One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This Omar El Akkad Penguin Random House, 2025
Stop what you are doing! Read this book!!
Every line, every paragraph
If you’ve been witness to Israel’s US-backed genocide of Palestinians that our government (Canadian) supports, this book will offer some sanity.
Put this book in the hands of everyone.
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
“There is an impulse in moments like this to appeal to self-interest. To say: These horrors you are allowing to happen, they will come to your doorstep one day; to repeat the famous phrase about who they came for first and who they’ll come for next. But this appeal cannot, in matter of fact, work. If the people well served by a system that condones such butchery ever truly believed the same butchery could one day be inflicted on them, they’d tear the system down tomorrow.
And anyway, by the time such a thing happens, the rest of us will already be dead. No, there is no terrible thing coming for you in some distant future, but know that a terrible thing is happening to you now. You are being asked to kill off a part of you that would otherwise scream in opposition to injustice. You are being asked to dismantle the machinery of a functioning conscience. Who cares if diplomatic expediency prefers you shrug away the sight of dismembered children? Who cares if great distance from the bloodstained middle allows obliviousness. Forget pity, forget even the dead if you must, but at least fight against the theft of your soul.”
•
“Toward the end of December 2023, the South African government brings charges of genocide against Israel at the International Court of Justice…
… Among those who have been calling for an end to the relentless killing, the development inspires a set of conflicting emotions.
First, there is the basic relief of watching some official entity—any entity-do something. Time and again, in conversation with friends, some of whom have lost family members in this killing spree, there is a sense that one must be going mad: to see so plainly the destruction, the murdered children filmed and presented for the world to look upon and then to hear the leaders of virtually every Western nation contend that this is not happening, that whatever is happening is good and righteous and should continue and that in fact the well-being of the Palestinian people demands this continue—it's enough to feel like you're losing your mind. As such, even were it a completely performative, hopeless act, the case brought before the International Court of Justice represents a brief respite from the bare-skinned duplicity, the Orwellian-ness of it all.”
—Omar El Akkad
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