The Western liberal’s moral collapse in Gaza
Omar El Akkad’s new book explores why the West only venerates resistance in hindsight, and how we might reconstruct humanity from the ashes of genocide.
“One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This,” by Omar El Akkad, Canongate, 2025.
On October 24, 2023, two and a half weeks after Hamas’ attack on Israel, Gaza’s Health Ministry reported a grim new record: Israel’s bombardment of the Strip had killed 704 Palestinians in the previous 24 hours alone. The next day, Egyptian-Canadian writer Omar El Akkad posted a now famous sentence on X: “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.”
That razor-sharp turn of phrase, which has since been viewed more than 10 million times, stayed with El Akkad all the way to February 2025, when it became the title of his third book. “One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This,” El Akkad’s first non-fiction work after two acclaimed novels, is a collection of essays examining Western liberalism’s failures and hypocrisy, particularly in the face of Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign in the Gaza Strip.
El Akkad’s own life story gives him a multifaceted perspective on the issue. Born in Cairo, his family emigrated to Qatar, where he attended an American school. At age 16, they moved to Canada.
“On my last morning in Qatar, the temperature was set to reach a high somewhere in the 40s Celsius, the 110s Fahrenheit,” he writes in the book. “Now, magnified by this thing called wind chill that I’d never heard of before, Montreal dips to 30 or 40 below zero, where the distinction between Celsius and Fahrenheit doesn’t much matter anymore.”
Omar El Akkad, at an event at Powell’s Books, Portland, OR, 8 April 2025. (Wikimedia Commons)
Such recollections, from a dark-skinned child of immigrants navigating a white world, reflect the kinds of cultural collisions that shake one’s personal foundations and make society’s underlying structures visible. Yet El Akkad’s unique perspective, despite what his name and background may suggest, is deeply rooted in Western society.
“I’ve been going to British and American schools since I was 5 years old,” he said in an interview after the book’s release. “I’ve been very much attuned to this part of the world from a very young age.
“Over the last year and a half there’s been an element of personal complicity that renders all these relatively tiny fractures that I’d seen growing up, or over the course of my life, part of a bigger break,” he continued. “It’s an account of a severance: there’s been something that I’ve been anchored to for most of my life. Now I feel unanchored from it, but I don’t know what I am on the other side of that.”
El Akkad’s movement into and out of the “First World” gives his richly textured language a unique weight and depth. “Shortly after I was born, in 1982,” he writes, “the man who killed [Egyptian President Anwar] Sadat went before the firing squad, and for years the whole country lived under the suffocating gravity of martial law. To be outside at night required a formal reason, or else one risked harassment by the soldiers who seemed to make a military checkpoint out of every intersection. It is a hallmark of failing societies, I’ve learned, this requirement that one always be in possession of a valid reason to exist.”
A random arrest of his father accelerated the family’s emigration to Qatar, where El Akkad encountered the strange contours of expatriate life.
“In the Middle East I’d seen North Americans and Europeans arrive and immediately cocoon themselves into gated compounds and gated friendships,” he explains. “So normalized was this walling off that a Westerner could spend decades in a place like Qatar and only briefly contend with the inconvenience of their host nation’s ways of living. (It would come as a genuine surprise to me, years later, when I came to the West and found that this precise thing was a routine accusation lobbed at people from my part of the world. We simply did not do enough to learn the language, the culture. We stubbornly refused to assimilate [emphasis in the original].)”
Still, he resolved to walk the path that was laid out before him. “I knew none of this was for my benefit, but I could make a home within it [the West],” he writes. “I believed, firmly, not in any ceiling on what this society would allow to be done to people like me, but in what it would allow done to itself, its own rights and freedoms and principles.”
For a decade, El Akkad worked as a foreign correspondent for a major Canadian newspaper, reporting from Afghanistan during the U.S. war, from Cairo at the height of the Arab Spring, and from Washington. Though trained to question everything, he clung to a principled faith in the inherent justice of the Western narrative. Until he could no longer.
Smoke rises from an Israeli strike in the northern Gaza Strip, May 21, 2025. (Ali Hassan/Flash90)
Sand in the gears of genocide
As a storyteller, El Akkad began to notice a recurring narrative among well-meaning white Westerners: a reverence for Indigenous populations around the world who had stood up to their conquerors. Crucially, though, that reverence rarely extended to Palestinian resistance. For Arabs like him, there was a constant expectation of contrition.
“In reality, it doesn’t much matter what or how vigorously I condemn,” El Akkad writes. “I am of an ethnicity and a religion and a place in the caste ordering of the Western world for which there exists no such thing as enough condemnation. This is what we are to do, always and to the exclusion of all else: condemn, apologize for, retreat into silence about any atrocity committed by anyone other than those to whom we are perpetually assumed allegiant.
“It is not sufficient,” he continues, “to say I despise Hamas for the same reason I despise almost every single governing entity in the Middle East — entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.”
For El Akkad, 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. While the terrible thing is happening — while the land is still being stolen and the natives still being killed — any form of opposition is terroristic and must be crushed for the sake of civilization. But decades, centuries later, when enough of the land has been stolen and enough of the natives killed, it is safe enough to venerate resistance in hindsight.”
The book was written in the United States, before Trump’s victory, as the Biden administration lied, whitewashed Israel’s war crimes, and flooded it with weapons to enable Gaza’s continued destruction. Again and again, El Akkad expresses his disgust with the recurring demand to choose between something that is clearly terrible, and something that is only marginally less so. The implicit threat: if you refuse to align yourself with the lesser evil, then the burden for what comes next falls on you — not on those unwilling to offer anything more ethical, evolved, or hopeful.
“When the world’s wealthiest nations decide, on the flimsiest pretext, to cut funding to the one agency that stands between thousands of civilians and slow, hideous death by starvation, it is a prudent anti-terrorism measure,” he writes. “But when voters decide they cannot in good conscience participate in the reelection of anyone who allows this starvation to happen, they are branded rubes at best, if not potential enablers of a fascist takeover of Western democracy.”
French-Palestinian European Parliament member Rima Hassan carries the Palestinian flag at a rally, in Paris, France, June 12, 2025. (Anne Paq/Activestills)
El Akkad’s gaze swings between Western liberalism and its inherent limitations, and those who resist them — from Aaron Bushnell, the U.S. airman who set himself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington, to queer Palestinian-American poet Rasha Abdulhadi, whose call to action he quotes: “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.”
What’s impossible to ignore, he notes, is the apathy that so often greets this sand-throwing. “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 acknowledgement of the horror is better than none, knowing that what will almost certainly follow that acknowledgement 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.”
Faced with the existential threat that Israel’s war on Gaza poses to their self-image, one might expect Western liberals to reckon with El Akkad’s core argument. And yet, outside of the ideological pro-Israel factions who cling to dogma over truth, the self-styled progressive is more likely to acknowledge past injustice only once nothing can be done to change it — when the most they can muster is a weary shrug: “It is what it is,” or, “We had no choice.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meets with then-U.S. President Joe Biden, in Tel Aviv, October 18, 2023. (Miriam Alster/Flash90)
“One remarkable difference between the modern Western conservative and their liberal counterpart,” he writes, “is that the former will gleefully sign their name on the side of the bomb while the latter will just sheepishly initial it.”
El Akkad insists on highlighting the silent scream of those who cannot, or will not, stand aside — those who feel an a priori sickness in their gut at the thought of how things will be framed retrospectively. But he also insists on the hope that, from the embers hidden in ruins and trauma, a humanity will someday arise that we won’t be ashamed to be part of.
For now, there is good reason not to cooperate with the sanctimonious. “Every derailment of normalcy matters when what’s becoming normal is a genocide,” El Akkad writes. “Every small act of resistance trains the muscle used to do it, in much the same way that turning one’s eyes from the horror strengthens that particular muscle, readies it to ignore even greater horror to come.”
For El Akkad, a person for whom the system was never designed bears the responsibility to dream of a better system. And he advocates for divorcing the system, knowing full well that it may respond with violence.
“The idea that walking away is childish and unproductive is predicated on the inability to imagine anything but a walking away from, never a walking away toward — never that there might exist another destination. The walking away is not nihilism, it’s not cynicism, it’s not doing nothing — it’s a form of engagement more honest, more soul-affirming, than anything the system was ever prepared to offer.”
A version of this article was first published in Hebrew on Local Call. Read it here.