One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This: National Book Award

Omar El Akkad

Feb 2025 · Sold by Knopf

About this ebook

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • From award-winning novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad comes a powerful reckoning with what it means to live in a West that betrays its fundamental values.

"[A] bracing memoir and manifesto." —The New York Times

"I can’t think of a more important piece of writing to read right now. I found hope here, and help, to face what the world is now, all that it isn’t anymore. Please read this. I promise you won’t regret it." —Tommy Orange, bestselling author of Wandering Stars and There There

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • PALESTINE BOOK AWARD WINNER • FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR CRITICISM

On October 25, 2023, after just three weeks of the bombardment of Gaza, Omar El Akkad put out a tweet: “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.” This tweet has been viewed more than 10 million times.

As an immigrant who came to the West, El Akkad believed that it promised freedom. A place of justice for all. But in the past twenty years, reporting on the War on Terror, Ferguson, climate change, Black Lives Matter protests, and more, and watching the unmitigated slaughter in Gaza, El Akkad has come to the conclusion that much of what the West promises is a lie. That there will always be entire groups of human beings it has never intended to treat as fully human—not just Arabs or Muslims or immigrants, but whoever falls outside the boundaries of privilege. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is a chronicle of that painful realization, a moral grappling with what it means, as a citizen of the U.S., as a father, to carve out some sense of possibility in a time of carnage.

This is El Akkad’s nonfiction debut, his most raw and vulnerable work to date, a heartsick breakup letter with the West. It is a brilliant articulation of the same breakup we are watching all over the United States, in family rooms, on college campuses, on city streets; the consequences of this rupture are just beginning. This book is for all the people who want something better than what the West has served up. This is the book for our time.

Ratings and reviews

"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." "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." Please, don't wait to take a stand. This is still happening and YOU can do something about it. Together we can do anything. Free Palestine

This book presents itself as moral clarity but functions as moral absolutism. It indicts Western institutions for hypocrisy while refusing to confront the constraints that govern real political action: incomplete information, weighing competing harms, and the catastrophic record of outrage-driven intervention. Moral opposition is implicitly equated with moral action, erasing the difference between recognising injustices and having viable waya to address them. Agency is applied asymmetrically: Western states are treated as freely choosing evil, while non-Western actors and extremist organizations are contextualised as products of history. And so their deliberate violations of war norms are minimised or backgrounded. The book offers indictment without design, urgency without architecture, and purity without accountability—an ideology that condemns Western power while calling on it to fix the world.

Read it. Then, read it again. Write the message in your soul until it becomes your breath and your blood and your actions and your words.

About the author

OMAR EL AKKAD is an author and journalist. He was born in Egypt, grew up in Qatar, moved to Canada as a teenager, and now lives in the United States. He is a two-time winner of both the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award and the Oregon Book Award for fiction. His books have been translated into thirteen languages. His debut novel, American War, was named by the BBC as one of one hundred novels that shaped our world.