“Where’s the Palestinian Martin Luther King?” Journalist and novelist Omar El Akkad has heard this question a lot lately, “the implicit accusation [being] that certain people are incapable of responding to their mistreatment with grace, with patience, with love, and that this incapacity, not any external injustice, is responsible for the misery inflicted upon them”.
But far more than loving or patient, King was eloquent. Palestine has many eloquent defenders, and El Akkad is one of them. Born in Egypt, raised in Qatar and Canada, and now a US citizen, he has reported from the Middle East, Afghanistan and Guantánamo. His new book is a response to events in Gaza after 7 October 2023. It is his voice, his bafflement, spilling out after decades of having to keep quiet for the sake of journalistic neutrality or artistic show-don’t-tell, of having to bite his tongue after readers responded to his journalism with racist doubt: “I don’t trust any story about terrorism written by a guy named Omar”.
He turns his back on these old strictures and tells the world what’s wrong as himself, not just reporting but processing all that he has seen and heard. “This is an account of a fracture,” he writes, “a breaking away from the notion that the polite, western liberal ever stood for anything at all.” It is a deft, broken-hearted, rhetorical savaging of comfortable people who say nothing (or pay lip service) but care only about preserving normality, convincing themselves that these things only happen “to certain places, to certain people”.
Organised as a series of linked essays, One Day is powerful, angry, but always compelling in its moral logic, and damn hard to put down. I devoured it in two quick sittings, and by the end my heart was drumming. The ugliness El Akkad describes is real and seems inescapable, too. Much of it is the unspeakable stuff nobody admits to but is clear to anyone who reads or observes: that once we’re safe, our empathy is often performative; that it’s more expedient to be against evil after it’s over; that western countries preach justice and democracy, but act to protect wealth and power. He balks at the morality of both the right, who with “deranged honesty” sign missiles, and the left, whose “progressivism often ends at the lawn sign”. And he reckons, at times, with his own part in all this.
As an Iranian who spent my first eight years dodging Saddam Hussein’s American bombs, then arrived in America to be treated like a savage, this book speaks to me. I’ve heard these arguments before, but never so articulately expressed. History always seems to start when westerners are harmed, “not when the wagons arrive, but only after they are circled. In this telling, fear is the exclusive property of only one people.” Like El Akkad, I despise Hamas and the authoritarian governments who use Islam to crush women, minorities and peaceful Muslims. But I can’t stomach the lie that the west is a civilised party here, after centuries of looting. El Akkad’s most compelling argument takes aim at “a fiction of moral convenience”, as he calls it: “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 civilisation.” Later the children of the aggressors, with all that stolen wealth and privilege firmly in their hands, hungry now for cultural capital, can celebrate the old resistance and claim outrage and solidarity in hindsight. At the time they say: “Yes, this is tragic, but necessary, because the alternative is barbarism. The alternative to the countless killed and maimed and orphaned … screaming from under the rubble … is barbarism.”
Supporting his arguments are jaw-dropping details: an Israeli newspaper calling Palestinian children “explosives of the future”; the haunting acronym WCNSF (Wounded child, no surviving family); a girl who, asked what she misses most, says “Bread”.
One Day has a single rhetorical shortcoming. El Akkad questions the point of any art created in a time of genocide that doesn’t condemn it. “What is this work we do? What are we good for?” It matters, he says (rightly), where we “expend [our] finite capacity for concern”. But artists can’t swap out their demons, even at such moments. The psyche decides; and the psyche is shaped by experience. The writer who lost a child to cancer may only write about cancer for ever, and if that ignores an ongoing atrocity, she has little choice. It is too much to say that no self-respecting writer can quote Baldwin on injustice then retreat into “whatever the finches are doing”. Baldwin might be how that artist defends justice, and the finches may be how she survives.
When the unspeakable happens, the world should stop but it doesn’t. It’s outrageous that some people get to think, even briefly, about anything else. But artists aren’t the problem here. Art is breath; its parameters don’t need narrowing.
One Day is passionate, poetic and sickening. It is full of well-earned rage, frustration with those who need this morality to be spelled out. For me it was cathartic, almost spiritual, to have these ugly truths articulated. It stoked and tempered the fires of my own rage. It is an important book, a must-read, if only for the reminder that history always comes down to one simple question: “When it mattered, who sided with justice and who sided with power?”
• Dina Nayeri is the author of The Ungrateful Refugee and Who Gets Believed?. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad is published by Canongate (£16.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
