One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is a 2025 non-fiction book by Canadian author Omar El Akkad. [1] Although its title refers to the Gaza genocide, El Akkad's book also includes wide ranging critique of Western imperialism and hypocrisy. The book was classified by Book Marks as "rave" based on nine reviews.
The author is a novelist and journalist. His novels have won multiple literary awards, and he wrote for publications including The Globe and Mail . The book's title is from a viral tweet that El Akkad sent in October 2023 referring to the Gaza genocide. [2] [3]
In articles about atrocities committed by groups or nations that are not Western allies, nobody ever perishes in a blast. Buildings don’t collapse of their own volition. Civilian victims aren’t ordered by their interviewers to performatively condemn groups with which they have no affiliation. The violence is named, as is its perpetrator. Why this sudden clarity becomes utter fog when the subject is an Arab child torn to shreds by shrapnel or a Black motorist shot dead in a traffic stop or an Indigenous activist beaten at a pipeline protest is a function of preemptive deference to power. [4]
Besides the Gaza war, El Akkad takes aim at Western imperialism more generally. [2] The book is partly about what El Akkad called “the gap between [the West's] lofty ideals and its bloodstained reality”; [5] its author feels deeply disillusioned after adhering to Western ideas of freedom and seeing them betrayed. [2] He questions the hypocrisy of holding Western allies such as the United States and Israel to a different standard as the West's enemies. [4]
El Akkad contrasts the situation in Gaza with that of observers in the West, combining images of horrendous slaughter of children with the author's own children playing far away from a war zone. [2] His book is primarily aimed at Western centrists and liberals who have not spoken out against the Gaza war. [5]
The book was classified by Book Marks as "rave" based on nine reviews. [6]
The Guardian review called the book "passionate, poetic and sickening", and "full of well-earned rage". [7]
According to Joe Stanek in the Chicago Review of Books , El Akkad's use of the future tense gives the book the impression of prophecy, and the book "shines with quotable critique that spares no one from scrutiny". [2]
Brian Tanguay in the California Review of Books calls it a "brave book" and a "scathing polemic exposing the moral shortcomings of the Western world order". He compares the book to James Baldwin's Fire Next Time . Unlike El Akkad, Tanguay is skeptical that people would act when confronted with grave injustices. [4] Fintan O'Toole in the New York Times Book Review called it "a distraught but eloquent cry against our tolerance for other people’s calamities". [8]
David Mikics, writing in Tablet , said that "[i]n a better world ... [b]ooks like El Akkad's ... would have been vetoed by major publishers for deliberate inaccuracies, and for completely lacking sources. ... El Akkad’s 185-page book, which blames Israel on every page, contains exactly one sentence criticizing Hamas ...." [9]
The book won the 2025 National Book Awards prize for non-fiction. [10]