian stance that is crude to the point of puerility: Mishra relates how German culture minister Claudia Roth, when criticised for applauding at the Berlin Film Festival the Golden Bear-winning documentary No Other Land – which recounts the expulsion of West Bank villagers from their lands – insisted she was applauding only the Israeli Yuval Abraham, and not his Palestinian codirector Basle Adra. In a sane world, the intransigent German orthodoxy on Israel, which deigns to upbraid even Israelis who contest it, would hold no sway with anyone. Unfortunately, one of its subscribers, Ursula von der Leyen, currently presumes to speak for all the EU on the matter.
Both El Akkad and Mishra repeatedly call Israel’s actions in Gaza ‘genocide’. It has become common for supporters of Israel to dismiss such a description as inflammatory and unserious
Many readers will recoil at Mishra’s suggestion that the Shoah ought not to be coded as the universal symbol of human and moral evil, and instead be considered alongside other historical atrocities such as slavery, colonialism and the various genocides of the 20th century. But the supremacy of the Holocaust in the memory of suffering is, he contends, a relatively recent phenomenon, and one which survivors of the death camps such as Jean Améry and Primo Levi were intensely wary of. Though facile comparisons between Gaza and the Holocaust are invidious, it is hard to argue against Mishra’s statement that “Gaza has lengthened the shadow of the Shoah over many more people than the world’s Jewish population”.
Mishra has faced pushback for this argument, which was initially mounted in a pair of essays in the London Review of Books last year. A talk he was due to give at the Barbican in London was cancelled when the venue learned he intended to speak about the Shoah. The World After Gaza is no incendiary polemic, but rather a sober and extensively documented treatise on the discursive history that has given rise to the current situation.
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Both El Akkad and Mishra repeatedly call Israel’s actions in Gaza “genocide”. It has become common for supporters of Israel to dismiss such a description as inflammatory and unserious. Though it is certainly a contestable charge, so much evidence has been supplied by the Israeli government and its armed forces over the past 16 months that contesting it is an increasingly casuistical exercise. El Akkad predicts that “in time, there will be nothing particularly controversial” about using the word “genocide” in the context of Gaza, the first “live-streamed genocide in history”, as he calls it.
This is where Mishra and El Akkad diverge, however. Whereas the latter sees a future in which western intelligentsias cynically retrofit their stances on Gaza and whitewash their past complaisance, Mishra is in little doubt that attitudes on the whole will remain the same. Even as he salutes young protesters who have risked employment prospects by taking part in protests, he points to a general reluctance on the part of the West to reckon with the legacy of colonialism. While slavery and racism are for the most part seen as bad things these days, public opinion in former imperial powers is still wont to see colonialism as having been broadly beneficial for all.
In some countries there is even a flat-out refusal to acknowledge colonial crimes, such as in Belgium for the Congo genocide or in Germany for the Herero and Nama genocide in Southwest Africa between 1904 and 1908. Mishra holds that such blind spots are a feature rather than a bug, and integral to the maintenance of western supremacy, and that “barbarism and civilisation, far from being opposed, are inseparably entangled”.
Ultimately, this is likely to seriously damage western interests, and not necessarily to the benefit of the world as a whole. International relations are not a simple matter of the virtuous lined up against the malicious; protagonists can have different moral valencies depending on the context, and the simple status of being a postcolonial subject does not in itself make one virtuous, or western actors predatory by default.
The West was already having trouble getting countries in the Global South to support Ukraine in its resistance to the Russian invasion. Its egregious double-standard in failing to speak up on behalf of the people of Gaza as they have faced daily slaughter has irrevocably torpedoed any chance of that.
Russia and China have for some time been exploiting disenchantment with the West in their dealings with developing countries. And one needn’t make a false equivalency between liberal and authoritarian systems, or expect Moscow or Beijing to be any less exploitative than the West has been, to recognise that, for many Africans, Asians or Latin Americans, neither have the baggage the West brings.
