One Day, Everyone W
ill Have Always Been Against This
 | |
| Author | Omar El Akkad |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Published | 25 February 2025 |
| Publisher | Knopf |
| Publication place | Canada |
| Pages | 208 |
| ISBN | 9780593804148 |
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is a 2025 non-fiction book by Canadian author Omar El Akkad that won the 2025 National Book Award.[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 received positively by most reviewers.
Background
Omar El Akkad @omarelakkad 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.
25 Oct 2023[2]
El Akkad 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[4] referring to the Gaza genocide.[5][6]
Content
Besides the Gaza war, El Akkad takes aim at Western imperialism more generally.[5] The book is partly about what El Akkad called "the gap between [the West's] lofty ideals and its bloodstained reality";[7] he feels deeply disillusioned after adhering to Western ideas of freedom and seeing them betrayed.[5] He points out the hypocrisy of holding Western allies such as the United States and Israel to a different standard than their enemies.[8]
El Akkad contrasts the situation of people in Gaza with that of observers in the West, comparing images of horrendous slaughter of children with the author's own children playing far away from a war zone.[5] His book is primarily aimed at Western centrists and liberals who have not spoken out against the Gaza war.[7]
Reception
Dina Nayeri, writing for The Guardian, called the book "passionate, poetic and sickening", and "full of well-earned rage".[9]
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".[5] +972 Magazine published a review by Amir Rotem that highlighted several examples of Western inconsistencies brought up in El Akkad's book, including how violent resistance by indigenous people is only ever celebrated after it fails.[10] In Dissent, Avram Alpert found that the book relentlessly exposed the moral limitations of the contemporary world and showed how difficult—and yet necessary—transformation remains.[11]
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 The Fire Next Time. Unlike El Akkad, Tanguay is skeptical that people would act when confronted with grave injustices.[8] 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".[12]
David Mikics, a professor of English at New College of Florida writing in Tablet, said, "In a sane culture, Omar El Akkad's book would be dismissed as a crackpot hate-monger's one-sided diatribe ...."[13]
Awards
The book won the 2025 National Book Awards prize for non-fiction.[14]
References
- Beirne, Luke (20 November 2025). "Canadian author Omar El Akkad's debut nonfiction work wins U.S. National Book Award". CBC Books. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Retrieved 22 November 2025.
- Omar El Akkad [@omarelakkad] (25 Oct 2023). "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" (Tweet) – via X (formerly Twitter).
- Muhammad Smiry [@MuhammadSmiry] (25 Oct 2023). "This is Gaza" (Tweet) – via X (formerly Twitter).
- Omar El Akkad (25 Oct 2023). "Omar El Akkad 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." / X". Twitter.
- Stanek, Joe (26 February 2025). "Departures from Western Idealism in Omar El Akkad's "One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This"". Chicago Review of Books. Retrieved 22 November 2025.
- ""One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This": Omar El Akkad on Gaza & Western Complicity". Democracy Now!. Retrieved 23 November 2025.
- Trembath, Sarah (20 March 2025). "One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This". Washington Independent Review of Books. Retrieved 22 November 2025.
- Tanguay, Brian (May 2025). "One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad". California Review of Books. Retrieved 22 November 2025.
- Nayeri, Dina (14 February 2025). "One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad review – a cathartic savaging of western hypocrisy over Gaza". The Guardian. Retrieved 21 November 2025.
- Brison, Amos (7 July 2025). "The Western liberal's moral collapse in Gaza". +972 Magazine. Retrieved 5 December 2025.
- "Moral Limits". Dissent. Retrieved 5 December 2025.
- O'Toole, Fintan (Feb 25, 2025). "How Will the West Look Back on the Crisis in Gaza?". The New York Times Book Review. Retrieved 22 November 2025.
- Mikics, David (21 November 2025). "The Pornography of Resistance". Tablet. Retrieved 2025-12-22.
- Lapin, Andrew (20 November 2025). "National Book Award in nonfiction goes to Gaza polemic 'One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This'". Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Retrieved 21 November 2025.
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One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
by Omar El Akkad (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
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From award-winning novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad, an urgent and necessary reckoning with what it means to live in the West today.
As an immigrant, Omar El Akkad believed the West would be a place of freedom and justice for all. But in the past twenty years, reporting on the various Wars on Terror, climate change, Black Lives Matter protests, and more, and watching the unmitigated slaughter in Gaza, he has come to the conclusion that much of what the West promises is a lie. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is a chronicle of that painful realisation, a moral grappling with what it means—as a citizen of the US, as a father—to carve out some sense of possibility during these devastating times.
This is El Akkad’s nonfiction debut, his most raw and vulnerable work to date. It’s a heartfelt breakup letter with the West, a brilliant articulation of the same breakup we are watching all over the world, in family rooms, on university campuses, on city streets. This book is for everyone who wants something better than what the West has served up. This is the book for our time.
'[A] bracing memoir and manifesto.' The New York Times
‘Full of exasperated wisdom and virtue. Its honesty is invigorating.’Vulture
‘Certain to become one of the essential texts of this terrible era.’ LitHub
‘This is one of the most urgent and important nonfiction books of our time: exquisitely written, devastating, and incandescent with feeling and moral clarity about what it means to live in a world where unimaginable atrocities unfold in plain sight.’ Antoinette Lattouf
‘Terrifying, shameful, and necessary testimony.’ Lesley Williams, Booklist
‘Rearranged my soul.’ Yves Rees, Australian Book Review
'I can’t think of a more important piece of writing to read right now... I found hope here, and help, to face what the world is now, all that it isn’t anymore. Please read this. I promise you won’t regret it.' Tommy Orange, author of Wandering Stars
'A unique and urgently needed book.’ Naomi Klein
'A startling, shocking, beautiful and essential book.' Brian Eno
‘If you read one thing this year, read this.’ Amplify Bookstore
'Part elegy, part rallying cry, this magnificent book should, and will, be required reading for future generations trying to reckon with one of humanity’s darkest chapters.’ Téa Obreht, author of The Morningside
'I urge you to read Omar El Akkad’s astonishing book.' David Olusoga, Black and British
‘El Akkad's writing is mesmerising: it juggles the lyrical with the political, the comic with the analytical, and never once drops a ball. His book is at once observation, admonition and tender autobiography.’ Good Reading
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Review
"[A] bracing memoir and manifesto. . . . With precision and passion, [El Akkad] compels readers to close the emotional distance between 'us' and 'them' and to consider the immense suffering of civilians with renewed urgency." --The New York Times
"A bracing case for empathy. . . . What would it take to render a horror 'over there' equally real to one 'over here'? How do we lie to ourselves so convincingly, and what is the cost of those lies? These questions burn and throb with a haunting clarity [in One Day]. . . . El Akkad is . . . a moral meteorologist. . . . It reminds me of a story I heard once, about the late Toronto filmmaker Charles Officer, who was asked why he makes films that preach to the choir. It is because the choir must be fortified, he answered. El Akkad is tending to an exhausted choir, so that its song may ring clear." --The Washington Post
"Fiercely agonized. . . . [Omar El Akkad's] book is a distraught but eloquent cry against our tolerance for other people's calamities." --The New York Times Book Review (cover)
"A thoughtful, heartfelt, and ultimately heartbroken missive from an immigrant to his second home--a country whose vaunted values, never fulfilled, now seem almost a mockery. Echoing Baldwin, El Akkad writes from anger and love." --The Boston Globe
"One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This strikes with the clarifying force of an angel. By turns furiously troubled and achingly introspective, El Akkad sets fire to the devourous genocidal abyss we call a civilization and all the billion mendacities that sustain it. A landmark of truth-telling and moral courage, One Day is the truest most necessary book you will ever read." --Junot Díaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
"I can't think of a more important piece of writing to read right now. Doom and gloom and unspeakable horror abound and overwhelm these days, but it remains important to understand what we already know is happening now and how it will be understood in the future. It helps when we feel helpless to give our time and attention, our hearts and consideration to a voice like this, a book like this, from our particular time and for it. There is so much power in language here, where it is difficult to find words, such heart in a world that feels has lost its way. I found hope here, and help, to face what the world is now, all that it isn't anymore. Please read this. I promise you won't regret it. I honestly don't know how you could." --Tommy Orange, author of Wandering Stars
"Never again starts with not dehumanising the Other. No one, ever. Thank you @omarelakkad for putting this into words." --Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur, via X
"It is difficult to understand the nature of a true rupture while it is still tearing through the fabric of our world. Yet that is precisely what Omar El Akkad has accomplished, putting broken heart and shredded illusions into words with tremendous insight, skill and courage. A unique and urgently needed book." --Naomi Klein, author of Doppelganger
"This book is a howl from the heart of our age. I struggle to find more precise wording that might capture its ferocious, fracturing rage, as it seeks to describe the indescribable, make coherent an increasingly incoherent world." --Richard Flanagan, author of The Narrow Road to the Deep North
"If you cannot fathom the scale and savagery of the genocide against the Palestinian people, if you feel the world is smashed off its axis and you feel profoundly alone, profoundly mad, then read this clear, elegant and devastatingly truthful account of why you are not mad, and not alone; read this shatteringly honest book by a great writer who also cannot reconcile those things, but is--on behalf of us all, and with his whole soul--trying." --Max Porter, author of Grief Is the Thing with Feathers
"One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This wants us to answer its questions with the greatest possible honesty, and to embrace those answers as our true companions. What it gives us is nothing less than lionhearted, dauntless, unembellished love." --Megha Majumdar, author of A Guardian and a Thief
"Omar El Akkad's book is riveting in its honesty. I found it to be a brilliant mosaic of heartfelt reflections on the sad state of the world, one that dared to end in hope." --Raja Shehadeh, author of We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I
"I feel inadequate to describe a book like this with the right superlatives--I don't want to reduce the book down to one thing in doing so. . . but I hope Omar El Akkad's One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This will find a large audience." --Jeff VanderMeer, author of the Southern Reach Trilogy
"Part elegy, part rallying cry, this magnificent book should, and will, be required reading for future generations trying to reckon with one of humanity's darkest chapters." --Téa Obreht, author of The Tiger's Wife
"A startling, shocking, beautiful and essential book. It shook me up." --Brian Eno
"Omar El Akkad's One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, lays bare and eviscerates the genocidal logics of fascism and liberalism. Here, language does what we need it to do: it clarifies, it condemns, it names, it grieves. Here, too, is a lexicon for what might survive this. Devastating and scathing; you will want to read, will want to have read, this book." --Christina Sharpe, author of Ordinary Notes
"Is this the most urgent book you can read right now? Yes, it is.
Is this the most moral book you can read right now? It sure is.
Is this the most eye-opening book right now? Yep.
Is this the most needed book for our times? Absolutely." --Rabih Alameddine, author of The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother)
"In this powerful indictment of Western complicity in the genocide of Palestinians, Omar El Akkad asks: how are we supposed to go on living in this world? He looks for his answer to the worlds colonized and oppressed, who have always lived according to a love that 'cannot be acknowledged by the empire because it's a people's love for one another.'" --Isabella Hammad, author of Enter Ghost
"An extraordinary, essential work of fury and humanity, as well as a damning indictment of Western hypocrisy and institutional malignity. I cannot conceive of a more important book to read right now, or a more incisive and elegant articulation of this dark time. Every page contains a sentence or a paragraph I wanted to tear out and nail to the wall. I wish I could send a copy of El Akkad's moral call to arms to every person in America, every person in the West--the outraged and the apathetic alike." --Dan Sheehan, author of Restless Souls
"Omar El Akkad has produced something close to impossible with this elegiac and deeply personal book. With barely contained fury at the depths of Western hypocrisy, El Akkad manages to speak not just for himself but for all of us in the face of Israel's unspeakable violence against the Palestinians." --Moustafa Bayoumi, author of How Does It Feel to Be a Problem
"El Akkad's propulsive and damning indictment of Western violence and sanctimony in Palestine and beyond reads as a cry from the heart. He carefully dissects what it means to be an immigrant writing about the brutality of a system he has chosen to be part of and all the ensuing psychological harm that follows." --Nadifa Mohamed, author of The Fortune Men
"Omar El Akkad's devastating new book lays bare the deliberately distorted twists of language and logic that have allowed us to sustain a politics of extermination. The care, grief, anger, and intimacy that Akkad brings to every page implicates all of us and is a testament to the moral and intellectual courage that make this desperately needed book absolutely necessary." --Dinaw Mengestu, author of Someone Like Us
"Affecting. . . . Wherever we go, El Akkad is correct that we must start with refusal, if only the refusal to look away." --JewishCurrents
"Exceptionally powerful, as a howl of rage and grief against the status quo must be. . . . This is a book that many will take issue with, and most will find uncomfortable, which makes it even more important. Discomfort, as he points out, is a luxury." --Financial Times
"One Day is powerful, angry, but always compelling in its moral logic, and damn hard to put down. . . by the end my heart was drumming. . . . For me it was cathartic, almost spiritual. . . . It is an important book, a must-read." --The Guardian
"Powerful. . . compelling. . . haunting." --The Guardian Observer
"A powerful and deeply disturbing book. . . . It took courage to write One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. It takes courage too, to read it. Because El Akkad is right." --The Globe and Mail
"I will read anything Omar El Akkad ever writes. This book is a reckoning. The lie that the West is founded upon--from the beginning--blooms in blood on the pages. This book is a love story in the face of genocide--a love born between the very peoples we have always colonized and killed as if they are the raw material of building nations. What a furious, perfect heart it took to stare into the abyss we call being human and emerge with a revolution song." --The Millions
About the Author
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.
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One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
Product details
ASIN : B0DKSJP13C
Publisher : TEXT EBOOK
Accessibility : Learn more
Publication date : 4 March 2025
Language : English
File size : 1.1 MB
Screen Reader : Supported
Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
X-Ray : Enabled
Word Wise : Enabled
Print length : 172 pages
ISBN-13 : 978-1923059450
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Best Sellers Rank: 57,609 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)7 in Middle Eastern Politics
324 in Politics & Government (Kindle Store)
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From Australia
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Troy Chiodo-Gurr
5.0 out of 5 stars Just extraordinaryReviewed in Australia on 1 August 2026
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A beautifully written book about the ugliest of crimes. Haunting, brutal, and extraordinary.
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Essential readingReviewed in Australia on 25 July 2025
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Essential reading for any Muslim living in the West. Also works to give perspective white people on how all of these current world events make Muslims living among them feel.
2 people found this helpful
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Fred
5.0 out of 5 stars When it mattered who sided with justice?Reviewed in Australia on 26 January 2026
Format: KindleVerified Purchase
‘When those dying are deemed human enough to warrant discussion, discussion must be had. When they’re deemed nonhuman, discussion becomes offensive, an affront to civility’. That sums it up.
One person found this helpful
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Robin
5.0 out of 5 stars Must readReviewed in Australia on 21 August 2025
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Read this and pass it on.
One person found this helpful
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P. Gunning
5.0 out of 5 stars Read this and thinkReviewed in Australia on 28 November 2025
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This book is brutal but politely so. The words are reasonable and measured, but what they describe is unreasonable hatred, and unreasonable indifference to suffering, cruelty and an unreasonable capacity for looking away from what cannot be unseen.
5 people found this helpful
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Stan
5.0 out of 5 stars look at yourselfReviewed in Australia on 21 November 2025
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the genocide is bad enough but what’s worse is our apparent ability to side with the perpetrators making us complicit with this genocide- read the book and feel your shame then do something about it
6 people found this helpful
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Amazon Customer
3.0 out of 5 stars Two Sides to Every StoryReviewed in Australia on 31 December 2025
Format: Paperback
There are two sides to every story. El Akkad fails to properly tell the other side. If the people of Gaza voted for Hamas because they had no hope for the future, it seems to me that the Israelis, seeing what happened on October 7 2023, were desperately afraid that it would happen again. Not enough weight was given to the Israeli view (although I think their reaction was terribly wrong.) Hamas placed their command centres under hospitals and schools with absolute disregard for the lives of patients and children, just to get the kind of publicity that has turned Western society (especially young people) against the Israelis. But razing whole cities is unacceptable and El Akkad makes this point well. From a Western point of view (Australia included) what he says about immigrants should penetrate deeply into our conciousness, I quote “I judge the immigrant who is as emotionless and pragmatic about the nation-state as the people who run that nation-state are so regularly emotionless and pragmatic about immigrants, who says honestly and plainly: I don’t love this country, don’t love any country, patriotism being the property of an entirely different type of life than luck has given me, I live because it will always be safer to live on the launching side of missiles. I live here because I am afraid.”
One person found this helpful
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A. J. Dale
5.0 out of 5 stars Those who should read this, are the most unlikely to do soReviewed in Australia on 14 July 2025
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
This is a powerful book, it highlights what a lot of people who are following the atrocities occurring in Gaza would already have some awareness of, and ties a line between the lack of wholesale outrage for the victims there, and victims anywhere when the perpetrators get to write the narrative.
Should be widely read.
7 people found this helpful
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Topspin
5.0 out of 5 stars What it is like to grow in two different culturesReviewed in Australia on 13 June 2025
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Anyone who has lived in both in the Arab word and the western world would find a deep connection to this book. It is a shared experience , I wish I able to put so well as Omar El Akkad. Many thanks
3 people found this helpful
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars History repeatsReviewed in Australia on 24 May 2025
Format: Paperback
Well written Omar El Akkad. You have described the perennial baseness of virtually all tribal human groups who achieve what they believe to be unrivalled power. Entertaining read; but of little real value. They all fall eventually; and than cry foul. History repeats. Very few individuals learn; most just get entertained.
2 people found this helpful
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B
5.0 out of 5 stars An easy and yet brilliant readReviewed in Australia on 28 November 2025
Format: Paperback
Very well written.
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From other countries
strabazzino
5.0 out of 5 stars A masterpieceReviewed in Italy on 17 March 2026
Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
From the point of view of a “forever foreigner” who has dabbled in both geopolitics and anthropology for a lifetime, or so it seems: Omar El Akkad’s approach to what many deem to be the most harrowing question of our times is nothing less than a masterpiece. He has succeeded in entwining those two fields of study with his own life experience in an intensely soulful and emotional manner — one might add a philosophical one, in the original, etymological sense of the word — such as one rarely encounters as a reader.
More: I would even venture that this book is vastly more compelling than his two novels (without intending to deprecate these in the least.)
Curiously — a reverse argument of sorts — I found myself to be in disagreement with his brief mention of a couple of issues that are only slightly less important in the context of how today’s world is evolving. As it turns out, judging from the elements of biography revealed throughout the book, Omar El Akkad appears to have only had a second-hand knowledge of these particular topics.
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siddiqui
5.0 out of 5 stars Essential readingReviewed in Germany on 16 July 2026
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Excellent!
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QED
5.0 out of 5 stars A painful read but I gained a lot from it.Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 19 February 2025
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What’s described so well in this book is a hideous betrayal I think - and it not only wounds people like the author who put their faith in the western liberal promise and altered their lives for the better existence they believed it would afford them, but also affects people like me, born western and white into devout Christian families with doctrine and values instilled into them that now seem brushed aside for a different interpretation of text that’s considerably at odds with what they always believed was central to the teaching. Were we always being played or is it that post-WWII shock and rebound empathy has now petered (or indeed died) out and the western world has abandoned right and good and reverted to how things were before? Whatever the explanation, I now feel like an alien, wandering amongst westerners and political evangelists who choose to shut their eyes and cover their ears.
What do you do and where do you go to when what you’ve put your faith in as some comfort in existence has been blown to smithereens before your eyes and yet life goes on as normal around you as if nothing has changed at all? Although necessarily painful to read, this book has given me a strange sort of comfort, a place to be where I feel connection to a humanity that I embrace, and I’m indebted to Omar for that. I concur - having my illusions shattered and my moorings sliced through is but nothing compared to pain, suffering, death and destruction so immorally inflicted on innocent people. “But it hurts” (see page 179) and this book has helped me stop uselessly screaming (see page 87).
That Omar attaches no blame to any particular religion is to his credit, I think, and helps his message chime right across backgrounds and experiences and mark out that better place. How long will it be before those I thought I knew will have always thought that this was an abomination? I’m not sure I’ll ever find out, but if we ever meet again I can’t imagine it being a particularly sunny day for me.
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Said Rahim Manandoy
5.0 out of 5 stars PricelessReviewed in Ireland on 5 May 2025
Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
One day, everyone will have always been against this, is precisely written piece of book , which reflects the injustice and in the world. A must read for everyone. Omar El Akkad said what a shape of view
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Bianca Alecssia Gaina
5.0 out of 5 stars Must read!Reviewed in Belgium on 29 June 2026
Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
This book is a truthful picture of the Palestinian people’s genocide, but it also offers many other thought starters.
It made me realize that facts can be distorted and manipulated to fabricate mitigating factors and undermine even the biggest atrocities; it made me realize that victims are often dehumanized, in order to justify what they are forced to endure (even worse, politicians and mainstream media try to convince the general public that the victims deserve every single bit of it: injustice, torture, mutilation, forced starvation, execution, any excuse can be forged to make anything appear permissible/necessary for a “greater good”, to “protect” us from bigger “threats”).
I’d have much to say about each of the 10 cleverly written chapters, but I don’t want to go into details, because I wish anyone would read this book, analyze the current worldwide situation and understand that what’s happening in Palestine, is not actually just happening in Palestine, it’s not “only” a geographically-far-away horror; consider the latest events in the “free and civilized” USA, to make an example…
A must read, among many others on this atrocious topic
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pedikeens
5.0 out of 5 stars The emotional and philosophical impact is indelible and necessary.Reviewed in the United States on 24 January 2026
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This is not a book that comforts, inspires, or mobilizes in any traditional sense. Instead, it is a meticulous, gutting autopsy of the conscience in a time of atrocity.
Omar El Akkad constructs a work of autofiction so raw it feels less like a story and more like a trap, one set for both the author and the reader. Through a narrator paralyzed by guilt, compromise, and the sheer weight of witnessing a genocide, El Akkad indicts the very act of writing about suffering. He questions what it means to "bear witness" from a place of safety, to transform unspeakable horror into an aesthetic object.
The book’s genius, and its profound difficulty, lies in its refusal of heroism. It lives in the paralyzing space between the moral imperative to act and the human instinct to survive, offering no redemption. Reading it, I felt a deep, familiar rage at the world's cruelty, followed by a disorienting frustration with the narrator’s (and by extension, my own) complicity.
This is not a call to arms. It is a mirror held up to the specific, isolating injury of caring deeply in a world engineered to make that care feel futile. It’s about the corrosion of the soul under the weight of knowledge and powerlessness. The title is its own bleak prophecy, satirizing the future historical revision where everyone claims they were on the right side.
For those already consumed by rage and grief for Palestine, this book will not give you hope. It will give you the chilling solace of recognition, a stark, literary companion for the days when despair feels like the only honest response. It is a devastating and essential read precisely because it offers no easy way out.
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José Macaya
5.0 out of 5 stars Persuasivo, contundente y convincenteReviewed in Spain on 6 December 2025
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Muy bien escrito. Persuasivo. Convincente. Una acusación certera al mundo occidental. Explica la interrelación entre la política norteamericana y el mirar para otra parte sobre lo que pasa en Gaza. Escrito por un periodista, que es inmigrante egipcio, con experiencias complicadas por ello, y con visión novedosa.
Siendo muy bueno el libro, el mensaje está ya claro cuando se llega al 60% del libro. Encontré que la última parte aportaba mucho menos. Un libro que se leía rápido y con gusto, al final se hace un poco largo, por repetitivo. Pero el mensaje no por eso deja de ser persuasivo, contundente y convincente.
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Mario BR
5.0 out of 5 stars A wake-up call for all of usReviewed in Brazil on 6 July 2025
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A conscious-awakening violent punch in the stomach, written in a very clear, very readable way that allows this book to say what it says without turning you off and letting its message go straight to your heart and mind: the emperor is naked.
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Olivia
5.0 out of 5 stars Highly recommend itReviewed in France on 11 August 2026
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Poignant, necessary reading. An answer to all the gaslighting of the past 3 / 25 years of the "wars on terror".
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Joshua
5.0 out of 5 stars Painful Reality Articulated WonderfullyReviewed in the United States on 23 July 2026
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A book that should have never been written and one everyone everywhere should read.
I’ve kept a list of quotes for decades. Little snippets of what I saw as significance or brilliance. Both at times. But always resonant thoughts articulated in a succinct and coherent form.
The tweet from the author gracing the front cover will be the first one I’ve added by any living person.
The book is full of pain. I’d imagine at least some of it was written through tears. I’m sure all of it vehemently demanded to be spilled onto page. I hope the author found some relief once it had.
Read it. It hurts, and it should. Read it anyway.
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RJO
5.0 out of 5 stars Worth the time!Reviewed in Italy on 21 April 2026
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Such a great read; I wish everyone could read it.
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Stephen S.
5.0 out of 5 stars TIMELY & MOVINGReviewed in Spain on 8 January 2026
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A message we must not ignore. Read it. Share it.
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Anonym
5.0 out of 5 stars Perfect bookReviewed in Germany on 18 April 2026
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I love this book so much!! Please read!
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Jehad Abu-Ulbeh
5.0 out of 5 stars The Best Book I Have Read in my LifeReviewed in Canada on 23 November 2025
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I have enjoyed reading this book despite the sadness I felt. It's an honest, open account of the atrocities inflicted on the Palestinians people. I enjoyed reading about the author's life despite the difficulties he faced. The courage and clarity he displayed were to be commended. The language is so rich that I needed to read the sentences twice sometimes to comprehend the depth of their meaning.
I am so grateful for the recommendation, and I highly recommend it. Anyone who is willing to be conforted with the truth about power and ignorance should read this book. This book will open your heart and mind to the issues that you might not have thought about before.
I am happy that this book won the US National Book Award. He deserves it.
One will have a lot to gain by reading it.
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Client d'Amazon
5.0 out of 5 stars Super Duper !!Reviewed in France on 2 March 2025
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Super Duper !!
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Tara B.
5.0 out of 5 stars Well Written and DevastatingReviewed in the United Kingdom on 30 May 2026
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A very well written but devastating read.
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Amin Jorati
5.0 out of 5 stars Brutally honest and very timelyReviewed in Germany on 24 December 2025
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It was very cathartic to read the book for me. I identified with it so much so that I could have imagined having written it myself, had I had the aptitude to produce it. Peppered with personal stories and exquisite language, it shares the author's existential angst, inevitable in the world we live in at the moment. It doesn't take me anywhere I haven't been, but neither does it give false hope or lie to me. It's brutally honest.
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Kirsty
4.0 out of 5 stars A recommended read, but no sources listedReviewed in the United Kingdom on 9 April 2025
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A very well written book, however I did have to re-read many paragraphs multiple times as the wording was rather convoluted in places (for me anyway). The overall message was clear and some points were very well made, it really makes you stop and think. I've read many parts out loud to others when I wanted to share them.
I would have appreciated a list of sources at the back. Many things that have happened in history were mentioned, and I would've liked to have gone online and read about them in more detail but without sources this isn't possible, which was disappointing. (I understand that complaining about a lack of a list of resources in comparison to the book's content is definitely a 'first world problem' but if this book is here to educate, I feel it would have been helpful).
I would also recommend that you remove the cover jacket and check out the design on the actual hardback cover. That alone was quite hard hitting, and makes you realise what kind of thing you'll be reading about.
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Marit De Meyer
2.0 out of 5 stars Upsetting book.Reviewed in France on 28 May 2026
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Very angry , not a pleasant read. Could not finish, but he is right. It confronts us with the world politics while we are powerless.
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marcella
4.0 out of 5 stars A must read - but too longReviewed in the United States on 12 July 2025
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This is a very painful and beautifully written book because it is spot on and I'm not better than everybody else. A must read. However, as is so often the case with non-fiction books, the point(s) could have been made just as effectively in half the number of words, or even a long magazine article.
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Layal
5.0 out of 5 stars Eine sehr empfehlenswerte Lektüre!Reviewed in Germany on 6 November 2025
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Ein sehr persönliches, bewegendes Buch, das eigentlich jeder in Deutschland kennen und gelesen haben sollte..
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S. Singh
5.0 out of 5 stars Important, critical, movingReviewed in the United Kingdom on 12 August 2026
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Really moving and a powerful commentary on the atrocities being committed against the Palestinians for decades by Israel.
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Figbean
5.0 out of 5 stars UnexpectedReviewed in the United States on 23 August 2026
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Have read a book a week for many years, but this is the first review I’ve written in decades.
The recommendation algorithm has consistently shown this since release, and it popped up regularly in book threads that I follow. Each time I ignored it thinking “that is gonna be way too depressing. I know the ‘situation’ is horrible, but do I need to read an accounting of atrocities?” While I expected a more detailed version of the MSNBC or Drop Site news feed, the beautifully written book has much more in common with Chomsky and Gramsci: How narratives are created and enforced in the service of empire and those in power to maintain the status quo and justify any horrendous act. Rather than just a simplistic banner waving “GOP are Fascists,” Omar’s vitriolic critique is heavier upon the Democratic establishment and the Left to achieve absolutely anything of value while standing for nothing but self-preservation. While reading I was already thinking about this review and posting it wide, a useless equivalent of adding a flag or BLM logo to my profile pic to show my allyship…which proves Omar’s point. I will certainly recommend this book to everyone I know. I can also sheepishly and embarrassingly admit that will be the extent of my support as I have other more pressing personal issues to worry about. In the meantime, countless more will be murdered. So it goes.
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Highly recommendedReviewed in the United Kingdom on 3 December 2025
Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
Such an important book. The telling of his personal experiences of discrimination and outright racism, in conjunction with the political & social decisions and movements that made them possible, against the backdrop of a genocide. Beautifully written. I've spent the past months recommending this book to anyone who will listen to me. I've also taken enough photos of the text to be liable for copyright infringement - enough that I bought the e-book too to annotate... I've only annotated one book before this in 40+ yrs of reading.
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Mary-Lyn
5.0 out of 5 stars A deeply affecting workReviewed in the United States on 5 June 2026
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A thought-provoking and deeply moving book. Omar El Akkad masterfully connects historical events and modern geopolitical crises, helping readers understand not only what is happening in the world, but why. The book is relatable, informative, and at times heartbreaking as it explores the atrocities humanity is capable of inflicting upon one another. It challenged many of my assumptions and left me reflecting on issues of justice, accountability, and our shared human responsibility. A powerful read that I highly recommend.
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"kasimirio"
5.0 out of 5 stars skipReviewed in Germany on 11 November 2025
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The author, seeminly a very intelligent man, runs with with head against the wall again and again. He learns nothing in the process of writing. He does not care how things work, what is their inner logic. He clings to what we hold to be normal. But thinking about it a little longer, it is normal only in peace. In war a different logic prevails, which looks like atrocity and moral outrage when judged with civilised standards.
I did not finish the book but I suspect that Sinwar is not mentioned as the one who triggered the descent into violence. An utterly stupid move to set off a much stronger power. Of course, civilian victims in a war are entirely innocent. But war cause this carnage. The author is entirely blind to this logic.
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ZinaS
5.0 out of 5 stars An Urgent and Necessary Challenge to ComplicityReviewed in the United Kingdom on 22 February 2026
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A powerful, deeply informative and personal account of a genocide that unfolds in real time while the West turns away. The book challenges readers to reconsider media narratives, political hypocrisy, and their own position within systems of power. It demands to be read.
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Nicole Russell
5.0 out of 5 stars Genocide is ALWAYS WRONG and we must fight back!Reviewed in the United States on 15 July 2026
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This book was very eye opening! I loved that the author found a brilliant way to mesh together some topics and personal stories. I enjoyed the stories about his life growing up and the trials and tribulations he and his family went through and that he included the horrors happening in Gaza and the atrocities Israel’s government is inflicting upon gazans and as of lately other countries too!. And the standard message of we have to rise up against this machine otherwise one day it can and will be us on the receiving end of these atrocities.
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Catherine Trites
5.0 out of 5 stars Oof.Reviewed in Canada on 15 August 2025
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I spent the entirety of this book in reflection and more is required. It's heavy, but also feels necessary. It's not a long read but I took time to pause and think while reading - something that was needed for sure.
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Jana Toporova
5.0 out of 5 stars Thank youReviewed in Germany on 12 December 2025
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Everything is pretty good
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Stephen J. Haddon
5.0 out of 5 stars Just read this book. My words can never match those of Omar El Akkad.Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 22 May 2026
Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
The only reason I wasn't been able to finish reading this book in one sitting, was the need to put it down; and recover from the sadness and trauma.
I can't find the words. Mankind is morally bankrupt? No! That feels like a euphemism.
Just read it. Please.
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Camilla D.
5.0 out of 5 stars We live in interesting timesReviewed in the United States on 26 July 2026
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Interesting read.
What our American tax dollars are doing to the world around us.
Even without nuclear war, we will be experiencing the fallout for decades.
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Get 5% off $50 with eligible NAB Cards. Enter code NAB5 at checkout. Discount by Amazon. TermsFrom award-winning novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad, an urgent and necessary reckoning with what it means to live in the West today.
As an immigrant, Omar El Akkad believed the West would be a place of freedom and justice for all. But in the past twenty years, reporting on the various Wars on Terror, climate change, Black Lives Matter protests, and more, and watching the unmitigated slaughter in Gaza, he has come to the conclusion that much of what the West promises is a lie. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is a chronicle of that painful realisation, a moral grappling with what it means—as a citizen of the US, as a father—to carve out some sense of possibility during these devastating times.
This is El Akkad’s nonfiction debut, his most raw and vulnerable work to date. It’s a heartfelt breakup letter with the West, a brilliant articulation of the same breakup we are watching all over the world, in family rooms, on university campuses, on city streets. This book is for everyone who wants something better than what the West has served up. This is the book for our time.
'[A] bracing memoir and manifesto.' The New York Times
‘Full of exasperated wisdom and virtue. Its honesty is invigorating.’Vulture
‘Certain to become one of the essential texts of this terrible era.’ LitHub
‘This is one of the most urgent and important nonfiction books of our time: exquisitely written, devastating, and incandescent with feeling and moral clarity about what it means to live in a world where unimaginable atrocities unfold in plain sight.’ Antoinette Lattouf
‘Terrifying, shameful, and necessary testimony.’ Lesley Williams, Booklist
‘Rearranged my soul.’ Yves Rees, Australian Book Review
'I can’t think of a more important piece of writing to read right now... I found hope here, and help, to face what the world is now, all that it isn’t anymore. Please read this. I promise you won’t regret it.' Tommy Orange, author of Wandering Stars
'A unique and urgently needed book.’ Naomi Klein
'A startling, shocking, beautiful and essential book.' Brian Eno
‘If you read one thing this year, read this.’ Amplify Bookstore
'Part elegy, part rallying cry, this magnificent book should, and will, be required reading for future generations trying to reckon with one of humanity’s darkest chapters.’ Téa Obreht, author of The Morningside
'I urge you to read Omar El Akkad’s astonishing book.' David Olusoga, Black and British
‘El Akkad's writing is mesmerising: it juggles the lyrical with the political, the comic with the analytical, and never once drops a ball. His book is at once observation, admonition and tender autobiography.’ Good Reading
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"[A] bracing memoir and manifesto. . . . With precision and passion, [El Akkad] compels readers to close the emotional distance between 'us' and 'them' and to consider the immense suffering of civilians with renewed urgency." --The New York Times
"A bracing case for empathy. . . . What would it take to render a horror 'over there' equally real to one 'over here'? How do we lie to ourselves so convincingly, and what is the cost of those lies? These questions burn and throb with a haunting clarity [in One Day]. . . . El Akkad is . . . a moral meteorologist. . . . It reminds me of a story I heard once, about the late Toronto filmmaker Charles Officer, who was asked why he makes films that preach to the choir. It is because the choir must be fortified, he answered. El Akkad is tending to an exhausted choir, so that its song may ring clear." --The Washington Post
"Fiercely agonized. . . . [Omar El Akkad's] book is a distraught but eloquent cry against our tolerance for other people's calamities." --The New York Times Book Review (cover)
"A thoughtful, heartfelt, and ultimately heartbroken missive from an immigrant to his second home--a country whose vaunted values, never fulfilled, now seem almost a mockery. Echoing Baldwin, El Akkad writes from anger and love." --The Boston Globe
"One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This strikes with the clarifying force of an angel. By turns furiously troubled and achingly introspective, El Akkad sets fire to the devourous genocidal abyss we call a civilization and all the billion mendacities that sustain it. A landmark of truth-telling and moral courage, One Day is the truest most necessary book you will ever read." --Junot Díaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
"I can't think of a more important piece of writing to read right now. Doom and gloom and unspeakable horror abound and overwhelm these days, but it remains important to understand what we already know is happening now and how it will be understood in the future. It helps when we feel helpless to give our time and attention, our hearts and consideration to a voice like this, a book like this, from our particular time and for it. There is so much power in language here, where it is difficult to find words, such heart in a world that feels has lost its way. I found hope here, and help, to face what the world is now, all that it isn't anymore. Please read this. I promise you won't regret it. I honestly don't know how you could." --Tommy Orange, author of Wandering Stars
"Never again starts with not dehumanising the Other. No one, ever. Thank you @omarelakkad for putting this into words." --Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur, via X
"It is difficult to understand the nature of a true rupture while it is still tearing through the fabric of our world. Yet that is precisely what Omar El Akkad has accomplished, putting broken heart and shredded illusions into words with tremendous insight, skill and courage. A unique and urgently needed book." --Naomi Klein, author of Doppelganger
"This book is a howl from the heart of our age. I struggle to find more precise wording that might capture its ferocious, fracturing rage, as it seeks to describe the indescribable, make coherent an increasingly incoherent world." --Richard Flanagan, author of The Narrow Road to the Deep North
"If you cannot fathom the scale and savagery of the genocide against the Palestinian people, if you feel the world is smashed off its axis and you feel profoundly alone, profoundly mad, then read this clear, elegant and devastatingly truthful account of why you are not mad, and not alone; read this shatteringly honest book by a great writer who also cannot reconcile those things, but is--on behalf of us all, and with his whole soul--trying." --Max Porter, author of Grief Is the Thing with Feathers
"One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This wants us to answer its questions with the greatest possible honesty, and to embrace those answers as our true companions. What it gives us is nothing less than lionhearted, dauntless, unembellished love." --Megha Majumdar, author of A Guardian and a Thief
"Omar El Akkad's book is riveting in its honesty. I found it to be a brilliant mosaic of heartfelt reflections on the sad state of the world, one that dared to end in hope." --Raja Shehadeh, author of We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I
"I feel inadequate to describe a book like this with the right superlatives--I don't want to reduce the book down to one thing in doing so. . . but I hope Omar El Akkad's One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This will find a large audience." --Jeff VanderMeer, author of the Southern Reach Trilogy
"Part elegy, part rallying cry, this magnificent book should, and will, be required reading for future generations trying to reckon with one of humanity's darkest chapters." --Téa Obreht, author of The Tiger's Wife
"A startling, shocking, beautiful and essential book. It shook me up." --Brian Eno
"Omar El Akkad's One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, lays bare and eviscerates the genocidal logics of fascism and liberalism. Here, language does what we need it to do: it clarifies, it condemns, it names, it grieves. Here, too, is a lexicon for what might survive this. Devastating and scathing; you will want to read, will want to have read, this book." --Christina Sharpe, author of Ordinary Notes
"Is this the most urgent book you can read right now? Yes, it is.
Is this the most moral book you can read right now? It sure is.
Is this the most eye-opening book right now? Yep.
Is this the most needed book for our times? Absolutely." --Rabih Alameddine, author of The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother)
"In this powerful indictment of Western complicity in the genocide of Palestinians, Omar El Akkad asks: how are we supposed to go on living in this world? He looks for his answer to the worlds colonized and oppressed, who have always lived according to a love that 'cannot be acknowledged by the empire because it's a people's love for one another.'" --Isabella Hammad, author of Enter Ghost
"An extraordinary, essential work of fury and humanity, as well as a damning indictment of Western hypocrisy and institutional malignity. I cannot conceive of a more important book to read right now, or a more incisive and elegant articulation of this dark time. Every page contains a sentence or a paragraph I wanted to tear out and nail to the wall. I wish I could send a copy of El Akkad's moral call to arms to every person in America, every person in the West--the outraged and the apathetic alike." --Dan Sheehan, author of Restless Souls
"Omar El Akkad has produced something close to impossible with this elegiac and deeply personal book. With barely contained fury at the depths of Western hypocrisy, El Akkad manages to speak not just for himself but for all of us in the face of Israel's unspeakable violence against the Palestinians." --Moustafa Bayoumi, author of How Does It Feel to Be a Problem
"El Akkad's propulsive and damning indictment of Western violence and sanctimony in Palestine and beyond reads as a cry from the heart. He carefully dissects what it means to be an immigrant writing about the brutality of a system he has chosen to be part of and all the ensuing psychological harm that follows." --Nadifa Mohamed, author of The Fortune Men
"Omar El Akkad's devastating new book lays bare the deliberately distorted twists of language and logic that have allowed us to sustain a politics of extermination. The care, grief, anger, and intimacy that Akkad brings to every page implicates all of us and is a testament to the moral and intellectual courage that make this desperately needed book absolutely necessary." --Dinaw Mengestu, author of Someone Like Us
"Affecting. . . . Wherever we go, El Akkad is correct that we must start with refusal, if only the refusal to look away." --JewishCurrents
"Exceptionally powerful, as a howl of rage and grief against the status quo must be. . . . This is a book that many will take issue with, and most will find uncomfortable, which makes it even more important. Discomfort, as he points out, is a luxury." --Financial Times
"One Day is powerful, angry, but always compelling in its moral logic, and damn hard to put down. . . by the end my heart was drumming. . . . For me it was cathartic, almost spiritual. . . . It is an important book, a must-read." --The Guardian
"Powerful. . . compelling. . . haunting." --The Guardian Observer
"A powerful and deeply disturbing book. . . . It took courage to write One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. It takes courage too, to read it. Because El Akkad is right." --The Globe and Mail
"I will read anything Omar El Akkad ever writes. This book is a reckoning. The lie that the West is founded upon--from the beginning--blooms in blood on the pages. This book is a love story in the face of genocide--a love born between the very peoples we have always colonized and killed as if they are the raw material of building nations. What a furious, perfect heart it took to stare into the abyss we call being human and emerge with a revolution song." --The Millions
About the Author
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.
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One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against ThisProduct details
ASIN : B0DKSJP13C
Publisher : TEXT EBOOK
Accessibility : Learn more
Publication date : 4 March 2025
Language : English
File size : 1.1 MB
Screen Reader : Supported
Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
X-Ray : Enabled
Word Wise : Enabled
Print length : 172 pages
ISBN-13 : 978-1923059450
Page Flip : Enabled
Best Sellers Rank: 57,609 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)7 in Middle Eastern Politics
324 in Politics & Government (Kindle Store)
544 in Memoirs (Kindle Store)
Customer Reviews:
4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars (3,569)
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From Australia
Helpful
Troy Chiodo-Gurr
5.0 out of 5 stars Just extraordinaryReviewed in Australia on 1 August 2026
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
A beautifully written book about the ugliest of crimes. Haunting, brutal, and extraordinary.
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Essential readingReviewed in Australia on 25 July 2025
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
Essential reading for any Muslim living in the West. Also works to give perspective white people on how all of these current world events make Muslims living among them feel.
2 people found this helpful
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Fred
5.0 out of 5 stars When it mattered who sided with justice?Reviewed in Australia on 26 January 2026
Format: KindleVerified Purchase
‘When those dying are deemed human enough to warrant discussion, discussion must be had. When they’re deemed nonhuman, discussion becomes offensive, an affront to civility’. That sums it up.
One person found this helpful
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Robin
5.0 out of 5 stars Must readReviewed in Australia on 21 August 2025
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
Read this and pass it on.
One person found this helpful
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P. Gunning
5.0 out of 5 stars Read this and thinkReviewed in Australia on 28 November 2025
Format: KindleVerified Purchase
This book is brutal but politely so. The words are reasonable and measured, but what they describe is unreasonable hatred, and unreasonable indifference to suffering, cruelty and an unreasonable capacity for looking away from what cannot be unseen.
5 people found this helpful
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Stan
5.0 out of 5 stars look at yourselfReviewed in Australia on 21 November 2025
Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
the genocide is bad enough but what’s worse is our apparent ability to side with the perpetrators making us complicit with this genocide- read the book and feel your shame then do something about it
6 people found this helpful
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Amazon Customer
3.0 out of 5 stars Two Sides to Every StoryReviewed in Australia on 31 December 2025
Format: Paperback
There are two sides to every story. El Akkad fails to properly tell the other side. If the people of Gaza voted for Hamas because they had no hope for the future, it seems to me that the Israelis, seeing what happened on October 7 2023, were desperately afraid that it would happen again. Not enough weight was given to the Israeli view (although I think their reaction was terribly wrong.) Hamas placed their command centres under hospitals and schools with absolute disregard for the lives of patients and children, just to get the kind of publicity that has turned Western society (especially young people) against the Israelis. But razing whole cities is unacceptable and El Akkad makes this point well. From a Western point of view (Australia included) what he says about immigrants should penetrate deeply into our conciousness, I quote “I judge the immigrant who is as emotionless and pragmatic about the nation-state as the people who run that nation-state are so regularly emotionless and pragmatic about immigrants, who says honestly and plainly: I don’t love this country, don’t love any country, patriotism being the property of an entirely different type of life than luck has given me, I live because it will always be safer to live on the launching side of missiles. I live here because I am afraid.”
One person found this helpful
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A. J. Dale
5.0 out of 5 stars Those who should read this, are the most unlikely to do soReviewed in Australia on 14 July 2025
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
This is a powerful book, it highlights what a lot of people who are following the atrocities occurring in Gaza would already have some awareness of, and ties a line between the lack of wholesale outrage for the victims there, and victims anywhere when the perpetrators get to write the narrative.
Should be widely read.
7 people found this helpful
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Topspin
5.0 out of 5 stars What it is like to grow in two different culturesReviewed in Australia on 13 June 2025
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
Anyone who has lived in both in the Arab word and the western world would find a deep connection to this book. It is a shared experience , I wish I able to put so well as Omar El Akkad. Many thanks
3 people found this helpful
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars History repeatsReviewed in Australia on 24 May 2025
Format: Paperback
Well written Omar El Akkad. You have described the perennial baseness of virtually all tribal human groups who achieve what they believe to be unrivalled power. Entertaining read; but of little real value. They all fall eventually; and than cry foul. History repeats. Very few individuals learn; most just get entertained.
2 people found this helpful
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B
5.0 out of 5 stars An easy and yet brilliant readReviewed in Australia on 28 November 2025
Format: Paperback
Very well written.
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From other countries
strabazzino
5.0 out of 5 stars A masterpieceReviewed in Italy on 17 March 2026
Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
From the point of view of a “forever foreigner” who has dabbled in both geopolitics and anthropology for a lifetime, or so it seems: Omar El Akkad’s approach to what many deem to be the most harrowing question of our times is nothing less than a masterpiece. He has succeeded in entwining those two fields of study with his own life experience in an intensely soulful and emotional manner — one might add a philosophical one, in the original, etymological sense of the word — such as one rarely encounters as a reader.
More: I would even venture that this book is vastly more compelling than his two novels (without intending to deprecate these in the least.)
Curiously — a reverse argument of sorts — I found myself to be in disagreement with his brief mention of a couple of issues that are only slightly less important in the context of how today’s world is evolving. As it turns out, judging from the elements of biography revealed throughout the book, Omar El Akkad appears to have only had a second-hand knowledge of these particular topics.
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siddiqui
5.0 out of 5 stars Essential readingReviewed in Germany on 16 July 2026
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Excellent!
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QED
5.0 out of 5 stars A painful read but I gained a lot from it.Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 19 February 2025
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What’s described so well in this book is a hideous betrayal I think - and it not only wounds people like the author who put their faith in the western liberal promise and altered their lives for the better existence they believed it would afford them, but also affects people like me, born western and white into devout Christian families with doctrine and values instilled into them that now seem brushed aside for a different interpretation of text that’s considerably at odds with what they always believed was central to the teaching. Were we always being played or is it that post-WWII shock and rebound empathy has now petered (or indeed died) out and the western world has abandoned right and good and reverted to how things were before? Whatever the explanation, I now feel like an alien, wandering amongst westerners and political evangelists who choose to shut their eyes and cover their ears.
What do you do and where do you go to when what you’ve put your faith in as some comfort in existence has been blown to smithereens before your eyes and yet life goes on as normal around you as if nothing has changed at all? Although necessarily painful to read, this book has given me a strange sort of comfort, a place to be where I feel connection to a humanity that I embrace, and I’m indebted to Omar for that. I concur - having my illusions shattered and my moorings sliced through is but nothing compared to pain, suffering, death and destruction so immorally inflicted on innocent people. “But it hurts” (see page 179) and this book has helped me stop uselessly screaming (see page 87).
That Omar attaches no blame to any particular religion is to his credit, I think, and helps his message chime right across backgrounds and experiences and mark out that better place. How long will it be before those I thought I knew will have always thought that this was an abomination? I’m not sure I’ll ever find out, but if we ever meet again I can’t imagine it being a particularly sunny day for me.
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Said Rahim Manandoy
5.0 out of 5 stars PricelessReviewed in Ireland on 5 May 2025
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One day, everyone will have always been against this, is precisely written piece of book , which reflects the injustice and in the world. A must read for everyone. Omar El Akkad said what a shape of view
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Bianca Alecssia Gaina
5.0 out of 5 stars Must read!Reviewed in Belgium on 29 June 2026
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This book is a truthful picture of the Palestinian people’s genocide, but it also offers many other thought starters.
It made me realize that facts can be distorted and manipulated to fabricate mitigating factors and undermine even the biggest atrocities; it made me realize that victims are often dehumanized, in order to justify what they are forced to endure (even worse, politicians and mainstream media try to convince the general public that the victims deserve every single bit of it: injustice, torture, mutilation, forced starvation, execution, any excuse can be forged to make anything appear permissible/necessary for a “greater good”, to “protect” us from bigger “threats”).
I’d have much to say about each of the 10 cleverly written chapters, but I don’t want to go into details, because I wish anyone would read this book, analyze the current worldwide situation and understand that what’s happening in Palestine, is not actually just happening in Palestine, it’s not “only” a geographically-far-away horror; consider the latest events in the “free and civilized” USA, to make an example…
A must read, among many others on this atrocious topic
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pedikeens
5.0 out of 5 stars The emotional and philosophical impact is indelible and necessary.Reviewed in the United States on 24 January 2026
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This is not a book that comforts, inspires, or mobilizes in any traditional sense. Instead, it is a meticulous, gutting autopsy of the conscience in a time of atrocity.
Omar El Akkad constructs a work of autofiction so raw it feels less like a story and more like a trap, one set for both the author and the reader. Through a narrator paralyzed by guilt, compromise, and the sheer weight of witnessing a genocide, El Akkad indicts the very act of writing about suffering. He questions what it means to "bear witness" from a place of safety, to transform unspeakable horror into an aesthetic object.
The book’s genius, and its profound difficulty, lies in its refusal of heroism. It lives in the paralyzing space between the moral imperative to act and the human instinct to survive, offering no redemption. Reading it, I felt a deep, familiar rage at the world's cruelty, followed by a disorienting frustration with the narrator’s (and by extension, my own) complicity.
This is not a call to arms. It is a mirror held up to the specific, isolating injury of caring deeply in a world engineered to make that care feel futile. It’s about the corrosion of the soul under the weight of knowledge and powerlessness. The title is its own bleak prophecy, satirizing the future historical revision where everyone claims they were on the right side.
For those already consumed by rage and grief for Palestine, this book will not give you hope. It will give you the chilling solace of recognition, a stark, literary companion for the days when despair feels like the only honest response. It is a devastating and essential read precisely because it offers no easy way out.
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José Macaya
5.0 out of 5 stars Persuasivo, contundente y convincenteReviewed in Spain on 6 December 2025
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Muy bien escrito. Persuasivo. Convincente. Una acusación certera al mundo occidental. Explica la interrelación entre la política norteamericana y el mirar para otra parte sobre lo que pasa en Gaza. Escrito por un periodista, que es inmigrante egipcio, con experiencias complicadas por ello, y con visión novedosa.
Siendo muy bueno el libro, el mensaje está ya claro cuando se llega al 60% del libro. Encontré que la última parte aportaba mucho menos. Un libro que se leía rápido y con gusto, al final se hace un poco largo, por repetitivo. Pero el mensaje no por eso deja de ser persuasivo, contundente y convincente.
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Mario BR
5.0 out of 5 stars A wake-up call for all of usReviewed in Brazil on 6 July 2025
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A conscious-awakening violent punch in the stomach, written in a very clear, very readable way that allows this book to say what it says without turning you off and letting its message go straight to your heart and mind: the emperor is naked.
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Olivia
5.0 out of 5 stars Highly recommend itReviewed in France on 11 August 2026
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Poignant, necessary reading. An answer to all the gaslighting of the past 3 / 25 years of the "wars on terror".
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Joshua
5.0 out of 5 stars Painful Reality Articulated WonderfullyReviewed in the United States on 23 July 2026
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A book that should have never been written and one everyone everywhere should read.
I’ve kept a list of quotes for decades. Little snippets of what I saw as significance or brilliance. Both at times. But always resonant thoughts articulated in a succinct and coherent form.
The tweet from the author gracing the front cover will be the first one I’ve added by any living person.
The book is full of pain. I’d imagine at least some of it was written through tears. I’m sure all of it vehemently demanded to be spilled onto page. I hope the author found some relief once it had.
Read it. It hurts, and it should. Read it anyway.
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RJO
5.0 out of 5 stars Worth the time!Reviewed in Italy on 21 April 2026
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Such a great read; I wish everyone could read it.
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Stephen S.
5.0 out of 5 stars TIMELY & MOVINGReviewed in Spain on 8 January 2026
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A message we must not ignore. Read it. Share it.
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Anonym
5.0 out of 5 stars Perfect bookReviewed in Germany on 18 April 2026
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I love this book so much!! Please read!
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Jehad Abu-Ulbeh
5.0 out of 5 stars The Best Book I Have Read in my LifeReviewed in Canada on 23 November 2025
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I have enjoyed reading this book despite the sadness I felt. It's an honest, open account of the atrocities inflicted on the Palestinians people. I enjoyed reading about the author's life despite the difficulties he faced. The courage and clarity he displayed were to be commended. The language is so rich that I needed to read the sentences twice sometimes to comprehend the depth of their meaning.
I am so grateful for the recommendation, and I highly recommend it. Anyone who is willing to be conforted with the truth about power and ignorance should read this book. This book will open your heart and mind to the issues that you might not have thought about before.
I am happy that this book won the US National Book Award. He deserves it.
One will have a lot to gain by reading it.
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Client d'Amazon
5.0 out of 5 stars Super Duper !!Reviewed in France on 2 March 2025
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Super Duper !!
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Tara B.
5.0 out of 5 stars Well Written and DevastatingReviewed in the United Kingdom on 30 May 2026
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A very well written but devastating read.
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Amin Jorati
5.0 out of 5 stars Brutally honest and very timelyReviewed in Germany on 24 December 2025
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It was very cathartic to read the book for me. I identified with it so much so that I could have imagined having written it myself, had I had the aptitude to produce it. Peppered with personal stories and exquisite language, it shares the author's existential angst, inevitable in the world we live in at the moment. It doesn't take me anywhere I haven't been, but neither does it give false hope or lie to me. It's brutally honest.
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Kirsty
4.0 out of 5 stars A recommended read, but no sources listedReviewed in the United Kingdom on 9 April 2025
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A very well written book, however I did have to re-read many paragraphs multiple times as the wording was rather convoluted in places (for me anyway). The overall message was clear and some points were very well made, it really makes you stop and think. I've read many parts out loud to others when I wanted to share them.
I would have appreciated a list of sources at the back. Many things that have happened in history were mentioned, and I would've liked to have gone online and read about them in more detail but without sources this isn't possible, which was disappointing. (I understand that complaining about a lack of a list of resources in comparison to the book's content is definitely a 'first world problem' but if this book is here to educate, I feel it would have been helpful).
I would also recommend that you remove the cover jacket and check out the design on the actual hardback cover. That alone was quite hard hitting, and makes you realise what kind of thing you'll be reading about.
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Marit De Meyer
2.0 out of 5 stars Upsetting book.Reviewed in France on 28 May 2026
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Very angry , not a pleasant read. Could not finish, but he is right. It confronts us with the world politics while we are powerless.
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marcella
4.0 out of 5 stars A must read - but too longReviewed in the United States on 12 July 2025
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This is a very painful and beautifully written book because it is spot on and I'm not better than everybody else. A must read. However, as is so often the case with non-fiction books, the point(s) could have been made just as effectively in half the number of words, or even a long magazine article.
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Layal
5.0 out of 5 stars Eine sehr empfehlenswerte Lektüre!Reviewed in Germany on 6 November 2025
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Ein sehr persönliches, bewegendes Buch, das eigentlich jeder in Deutschland kennen und gelesen haben sollte..
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S. Singh
5.0 out of 5 stars Important, critical, movingReviewed in the United Kingdom on 12 August 2026
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Really moving and a powerful commentary on the atrocities being committed against the Palestinians for decades by Israel.
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Figbean
5.0 out of 5 stars UnexpectedReviewed in the United States on 23 August 2026
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Have read a book a week for many years, but this is the first review I’ve written in decades.
The recommendation algorithm has consistently shown this since release, and it popped up regularly in book threads that I follow. Each time I ignored it thinking “that is gonna be way too depressing. I know the ‘situation’ is horrible, but do I need to read an accounting of atrocities?” While I expected a more detailed version of the MSNBC or Drop Site news feed, the beautifully written book has much more in common with Chomsky and Gramsci: How narratives are created and enforced in the service of empire and those in power to maintain the status quo and justify any horrendous act. Rather than just a simplistic banner waving “GOP are Fascists,” Omar’s vitriolic critique is heavier upon the Democratic establishment and the Left to achieve absolutely anything of value while standing for nothing but self-preservation. While reading I was already thinking about this review and posting it wide, a useless equivalent of adding a flag or BLM logo to my profile pic to show my allyship…which proves Omar’s point. I will certainly recommend this book to everyone I know. I can also sheepishly and embarrassingly admit that will be the extent of my support as I have other more pressing personal issues to worry about. In the meantime, countless more will be murdered. So it goes.
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Highly recommendedReviewed in the United Kingdom on 3 December 2025
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Such an important book. The telling of his personal experiences of discrimination and outright racism, in conjunction with the political & social decisions and movements that made them possible, against the backdrop of a genocide. Beautifully written. I've spent the past months recommending this book to anyone who will listen to me. I've also taken enough photos of the text to be liable for copyright infringement - enough that I bought the e-book too to annotate... I've only annotated one book before this in 40+ yrs of reading.
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Mary-Lyn
5.0 out of 5 stars A deeply affecting workReviewed in the United States on 5 June 2026
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A thought-provoking and deeply moving book. Omar El Akkad masterfully connects historical events and modern geopolitical crises, helping readers understand not only what is happening in the world, but why. The book is relatable, informative, and at times heartbreaking as it explores the atrocities humanity is capable of inflicting upon one another. It challenged many of my assumptions and left me reflecting on issues of justice, accountability, and our shared human responsibility. A powerful read that I highly recommend.
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"kasimirio"
5.0 out of 5 stars skipReviewed in Germany on 11 November 2025
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The author, seeminly a very intelligent man, runs with with head against the wall again and again. He learns nothing in the process of writing. He does not care how things work, what is their inner logic. He clings to what we hold to be normal. But thinking about it a little longer, it is normal only in peace. In war a different logic prevails, which looks like atrocity and moral outrage when judged with civilised standards.
I did not finish the book but I suspect that Sinwar is not mentioned as the one who triggered the descent into violence. An utterly stupid move to set off a much stronger power. Of course, civilian victims in a war are entirely innocent. But war cause this carnage. The author is entirely blind to this logic.
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ZinaS
5.0 out of 5 stars An Urgent and Necessary Challenge to ComplicityReviewed in the United Kingdom on 22 February 2026
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A powerful, deeply informative and personal account of a genocide that unfolds in real time while the West turns away. The book challenges readers to reconsider media narratives, political hypocrisy, and their own position within systems of power. It demands to be read.
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Nicole Russell
5.0 out of 5 stars Genocide is ALWAYS WRONG and we must fight back!Reviewed in the United States on 15 July 2026
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This book was very eye opening! I loved that the author found a brilliant way to mesh together some topics and personal stories. I enjoyed the stories about his life growing up and the trials and tribulations he and his family went through and that he included the horrors happening in Gaza and the atrocities Israel’s government is inflicting upon gazans and as of lately other countries too!. And the standard message of we have to rise up against this machine otherwise one day it can and will be us on the receiving end of these atrocities.
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Catherine Trites
5.0 out of 5 stars Oof.Reviewed in Canada on 15 August 2025
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I spent the entirety of this book in reflection and more is required. It's heavy, but also feels necessary. It's not a long read but I took time to pause and think while reading - something that was needed for sure.
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Jana Toporova
5.0 out of 5 stars Thank youReviewed in Germany on 12 December 2025
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Everything is pretty good
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Stephen J. Haddon
5.0 out of 5 stars Just read this book. My words can never match those of Omar El Akkad.Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 22 May 2026
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The only reason I wasn't been able to finish reading this book in one sitting, was the need to put it down; and recover from the sadness and trauma.
I can't find the words. Mankind is morally bankrupt? No! That feels like a euphemism.
Just read it. Please.
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Camilla D.
5.0 out of 5 stars We live in interesting timesReviewed in the United States on 26 July 2026
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Interesting read.
What our American tax dollars are doing to the world around us.
Even without nuclear war, we will be experiencing the fallout for decades.
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