Omar El Akkad’s moral reckoning

By Yahia Lababidi

Omar El Akkad’s first work of nonfiction, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (Knopf, 2025), began as a line he posted online in October 2023, in the early weeks of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza:

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.

It spread swiftly because it named what many suspected: that a reckoning would eventually arrive, but only when it no longer carried a cost.

From that sentence grew a book of conscience, composed in fragments of confession, lament, and testimony. If El Akkad’s novels (American War, What Strange Paradise) used fiction to trace the devastations of empire and exile, here he turns inward, toward himself and the societies he inhabits. Born in Egypt, raised in Qatar, and long resident in Canada and the United States, El Akkad writes as one who has lived both within and at the margins of Western liberal democracy. That doubleness lets him register, with painful clarity, the gulf between the ideals the West proclaims and the violence it permits.

El Akkad does not absolve himself from this reckoning. On the contrary, he insists on his own entanglement:

I happen to live on the launching side of the missiles, and as a result, it’s very, very easy for me to look away. And what happens when you decide you’re not going to look away?

This refusal to avert his eyes becomes the book’s organizing principle. He speaks from the uneasy knowledge that his own tax dollars and civic belonging implicate him in the calamities visited upon Gaza.

That confession renders the book more than a political critique — it becomes an ethical meditation on what it means to witness. In one passage, he recalls watching destruction unfold on his phone and concedes, “My taxpayer money is paying for this, and I’m watching it in almost real time”. The horror lies in the way catastrophe is mediated into spectacle. To watch and remain silent, the book suggests, is itself a form of participation. Silence, in his account, is complicity dressed up as civility.

There is in these essays the tone of a man mourning Gaza as well as the collapse of his faith in the moral vocabulary of the societies in which he has made his home. “There’s been something that I’ve been anchored to for most of my life” , he confesses. “Now I feel unanchored from it, but I don’t know what I am on the other side of that”. These words give the book its emotional frame: the movement from belonging to estrangement, from inherited ideals to a wilderness of uncertainty.

This loss of anchorage arises from the spectacle of a genocide unfolding in real time, in full view of a world that prided itself on human rights and liberal values. As El Akkad observes, the West has been swift to invoke universal rights elsewhere, yet hesitant, evasive, or mute when the victims are Palestinian. The hypocrisy corrodes the very notion of universality. His is a lament for the disappearance of that moral anchor, and a recognition that the collapse of Gaza is also the collapse of an illusion.

The book’s most searing passages attempt to bridge the false divide between “our” lives and “theirs”. In one of its most quoted lines, El Akkad insists, “it may seem now like it’s someone else’s children, but there’s no such thing as someone else’s children”. This sentence crystallises the ethical demand that animates the book: to refuse the anesthetising distance that makes other people’s grief tolerable. His elegy, too, becomes a form of justice, preserving the sanctity of life when politics corrodes it.

Here, El Akkad’s voice converges with other recent works of witness. The fierce lyricism of Mohammed El-Kurd’s Perfect Victims, the philosophical scaffolding of Hamid Dabashi’s After Savagery, or Peter Beinart’s unsparing Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, also insist that one cannot continue in good faith while denying another people’s humanity. Yet El Akkad’s register is different: elegiac rather than polemical, written with the cadence of someone mourning a broken covenant. Where El-Kurd accuses and Beinart reconsiders, El Akkad testifies: bearing witness to his own unmooring, and to the betrayal of ideals he once trusted. If Dabashi erects a philosophical scaffolding around Gaza, El Akkad writes from within the collapse, refusing system in favour of lament.

El Akkad’s book sits alongside kindred voices without quite sounding like any of them. Beinart revises political commitments in the language of civic responsibility, and El-Kurd writes with the compressed voltage of poetry, El Akkad composes a record of severance from the interior of empire: a resident of “the launching side” who refuses to look away. His tone is elegiac, patient where the news cycle is frantic, confessional where policy essays are guarded. The result is a testimony of what breaks in a person, and in a culture, when the vocabulary of “values” no longer matches the world it makes.

It is in this vein that El Akkad asks: “Whose nonexistence is necessary to the self-conception of this place, and how uncontrollable is the rage whenever that nonexistence is violated?” Such questions strip bare the logic of domination: a society that defines itself by the erasure of others cannot endure the moment those others assert their presence.

For El Akkad, Gaza is a mirror. It reflects back the hollowness of the Western project in its current form. As he put it in an interview, “if Gaza does not wake us from our delusions, nothing will”. The point, past geopolitics, is spiritual: the war exposes how easily the language of rights, freedom, and democracy can be suspended, and how quickly silence fills the vacuum.

His own words cut deeper still:

Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power. Otherwise, they, like all else, are expendable.

Here the mask falls away. International law, lofty resolutions, even shared truths, all collapse when they obstruct the machinery of domination. Gaza reveals this with pitiless clarity, but the insight applies everywhere power makes a mockery of principle.

Reading these essays, one senses a writer wrestling with outrage, and with grief: grief for the dead, for the living left dispossessed, and for the vanishing belief that liberal democracy still meant something solid. The reader is not spared this grief. The book presses its audience to feel implicated, to see that to watch and say nothing is to bless the violence in progress.

Yet the tone, though anguished, never turns strident. It moves between reportage and memoir, between collective indictment and private confession. El Akkad’s gift lies in his ability to show the interior cost of living with contradiction: to speak as someone whose life has been sheltered by the very structures he condemns. His voice is weary yet resolute, wounded yet unflinching.

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is, ultimately, a reckoning. Read beside Dabashi’s philosophical indictment, Beinart’s prophetic reappraisal, and El-Kurd’s incendiary witness, El Akkad emerges as elegist, the voice of conscience mourning from within the aggressor’s house. It forces readers to confront the cost of their silence, the ease of their distraction, the comfort of their later disavowals. It insists that history will not be kind to those who merely waited for the storm to pass before finding their moral voice.

In its pages, Gaza becomes both a particular tragedy and a universal test. To look away is to collude. To look closely, as El Akkad has done, is to risk despair but also to recover the possibility of clarity. For readers in the West, the book offers only the hope that clarity might yet lead to courage. Its insistence is simple but devastating: there is no such thing as someone else’s children.

Don’t call it a “strip”: Daybreak in Gaza

By Norman Saadi Nikro

A striking feature of the edited volume Daybreak in Gaza concerns the way in which Gaza, as both place and graphic reference, proves to be amorphous. This isn’t to say that Gaza has no distinct geographical shape and structural attributes, but that through the many contributions one comes to appreciate how historically its form is abundantly more than a narrow “strip” — as it is mostly referred to since the advent of Israeli occupation. Indeed, the volume, subtitled Stories of Palestinian Lives and Culture and containing around a hundred contributions, provides a historical account of Gaza as a regional hub of trade, technological and educational development, cultural production, social interaction, and civilisational interconnection.

Understandably, most of the short, vignette-like contributions emerge from and reference Israel’s current genocidal onslaught, as well as earlier events of violence perpetrated by the settler colonial apartheid regime. However, besides these references, contributions provide descriptive accounts of history and geography. “For roughly four hundred years before 1948”, begins one of these, “Gaza was a region, not a strip”. Compellingly, Gaza’s regional historical and geographical coordinates are told through varying activities of indigenous cultural production, such as Palestinian embroidery, or tatreez, photography and cuisine, such as the wild leaf khobbayzeh (one of my own favourite side dishes).

The single longest contribution concerns photography, and is traced through the work of the Armenian Gazan Levon Yotnakhparian and his son Krikor, working through their studio Photo Koko, and of Kegham Djeghalian at his Studio Kegham. While providing a historical account of photography in Gaza from the early twentieth-century to the present, this chapter gives an engaging account of how photographers moved through and worked in the region, and how they understood their craft in relation to the history and social life of Gaza. Yotnakhparian, for example, chose to relocate from Jerusalem to Gaza in the 1930s, where he eventually set up his studio.

Both studios stood on one of the main Gazan streets, Omar al-Mukhtar. Through his work and social life, Kegham Djeghalian was locally known as “al-Musawer al-Fedai”, or the Guerrilla Photographer (137-38), an allusion to Palestinian resistance fighters. Sadly, the archive of Studio Kegham was destroyed by Israeli bombing on October 20, 2023. Through the wanton, calculated destruction of municipality buildings, universities, schools, hospitals and medical centres, even cemeteries, Israel’s strategy is to erase Palestinian capacities for history and memory.

In 2009, Palestinian-American historian Beshara Doumani argued for the vital need to produce and maintain Palestinian archives as records not only of the past, but of the present. As he explains, this is

because Palestinians are still incapable of stopping the continued and accelerating erasure of the two greatest archives of all: the physical landscape, and the bonds of daily life that constitute an organic social formation.

Sixteen years later, the urgency of such insights cannot be overstated.

Doumani’s point is that Palestinian landscapes, their myriad forms of social life and economy, maintain what we could call an archaeological livelihood — where arche denotes the capacities for archival production not only as records of the past, but as resources for the potential of Palestinian cultural production to engage history, memory, and social livelihood in the present. This is to say that the very writing of the chapter on photography serves both to document history and memory and provide a resource for further work engaging the economy and social life of photography in Gaza. This critical theme is directly addressed by Amani Shaltout in her account of her work with UNRWA’s Gazan photo archive, which had been digitised and hence rescued from Israeli destruction.

The decimation is emphasised by Palestinian novelist Susan Abulhawa in her contribution, “History Will Not Lie”, an excerpt borrowed from a longer essay she published in the Electronic Intifada after her visit to Gaza in February-March 2024. She writes:

How does one reckon with total erasure of your existence in the world — your home, family, friends, health, whole neighbourhood and country? No photos of your family, wedding, children, parents left; even the graves of your loved ones and ancestors bulldozed.

It is a poignant response to the international community’s (meaning western governments, in the main, including my own Australia) tacit acceptance and support of the genocide.

The volume does not shy away from critically addressing xenophobia and racism within Gaza, notably via singer Haifa Farajallah’s reflections on her African-Palestinian experience of her skin colour, or the longer essay “In the Eyes of Society”, which provides a fascinating account of Dom people, sometimes labelled as “gypsies”, or in the local Arabic, the more pejorative term Nawar. The word extends throughout Arabic countries of west Asia, including my north Lebanese vernacular, and basically means uncouth, dirty, uncivilised.

As editors Mahmoud Muna and Matthew Teller write in their preface, when contacting Gazans for contributions they were surprised by the number of positive responses. Despite, as they say, the “profound anguish, bereavement and loss”, as well as starvation, Gazans were keen to have their voices heard:

Stories poured out … Gazans wanted urgently to be heard, to record and preserve whatever once counted as normal and valuable and meaningful.

Palestinians in Gaza were all too well aware that they were likely to succumb to the Israeli killing machine.

The late novelist and playwright Noor Aldeen Hajjaj defiantly writes:

This is why I am writing now; it might be my last message that makes
it out to the free world, flying with the doves of peace to tell them that
we love life, or at least what life we have managed to live. In Gaza all
paths are blocked, and we’re just one tweet or breaking news story away
from death. 

Hajjaj’s contribution is taken from his diary notes published on the site Passages Through Genocide on 16 October 2023. He was murdered by Israel two months later, in an airstrike on Shuja’iyya, in Gaza City.

As that word in the title, daybreak, suggests, no matter how dire their circumstances, Palestinians will not give in to Israel’s strategic plan to erase them and their forms of cultural production from the face of the Earth. It represents and engages efforts to resist the pernicious Israeli occupation that has now morphed into an unashamed holocaust.