One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

Taking its title from a widely shared 2023 post by the author, Omar El Akkad's One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is a searching book-length essay written in the shadow of the war on Gaza. El Akkad — born in Egypt, raised in Qatar, and a longtime journalist who reported from Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay, and Ferguson — turns his attention to the distance between Western self-image and Western action.

Moving between reportage, memoir, and polemic, he sets images of atrocity against the ordinary safety of his own family's life, and interrogates the liberal centrism that professes horror while tolerating it. The result is both an indictment of imperial hypocrisy and a reckoning with what it means to belong to a society that, El Akkad argues, will one day claim it was against all this — once claiming so costs nothing.

Winner of the National Book Award, this is an urgent, unsparing, and deeply personal work about complicity, conscience, and the stories nations tell themselves.