“A chasm has developed ... one that cannot be bridged,” writes Omar El Akkad in his new book. “On one side is a portion of society that fears nothing more than the discontinuation of normalcy. That believes, regardless of what horror each new day brings, what matters most is to live as one had lived before, answering emails and meeting deadlines and maintaining productivity. On the other is that portion which, having witnessed the horror, is simply unable to continue as before. How does one live, hearing the screams, bearing witness to the bodies? How does anything else matter?”
The Egyptian-Canadian US-based writer is – of course – talking about Gaza. His non-fiction debut, One Day, Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This, is interspersed with graphic imagery: “An 18-month-old with a bullet wound to the forehead”; “missing limbs, skin burned away, maggots crawling out of the wounds”; “A woman’s leg amputated, without anaesthesia, the surgery conducted on a kitchen table. A boy holding his father’s shoe, screaming. A girl whose jaw has been torn off.”
The short book, he says, is “an account of a fracture, a breaking away from the notion that the polite, western liberal ever stood for anything at all” and a documentation of “the moment millions of 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.’”
Hours before I spoke to El Akkad on Zoom, the death toll from the Israeli onslaught in Gaza was revised to more than 61,700 people, after the Gaza health ministry reclassified thousands of people who had been missing, believed to be under rubble or in inaccessible areas, as presumed dead. That equates to around one in 37 of Gaza’s population. Among those killed were more than 17,880 children, Gazan authorities say, including 214 newborn infants.
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A ceasefire between Israel and Hamas continues to hold at the time of writing, though this is no way makes El Akkad’s treatise irrelevant – it is urgent.
While there are other wars and probably genocides taking place around the world, El Akkad sees Gaza as a unique turning point, galvanising because of the disconnect between the scale of the violence and the reaction of western governments, and the directness of western involvement.
When he sees a picture of a smiling child in his social media feed now, he says, “I have become conditioned ... [to understand] that child has just been murdered or is starving to death or can no longer be found. I have seen the most horrific videos and images and audio coming out of Gaza that I have ever seen in my life.”
Yet, at the same time as “watching this happen in real time, with audio and video proof”, western populations are “watching your own governments cheer it on as though it was the most moral act on Earth. I think those things have caused people to be angry and be motivated to stop this in a way that I haven’t seen before.”
Much of El Akkad’s book focuses on US politics, though it was finished before the re-election of Donald Trump. In our conversation, he told me that the next four years are going to be a “brutal ride”.
Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu recently sat smiling beside Trump, as the US president told the press of his plan to take over the Gaza Strip and arguing that Palestinians should not want to live there anyway.
[ Trump repeats Gaza takeover plan as he meets Jordan’s King AbdullahOpens in new window ]
One of the “fundamental tenets” of the US Democratic Party over at least the last two decades, El Akkad says, “has been this incredibly disjointed relationship between the performance of virtue and the pragmatic governance of conservatism. And I think Donald Trump shows up and kind of explodes that false paradigm. He represents an unmitigated cruelty that is not hidden behind virtuous rhetoric.”
Referring to the US, he says: “I have zero idea what happens to this country over the next four years. Anything is on the table at this point.” One of the things “Trump, as a political figure, does for this country is force it to contend with the idea that these awful things that happened throughout its history are not aberrations”.
El Akkad’s book is interspersed with memories from his own life. He left Egypt with his family as a young child, moving to Qatar, then to Canada. He now lives in rural Oregon, in the US, with his wife and children.
His history is relevant because his writing is not just a criticism of western countries for either supporting or failing to stop the bombardment of Gaza, but also a meditation on how so many people from other parts of the world, like El Akkad, spend their lives orientating themselves towards the West: adopting its languages and cultures; leaving their birth countries to move there. What does it mean to idealise countries with leaders and populations who can “abide by that slaughter”, as El Akkad puts it in his book? Today, “I find myself completely at a loss to explain what it is I’ve oriented myself towards,” he tells me.
This is an administration that punches down, and they are going to try out their worst cruelties on the people who have the least ability to defend themselves
Recent events have shaken his core beliefs, but also his sense of identity. “I mean, I can sit here and tell you how much of a pacifist I am and how much I abhor all violence, but by virtue of where my tax dollars are going, I’m one of the most violent people on earth.”
Despite his opposition, he remains in the US. In less than a year from October 2023 - when Hamas carried out a brutal attack on Israel, killing 1,200 people - Brown University’s Costs of War project made a “conservative” estimate that the US government had approved $17.9 billion (€17.2 billion) in “security assistance” for Israeli military operations in Gaza and elsewhere, with US spending on both Israel’s military operations and related US operations in the region totalling at least $22.76 billion (€21.87 billion).
Of the writer’s decision to reside in the US, he writes, “I live here because it will always be safer to live on the launching side of the missiles. I live here because I am afraid.”
El Akkad spoke in Dublin’s Pepper Canister Church on Thursday, for an International Literature Festival Dublin “off the page” event. He said he is excited. “There have been so few bright spots over the last year and a half in terms of looking towards the West and seeing anything resembling a national or institutional moral compass. Ireland has been a rare exception,” given, he says, “the way in which not just the country’s government, but the people of that country have behaved and have stood up.”
In his book, El Akkad writes that “every derailment of normalcy matters when what’s becoming normal is a genocide.” In terms of what objectors should be doing, he says there are obviously “active and negative forms of resistance, everything from chaining yourself to the gates of a weapons manufacturer, which very few people are in a position to be able to do, to refusing to buy products made by companies that are complicit in apartheid and occupation and all manner of atrocity”. In a very basic way, El Akkad believes that “letting people know what is important to you is meaningful”.
Since October 2023, many writers across the world, particularly Palestinian and Arab writers, have described finding themselves at a loss regarding what their work now means, if anything, and what they should be spending their time on. El Akkad – who worked as a journalist for a decade – said he believes writers are needed at a time like this.
“I think there’s a number of roles for writers, the first being purely documentary ... We have an obligation to get this down on paper. Because I think in the aftermath of every atrocity in my lifetime there’s been a communal effort at forgetting, at just moving on and not talking about it any more. And I think writers have a duty to stand in the way of that,” he said. “I’m a journalist by training. I’m a fiction writer ... And a lot of what I was working on suddenly seemed incredibly irrelevant. This seems to me the most morally grotesque moment, certainly in my time on this Earth, and if I can’t write about it, then I can’t call myself a writer.”
I don’t think there’s a single piece of physical or narrative violence that has been inflicted on Gaza that can’t be repurposed and inflicted on the most vulnerable human beings on the planet
Though El Akkad said he has found himself now unable to write about anything but Gaza, his previous fiction feels aligned somehow.
His first novel, 2017’s American War, speaks of a futuristic US badly damaged by climate change, where civil war has broken out over the use of fossil fuels. In his new book, he writes: “When climate change upends the lives of billions, our governments will depend on our ever-growing tolerance for violence against the hordes of nameless others to enact its cruelest, most violent fortressing.”
His second novel, What Strange Paradise, published in 2021, tells the story of a young Syrian boy who washes up on a European island following a shipwreck. It won Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize (the prestigious award has this month cut ties with its sponsor of two decades, Scotiabank, after coming under pressure due to Scotiabank’s investments in Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit Systems).
On January 29th, Trump announced plans to send as many as 30,000 unauthorised migrants from the US to detention in Guantánamo Bay. The scheme was denounced by the Cuban government, with foreign minister Bruno Rodríguez saying it displayed “contempt for the human condition and international law”.
El Akkad – who reported from Guantánamo Bay during his journalism career – calls this “such an incredibly ugly full-circle moment”.
“You know, this is an administration that punches down almost exclusively, and they are going to try out their worst cruelties on the people who have the least ability to defend themselves.” In the US, “as in many countries, overwhelmingly, that’s going to be migrants”. While that is done physically, “it’s going to be done narratively as well. A lot of the language of the ‘savage other’ is going to be applied at a governmental level to people who have committed the crime of trying for a better life, of escaping atrocity.”
El Akkad argues that the impact of climate change, the treatment of displaced people, growing global inequality and a vast range of other issues are interconnected.
“I don’t think there’s a single piece of physical or narrative violence that has been inflicted on Gaza that can’t be repurposed and inflicted on any of the most vulnerable human beings on the planet,” El Akkad says. “I think we live in a world that has increasingly come under the control of a gaggle of cruel, vain, very rich men who are fully engaged in the enterprise of stripping every public and societal resource for parts. And I think there’s a common narrative thread that runs from Gaza through climate change, through segregation, through apartheid, through resource exploitation, and that thread is simply asking people to look away.”
For so many in the West, “it is so easy not to talk about any of this. It’s so easy for the people who could be making the biggest difference to go through their entire day without having to think about, let alone talk to, a migrant who might be rounded up and sent to Guantánamo Bay, or a Palestinian whose bloodline has just been wiped off the face of the earth.
“My overriding piece of advice,” he reiterates, is to “let people know this is important to you.”
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad is published by Canongate
