Omar El Akkad is an author and journalist. He was born in Egypt, grew up in Qatar, moved to Canada as a teenager, and now lives in the United States. He is a two-time winner of both the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award and the Oregon Book Award for fiction. His books have been translated into thirteen languages. His debut novel, American War, was named by the BBC as one of the hundred novels that shaped our world.
In Democracy in Exile's latest in its book excerpt series, renowned journalist and author Omar El Akkad shares an excerpt from his new book, "One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This." The book is available via the publisher, Penguin Random House.
Copyright © 2025 by Omar El Akkad
Published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC
***
Fear obscures the necessity of its causing. No one has ever been unjustifiably afraid, not in their own mind. An old college professor of mine once said a fundamental tenet of logic theory is that, from a false premise, any implication is true. Fear functions this way, too, causes the whole of the world to flower in limitless, terrible possibility.
It has always been this way—not just in this moment, this culmination of so many previous moments—but as a precondition of existence within a system whose currency of justification is fear. And it is a currency. The exchange rate is very real.
In early February 2024, as the slaughter in Gaza continues, I watch U.S. politicians argue over a domestic immigration bill that would ramp up enforcement, impose emergency powers to deport migrants before they can apply for asylum, and generally overhaul some of the systems by which people are allowed to come to and live in the United States. Much of the political debate returns, repeatedly, to the question of whether the bill is sufficiently tough. Its toughness cannot be overstated, because the people on whom it is going to be tough—the fear of them, of a purity they might dilute—is its own justification. These same people against whom it is acceptable to exact virtually any kind of state violence, from the snatching away of their children to letting them drown in plain sight, must become the living, flowering product of unlimited fear.
Around the same time Democrats and Republicans argue over the bill, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman writes a piece comparing Iran, the nation of more than 87 million, to a wasp. What laces the entire racist, nonsensical premise is fear. Everyone knows, instinctively, the recoil the sight of a wasp induces. But fear is no end in itself: its function here is to allow for the abdication of restraint—nobody has ever been blamed for wanting to swat a wasp. It might have stung.
***
"Where is the Palestinian Martin Luther King?"
I've heard it said on more than one occasion, never accompanied by any self-reflection as to what kind of society necessitates a man like that, nor what that society ultimately did to him before his posthumous veneration. The implicit accusation is that certain people are incapable of responding to their mistreatment with grace, with patience, with love, and that this incapacity, not any external injustice, is responsible for the misery inflicted upon them.
It is a very odd thing to be deemed a potential agent of terrible violence and also to be expected to offer unending deference.
- Omar El Akkad
But Palestinians do respond overwhelmingly with love. Just as the Indigenous populations of an entire hemisphere, subjected to the largest genocide in human history, responded overwhelmingly with love. Just as the Black communities in much of the United States, a country that quite simply would not exist in its current form were it not for the theft of their labor, responded overwhelmingly with love. Just as every people everywhere deemed acceptable collateral in service of the empire's interest responded overwhelmingly with love. Today I watched footage of a man kissing his son's foot as he buried the body so torn apart by the missiles that the foot was one of the only pieces the father could find in the rubble. Tell me this man doesn't know love, hasn't been made to know it in a way no human being should.
Except it is a love that cannot be acknowledged by the empire, because it is a people's love for one another. Anyone who has dragged a relative out from under the wreckage of a bombed building, who has held a friend bleeding to death in the street while the officer who pulled the trigger looks on, who has watched their water poisoned, their land burned, their communities starved, is intimately well versed in love. But in the eyes of the empire such a thing can never be called love, because the directive was never in the first place, "love," but rather, "Love me. In spite of it all, love me."
***
In New York City, Joe Biden is met by Jewish protesters. It has become an almost everyday occurrence now, this resistance. There's a ham-fisted reaction on the part of the White House, the entire Democratic establishment, that seems to betray a genuine shock at this expression of moral solidarity among peoples. It's like watching someone get cursed out in a language they can't speak.
It's not surprising, I don't think, that in the midst of this indiscriminate killing, many of the Westerners doing the most active work in opposing genocide are Jews. Here is love born of pain, of the past century's most horrific crime, love of one's own spread outward into love of another. Whatever the empire is, it has no idea what to do with this kind of love, which adheres neither to the empire's own central principle of self-interest nor to the adjoining principle that solidarity is only with one's own, that love for one's people may never become love for another.
I happen to be in New York City the same time as the president, meeting with my publisher about the manuscript that will become this book. I ask one of my editors to tell me honestly if she thinks the publication will cause her and her colleagues trouble beyond the bounds of what can be usually expected from an overtly political book. She says she doesn't think so, in large part because the soonest this book could go out into the world is the following year, and the situation will almost certainly be different then.
I want to believe it. A month earlier, while I was conducting an interview for a podcast, my guest brings up the bombing in Gaza. Later, during editing, one of my producers leaves a note on the interview transcript: "Flagging that I hope this is not still going to go on in March when this episode is released." When a friend of mine who runs a large literary festival calls up to discuss how to address the killings when the festival next takes place in the fall, we find that both of us are no longer even paying lip service that any of this will be "over" anytime soon, any more than it "began" the previous October.
Colonialism demands history begin past the point of colonization precisely because, under those narrative conditions, the colonist's every action is necessarily one of self-defense.
- Omar El Akkad
A couple of days after the president's visit to New York, Israel begins a major incursion into Rafah, a city on the southernmost edge of Gaza where more than a million people have been sheltering and beyond which there is only expulsion into the Sinai desert. What frightens me about my publisher's argument that things will be different next year isn't that I don't believe her; it's that I do.
But that too is a useless fear. It buys nothing.
***
On the second weekend of February 2024, the decomposing body of five-year-old Hind Rajab, whom the Israeli military murdered, is found in a car with her family, next to a burned-out ambulance that was dispatched to rescue her. Later, an independent investigation will find 355 bullet holes in the car Hind was in. But early on, the story is reported in multiple media outlets as though it were a missing-person's case, as though this child simply walked out of sight and then walked straight out of this life.
She had called for help. She had picked up a phone and begged for help. She cried, said she'd wet herself. She was five years old.
What is the word for what she felt? Because on the other side of the planet countless people cheering on this liquidation will wake up and say that they too are afraid. But if these are equal and offsetting fears then the word means nothing. As does any system, any way of living, that abides it.
A chasm has developed, these last few months, one of many but one that cannot be bridged. On one side is a portion of society that fears nothing more than the discontinuation of normalcy. That believes, regardless of what horror each new day brings, what matters most is to live as one had lived before, answering emails and meeting deadlines and maintaining productivity. On the other is that portion which, having witnessed the horror, is simply unable to continue as before. How does one live, hearing the screams, bearing witness to the bodies? How does anything else matter? The fear of some comfort disappearing collides with a different fear—a fear that any society whose functioning demands one ignore carnage of this scale for the sake of artificial normalcy is by definition sociopathic. Often, I watch discussions on social media in which someone asks: What radicalized you? In response, others will point to various moments of mass violence at the hands of the state, blatant cases of injustice, moments such as this one where it becomes clear there exists a massive gap between the empty statements of the powerful in support of justice and the application of actual justice. But the word "radicalize" feels wrong, seems to imply an element of extremism, as though rage at this kind of blatant hypocrisy is the abnormal thing, when what is plainly abnormal is to accept it.
***
In Toronto, a protest marches downtown, along University Avenue, one of the city's most iconic streets. Someone climbs up the scaffolding outside Mount Sinai Hospital, waves a Palestinian flag. Within a day, both the prime minister of Canada and the mayor of Toronto, along with several more of the country's political leaders, issue statements of condemnation, accusing the protesters of anti-Semitism and making it clear that hospitals are sacred sites, sites of healing. Maybe the protesters were raging anti-Semites, and for some reason decided the most effective expression of their hatred was to dress up in Spider-Man costumes and climb scaffolding outside a hospital.
None of these same politicians have issued any condemnation of the obliteration of Gaza's hospitals, which seemingly in the Western conception are not sites of healing, not sites at all. The damage this does has been glaring for months now, in the growing count of murdered doctors, patients and civilians seeking refuge in the non-hospitals of the non-world.
Near the grounds of Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza, in the days after an Israeli siege, mass graves are discovered, the bodies in them bound with zip ties.
I want to live in a world where the worst thing imaginable is a protest nearing a hospital. I want the narcotic capacity to unsee mangled bodies, surgeons sniped in their operating room, a handcuffed prisoner ordered into a hospital to tell everyone to leave and then, on his return outside, executed—so that I too might calibrate my condemnations accordingly. It would be good to live in that world.
In reality, it doesn't much matter what or how vigorously I condemn. I am of an ethnicity and a religion and a place in the caste ordering of the Western world for which there exists no such thing as enough condemnation. This is what we are to do, always and to the exclusion of all else: Condemn, apologize for, and retreat into silence about any atrocity committed by anyone other than those to whom we are perpetually assumed allegiant. It is not sufficient to say I despise Hamas for the same reasons I despise almost every single governing entity in the Middle East—entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.
It is a very odd thing to be deemed a potential agent of terrible violence and also to be expected to offer unending deference.
Along the axis of fear and possibility, some people are permanently assigned the negative quadrant, defined not by the horror of what might be done to them, but of what they might do. There exists no other remotely plausible explanation for a moral worldview in which what a protester might hypothetically do to a hospital deserves the strongest condemnation, while what a military does—has done—to multiple hospitals deserves none.
Colonialism demands history begin past the point of colonization precisely because, under those narrative conditions, the colonist's every action is necessarily one of self-defense. The story begins not when the wagons arrive, but only after they are circled. In this telling, fear is the exclusive property of only one people, and the notion that the occupied might fear the doing of their occupier is as fantastical as the notion that barbarians might be afraid of the gate. Any population on whom this asymmetry is imposed will always be the instigators, the cause of what is and, simultaneously, the justification for what will be. For what the savage outside does, the civilized center must respond.
How does one finish the sentence: "It is unfortunate that tens of thousands of children are dead, but…"
Ignore for a moment that the number is an approximation. Ignore the many more children mutilated, orphaned, left to scream under the rubble. Ignore the construction of the sentence itself, its dark similarities to the language of every abuser—"You made me do this." Ignore all of this and think about how you would finish this sentence that has now been uttered in one form or another by so many otherwise deeply empathetic Western liberals—how to finish it and still be able to sleep at night.
Surely, many people have, and their answers might relate to terrorists or revenge or an all-encompassing right to self-defense. But trimmed to its most basic language, every proposed conclusion to that sentence is some variant of the same basic thesis: "They would have killed more of ours."
It is within this context that we must ask: What does unlimited fear cost? What will sate it?
