The Western liberal’s moral collapse in Gaza
Displaced Palestinians return to what is left of their homes in the Shuja’iya neighborhood, east of Gaza city, 28 January 2025
Amir Rotem writes in +972 on July 2025:
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, by Omar El Akkad, Canongate, 2025.
On October 24, 2023, two and a half weeks after Hamas’ attack on Israel, Gaza’s Health Ministry reported a grim new record: Israel’s bombardment of the Strip had killed 704 Palestinians in the previous 24 hours alone. The next day, Egyptian-Canadian writer Omar El Akkad posted a now famous sentence on X: “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.”
That razor-sharp turn of phrase, which has since been viewed more than 10 million times, stayed with El Akkad all the way to February 2025, when it became the title of his third book. “One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This,” El Akkad’s first non-fiction work after two acclaimed novels, is a collection of essays examining Western liberalism’s failures and hypocrisy, particularly in the face of Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign in the Gaza Strip.
El Akkad’s own life story gives him a multifaceted perspective on the issue. Born in Cairo, his family emigrated to Qatar, where he attended an American school. At age 16, they moved to Canada. “On my last morning in Qatar, the temperature was set to reach a high somewhere in the 40s Celsius, the 110s Fahrenheit,” he writes in the book. “Now, magnified by this thing called wind chill that I’d never heard of before, Montreal dips to 30 or 40 below zero, where the distinction between Celsius and Fahrenheit doesn’t much matter anymore.”
Such recollections, from a dark-skinned child of immigrants navigating a white world, reflect the kinds of cultural collisions that shake one’s personal foundations and make society’s underlying structures visible. Yet El Akkad’s unique perspective, despite what his name and background may suggest, is deeply rooted in Western society.