REVIEW: ‘One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This’ by Omar El Akkad

Thank you so much to Text Publishing for sending me a copy of ‘One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This’ in exchange for an honest and human-written review.

Omar El Akkad, author of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

It might have been a day after I started reading One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad when I decided to look at what some other reviewers were saying, mostly to see if everyone else was enjoying the book as much as I was (something something confirmation of taste). This is where I stumbled upon a one-star review where the reviewer claimed to have stopped reading after page 37 for a litany of reasons, with one major reason being that they claimed Omar El Akkad was promoting the false “beheaded babies” narrative that was propagated by the Israeli government in the early days of the war on Gaza. Fortunately for my ego, I had already read beyond page 37, in fact, to my recollection, I had actually read up to page 47 (some eye-witnesses may say page 48), so not only did I know that this reviewer was incorrect in their assertion, I also knew that they were an idiot were not properly engaging with the text like they should’ve been. Without giving too much away, this particular section of the book is actually about how western media outlets took this Israeli propaganda and ran with it without fact-checking. You can find this part of El Akkad’s analysis on page 38, but this reviewer wouldn’t have seen it as they stopped reading at page 37.

I found this particular almost anti-intellectual engagement with El Akkad’s book fascinating (and frustrating) because the world as a whole seems to be becoming more aware of the dissonance between what we know to be true and what we are told to be true. It’s a dissonance that has always existed, bubbling under the surface where it can be comfortably ignored by those with power and privilege, and those who benefit from those with power and privilege. Having now finished it, El Akkad’s book truly is a tour-de-force that confronts this dissonance with complete honesty and brevity, and yet this one-star-reviewer proves that as much of a confrontation as it is, One Day… is not immune to the confusion of truth that the powerful and the privileged rely on to justify war and occupation. By not being able to properly engage with the book, this reviewer (without realising it) used their own mishandled pro-Palestinian politics to muddy the waters by claiming that this book was not pro-Palestinian enough for them. (By the way, from what I could gather, yes, this reviewer was and remains to be White).

Now, I’m not going to sit here and say that my engagement and review of El Akkad’s book is an exemplar, but it’s not incorrect. I found El Akkad’s approach to his commentary on the war in Gaza to be truly fascinating. He frames it with memoir-like passages – on his father, his ethnicity, his daughter, his career – in a way that could be misinterpreted by other readers (and actually was by the one-star-reviewer) as a ‘self-centring’ of the genocide in Gaza. This, however, is not the case as El Akkad’s framing highlights to the reader that they, along with him, and every other person who has been involved with this conflict, are human. This framing ensures that we as the reader have a deeply human response to the atrocities he is writing about, grounding and contextualising his perspective as a Middle-Eastern journalist in a way that gives us something to hold on to. Many readers, including myself, will never have experienced anything close to what has happened and continues to happen in Gaza (and all of Palestine for that matter), so this personal relatability is integral. We must be able to somehow relate our own familial grief, or our own grievances with our peers, to Palestine, especially when the age of the internet demands our focus to be on statistical numbers and neutral statements and passive-voice headlines in an attempt to dehumanise victims of war. It isn’t enough to acknowledge the genocide, we must feel it too. 

Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) the review has since been taken down, with the reviewer’s star rating remaining without explanation. I can imagine they took down the review after dozens of comments from other readers, mine included, called them out on their inaccuracy and pleaded with them to actually read the book in earnest. Or perhaps they were sick of reading comments saying that they were wrong, finding it easier to disengage and remain ignorant of their own poor analysis rather than properly reflecting and engaging with critique of their critique. It’s funny, because El Akkad has a chapter in his book dedicated entirely to writer’s like this, but it came well after page 37 so this reviewer never would’ve seen it.

Despite this piece turning into a review of a reviewer, I want to be clear: I adored this book. I found El Akkad’s sharp yet empathetic writing to be attention-grabbing, and his intense clarity held me closely and tightly as though I wasn’t reading his words but rather his mind. I think this is the most important book to be published in 2025.