Mick Hartley

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is a book by one Omar El Akkad. It won the Palestine Book Award and the National Book Award for Nonfiction. The Guardian applauded it as “powerful, angry, but compelling in its moral logic”, and for the New York Times it was “fiercely agonized,” “a distraught but eloquent cry against our tolerance for other people’s calamities.” The BBC’s favourite historian David Olusoga says ” I urge you to read Omar el Akkad’s astonishing book”. The list of passionate encomiums from the great and the good is as long as anything I’ve seen on Amazon. “I can’t think of a more important piece of writing to read right now.” “Strikes with the clarifying force of an angel.” “An extraordinary, essential work of fury and humanity…”. Well over a thousand reviews, the overwhelming majority five star, for a book published just nine months ago.

Which is strange because, as David Mikics outlines at Tablet, it’s a work of pure propaganda, unrelated in any serious way to what’s been happening in Gaza since October 7th 2023.

Omar El Akkad became famous for a tweet. On Oct. 25, 2023, he posted 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 account- able, everyone will always have been against this.” By “this,” the thing everyone should be against, El Akkad meant not Hamas burning people alive and murdering children in front of their parents, but instead Israel’s still nascent military response. The tweet was liked by more than 10 million people.

Early this year, El Akkad’s tweet heard round the world was expanded to a book, published to much fanfare by Knopf, titled One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. The book goes to truly staggering lengths to avoid “calling a thing what it is,” the moral clarion call announced in El Akkad’s tweet. According to El Akkad, Israel deliberately slaughters and starves civilians, trying by every possible means to increase casualty numbers in Gaza. Hamas is almost never mentioned, and the atrocities of Oct. 7 merit only one word, “bloodbath”—though, El Akkad instantly adds, it was a perfectly understandable bloodbath, the kind of thing the oppressed are forced to do because they have no other option, “in the absence of anything resembling a future.” If someone mumbles that Palestinians have had plenty of chances to make peace with Israel and thrive side by side with the Jewish state, El Akkad condemns this objection as racist, colonialist punching down.

In a better world this review would not exist. Books like Omar El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Been Against This would have been vetoed by major publishers for deliberate inaccuracies, and for completely lacking sources. El Akkad imagines into being scenes like the following, which he claims to have seen on video: “a girl begging for help, shortly before her execution by Israeli snipers.”

That’s a scene from the new Holocaust made to order, a child begging for her life and in answer being mercilessly slaughtered by her cold-blooded killers. Too bad it didn’t happen, one feels like saying, but actually it doesn’t matter at all that it didn’t happen, not to Hamas sympathizers like El Akkad, not to the press, not to the college activists, and not to the future mayor of New York, at least judging from his track record. The scene is so potent, so perfectly damning, that it must have happened, and that’s more than enough.

El Akkad’s book takes its place in Hamas’ current strategy, the hawking of fabricated atrocity porn. 

But read the whole article – a devastating take-down of what passes for reportage now on Israel’s fight against the Islamist terrorists. And as clear a demonstration as you could wish for of the overwhelming hatred of Israel – and, let’s face it, of Jews – that’s overwhelmed our supposedly enlightened liberal elites over the past two years. The book confirms their prejudices, so they love it.

One of El Akkad’s blurbs comes from the fiction writer Junot Díaz, who gushes, “A landmark of truth telling and moral courage, One Day is the truest, most necessary book you will ever read.” The truest of all things, which you probably don’t have the courage to admit, the bloodthirsty Jews’ commission of genocide, here takes its place along other famous truths—Poland attacked Germany in September 1939, Jewish doctors tried to kill Stalin, the Holocaust never really happened.

El Akkad repeatedly invokes his desired audience, the “people who recognize a thing for what it is.” But his book demands in every line that we see things for what they really are not. And if we don’t, well, we’re child killers, as we have been for as long as anyone can remember.