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Omar El Akkad tells WW ahead of the Vancouver, B.C., stop on his Canadian book tour that he’s tired, understandably so. The writer’s newest book, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (Penguin Random House, 208 pages, $28), has generated passionately positive and negative reactions since its February release, more than the professional writer says he’s accustomed to hearing for his work. An award-winning novelist and journalist who’s reported from Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, El Akkad says he’s hosted events for his previous books attended by five guests. He says events for One Day have drawn crowds as high as 500.
“The most impassioned responses I’ve gotten—and not saying these people liked the book, by any stretch of the imagination—[are from] people who felt like they were losing their minds,” El Akkad says on a Wednesday afternoon phone call. “I can’t tell you if it’s a good book; I don’t have that kind of relationship with my work where I can assess that, but it does feel like it’s created a little space for people to sit with feelings that perhaps, in other situations or settings, they might not have felt comfortable enough expressing.”
El Akkad reported for the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail on Guantanamo Bay trials and prisoner conditions, the U.S. War in Afghanistan, and civil uprisings such as the Arab Spring and Black Lives Matter protests. He’s received awards not only for his reporting, but for his literary work, like his 2021 novel What Strange Paradise. His debut novel in 2017, American War, won the Pacific Northwest Book Award and the Oregon Book Awards’ fiction prize. American War resulted in a movie deal that fell apart after Trump won the 2024 presidential election. He says he’s glad not to be working on the movie if the team isn’t really behind him.
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, El Akkad’s first nonfiction title, is both an autobiographical essay collection and an accounting of the lives lost since Oct. 7, 2023, in Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza. El Akkad was already working on his book under another title when one of his posts on X went viral. His publisher suggested that the post become the book’s title, though it naturally works as its thesis statement as well.
The content is difficult for anyone who abhors violence—El Akkad commits to print some of the most graphic civilian and child deaths reported by journalists, medical and relief workers, and Palestinian citizens. Revisiting these scenes is the least readers owe the dead, and by interconnecting scenes from his personal and professional life, El Akkad offers a reassuring voice for anyone who felt gaslit by the Biden administration’s two-faced response to the crisis by both acting powerless through leadership yet funneling billions of dollars to directly fund, manufacture and ship the weapons making things worse.
One Day also talks about the wider purchasing power of human fear, and whose fears are allowed to buy safety and security, and whose fears empires devalue. In One Day, El Akkad points out both the racist and classist ways that oil-rich societies exploit low-wage laborers to prop up the opulent lifestyles of the ultra-rich on down. He recalls a scene from his adolescence, growing up in Qatar, of an Arabic man beating an East Asian man in public who had rear-ended his expensive car, in the process rudely forcing the aggrieved driver to address him, and how passersby like him didn’t stop to help.
“There’s a particular endpoint that always arrives when we design our societies in such a way that people don’t think their liberation and their freedom is intertwined,” El Akkad says. “What strikes me as a kind of parallel between the 9/11 war-on-terror years and the moment we’re in right now is that we can only go on being oblivious to the suffering of others for so long, before those same mechanisms of injustice come to our door.”
El Akkad wonders in the book if we have arrived at “a truly weightless time” between when an atrocity occurs—the Holocaust, for example, or the Native American genocide, or how long it took the United States to outlaw slavery and what a struggle civil rights still are for marginalized people—and when it’s socially acknowledged as one. Or, as he puts it, “after the front page loses interest, but before the history books arrive.” Star Wars comes up as another metaphor, for how often he says people realize the U.S. acts more like the Galactic Empire and less like the righteous Rebel Alliance. The weightless time El Akkad describes could be between where the George Lucases of history are allowed to be inspired by someone’s fight against corruption.
“I think at all times you are aware of where you exist on various spectrums of possibility,” he says. “I’m an Arab man in the United States, I know the possibilities intertwined with that. The spectrum of possibility is not something you can be oblivious to when your life depends on it, if the state turns on you and things go bad, it’s not going to be a parking ticket, it’s going to be something existential.”
Nonlinear scenes from El Akkad’s formative years in Egypt, Qatar and Canada, and his current home life in suburban Portland with his young children, counterbalance the book’s heavy subject matter on death and imperial evil. El Akkad describes his fear in February 2024 when a fallen tree destroyed his home’s deck where his daughter played, and how fears like his are regularly manipulated. They’re powerful, but whose fears have buying power under an imperial market that’s no longer pretending to play by the rules, he asks. It’s people who live farthest from the blast sites turned killing fields.
El Akkad describes burying his father in his family’s crypt in Egypt, a scene that is universally profound in its portrayal of grief and love, no matter how deep a reader’s family roots run. He also chooses moments from his career—starting shortly after 9/11 in college to scenes in Gitmo courtrooms and Afghanistan military camps—where he also witnessed failures in empathy and justice, but still felt like those flaws were redeemable. The killings since Oct. 7 made El Akkad lose hope that the cracks he sees in America’s polite façade can be fixed.
“As disillusioned as I’ve become about almost all of the institutional load-bearing beams of not just the United States but the Western world, I’ve been so deeply inspired by what people have been doing individually and in solidarity with one another,” he says. “That’s where I derive hope, because otherwise, God knows, I’d be much more inclined to give up and let whatever happens happen.”
He’s had to be brave several times throughout his life, but El Akkad in print and over the phone calls himself a coward. It’s said that admitting fear is itself an act of bravery, but El Akkad talks about the relatively low risks he’s afraid to take to call for a cease-fire. Professional blowback, he notes, is lower risk than what the people running for their lives from American-made weapons have faced for decades. But those consequences are real when one’s trying to raise kids in America. He is openly sick of sloganeering online and from the Democratic Party, but El Akkad appreciates when people balance the risks they take against the power they wield. A librarian disciplined for wearing a pin supporting Palestinians risks far more, he notes, than members of Congress wearing pink to protest President Trump.
“One of the difficulties of this moment is that there’s such an asymmetry of effort involved,” El Akkad says. “If the system works for you, you don’t have to imagine something better.”
Trump’s second term doesn’t come up in One Day. His draft was written before El Akkad’s viral tweet, in the months leading up to the election. He’s discussed including an updated foreword to the paperback edition to include this perspective, but focusing on the final year under Biden encapsulates the frustration of living under a party that, as El Akkad writes, knew the risks of fascism returning to office and still allowed it to be a close race.
“There are so many cataclysmic things that we are dealing with and running out of time to fix,” El Akkad says. “For me, it was not a function of trying to indict this political party or that political party. I was thinking about my children’s lives under this kind of cycle.”
One Day ends with a surprisingly reassuring tone. For how demoralizing these years have been, El Akkad encourages readers not to give up hope. Even if people don’t see peace in their lifetimes—even if this conflict only ends once Israel finds no more blood to spill—encouraging one another to keep fighting against injustice is crucial.
“I don’t have the right to give up on someone else’s behalf,” he says. “I would be giving up on people who don’t have as much money as me, or as much power as me—which, granted, is not a lot in either case.
“But I would also be giving up on behalf of my children, and I don’t think I have that right. There are days that I don’t want to get out of bed and this feels insurmountable, but you have to get up because you wouldn’t just be abdicating responsibility for yourself, you’d be abdicating on someone else’s behalf, and I just don’t think I can do that.”
SEE IT: Omar El Akkad presents the 2025 Whiteley Distinguished Lecture at Pacific University’s McGill Auditorium, 2043 College Way, Forest Grove, 503-352-6151, pacificu.edu. 4 pm Wednesday, April 2. Free. Sarah Kendzior in Conversation With Omar El Akkad at Powell’s City of Books, 1005 W Burnside St., 800-878-7323, powells.com. 7 pm Tuesday, April 8. Free.