By Jaime Frederick, Local Journalism Initiative

Author and journalist Omar El Akkad’s 2025 memoir, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, written in response to the genocide in Gaza, won the National Book Award for non-fiction in the United States. In this interview, El Akkad discusses the cognitive dissonance that compelled him to write his excoriating critique of Western liberalism and capitalist imperialism.

Listen to the full interview, of which an excerpt was aired on Kootenay Morning on Friday, May 15, 2026:

 

Interview transcript:

Jaime Frederick: Thanks very much for calling today and taking a few minutes to talk to me. I wanted to start the conversation by discussing your critique of liberalism in the book, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. Starting with the idea of what you call “fictions of moral convenience” – that when it comes to genocide or atrocities that are being carried out, in this case by Israel against Palestine or Lebanon, but really by colonizers everywhere, that there are comforting narratives that are told to pacify people who know that what’s happening is wrong but are not really willing to do anything about it. Is your frustration with that what drove you to write [the book]? I mean, what was the last straw for you?

Omar El Akkad: As far as the last straw goes, I was waking up every day and seeing imagery and video and all manner of evidence of the worst things imaginable. And I was being told by the governments that represented me and continue to represent me, and institutions that represent me of all kinds–academic, cultural, journalistic, you name it–that this was, in fact, a good and necessary thing, and that if I was opposed to it in any way, I was the bad guy. Which is quite a crazy making state. And I think, you know, one of the most interesting conversations that I’ve had about the book is that it is indeed sort of primarily a critique of this mode of liberalism that will quite happily and vigorously engage with acknowledging and regretting what has happened once it’s safe enough to do so.

Now, I write for a living, which means I end up in a lot of poetry readings or literary events or, you know, book festivals, and overwhelmingly in this part of the world, those begin with a land acknowledgement. I think it would be quite clear to everyone how absurd those land acknowledgments would seem if we were in the middle of the sort of most active part of the genocide against the indigenous population of this of this continent and having them happen in real time. And so I think a lot of the frustration that’s in the book, and it’s obviously a book that was written in a state of great anger, is not so much with the action of any one mode of thinking or sort of political operation–it’s with this weird chasm between the principles as they are stated and and the reality of what is acted out. 

You know, one of the things about living under Donald Trump, as I currently do in the United States, is that there’s much less of a gap between the horrific things he says and the horrific things he does, whereas previous Democratic administrations, you would have all manner of horror enacted, and then you would have someone in a nice suit come out and tell you how necessary and actually sort of peace-seeking this was. And again, that’s crazy making in an entirely different way. And I think that’s the thing that a lot of the book is concerned with.

Yeah, I was really struck by the tone of sardonic bitterness. I mean, obviously there’s an anger there that you mentioned and… it’s like the insanity that is captured in novels like Catch-22 or some of Kurt Vonnegut’s work. And you talk about watching “a disjointed ballet of impossible reconciling” when it comes to governments doing this dance where they, on the one hand, are deeply regretful about what’s occurring, but on the other hand, seem to be unable or unwilling to take action to stop it. 

And so you mentioned Donald Trump as somebody who, you know… where there’s maybe less dissonance. I’m looking at someone like Mark Carney as our prime minister, who espouses support for a Palestinian state and talks about a “two-state solution” to the conflict while simultaneously Canada continues to ship munitions and weaponry to Israel via third party nations. How are you hoping that people will take this and change their behaviour? What do you want liberals who are reading this to do about it?

I mean, it’s a really interesting question, because one of the things I tend to say these days, whenever I give a talk or when I find myself speaking to any kind of audience, is that I have no interest in changing anybody’s mind about anything anymore. And I understand that that can be seen as a sort of very nihilistic approach. And I think I have become somewhat more nihilistic over the last few years. You know, I’ve seen enough dead kids that it has changed my outlook slightly. I don’t know how it could not. But I don’t think that the root of this is a kind of nihilism. Rather, I don’t feel that there is this obligation to tell people how to behave. People can act however they want. 

What I am trying to do with respect to myself–and again, I think everyone, in some way, needs to contend with this–is try to directly address the gap between who I say I am and who I really am. And so again, we come back to this notion of Carney, or really the vast majority of Western leaders, talking about this, you know, hypothetical two-state solution–which, again, is sort of nonsense on its face–but using it as a means of describing this kind of hypothetical scenario that is directly contradicted by the actions of the government, the same government that is making these statements. And I think there’s really only one way that you sort of get away with that. And that is when you fundamentally consider one group of people in any situation to be foundationally subhuman. Most everything that every Western government has said and done with respect to this conflict, or whatever it is sort of described as, makes perfect sense if you consider Palestinians to be foundationally subhuman. 

And there’s a part early on in the book where I talk about growing up in Qatar, which is a country that has not only history but an active present of severe mistreatment–and this is putting it lightly–of severe mistreatment of what are called third “third country labourers.” Essentially, indentured servitude, the people who built this entire country [Qatar], and come from places like India and Pakistan and Nepal and the Philippines. 

And early on in the book, I describe this scene we came across on the side of the road, where there was a local sort of beating this man who had hit the back of his Mercedes. And this man was from one of these countries, and he had sort of violated the principle of his non-existence. He had appeared in this society in a way that he fundamentally was not allowed to do so. And I think this is what I keep coming back to, right? Like we, I think foundationally as human beings, are supposed to behave in a way that acknowledges that we owe each other a duty of care. And if we’re not going to do that, the least we can do is admit it outright.

You know, it would be far less maddening to have a politician come out and say, “Look, we don’t think of this group of people as being human enough to warrant the basic rights and the basic freedoms and the basic rules that we apply to everyone else. And we’re just going to be honest about that.” But instead, we get this. You know, we get someone in a nice suit telling us why this group of people has to die but “don’t worry, we feel really badly about it and here’s a non-solution for you.” Again, I’m not trying to tell anyone what to do. People will make their own decisions, but I find it very difficult to move through the world with that contradiction in place and not feel like I’m becoming sort of intellectually and emotionally and psychologically double-jointed?

You talk about that situation in Qatar, and I was really struck by the turn of phrase, or the question you asked yourself in terms of “Whose non-existence is necessary to the self conception of the place” that you’re in, in any given place. And the second part of that being, “How uncontrollable is the rage against those non-existent people whenever that non-existence is violated?” You’re talking about a concept of erasure, where people are erased from our consciousness, and you talk about the “heightened derangement of language for the purpose of sanitizing violence” against them. 

Is your purpose, I guess, in writing this book–you know, I’m not suggesting it’s just to cleanse yourself of that–but to articulate that issue, and really try and bring it into people’s awareness? 

I mean, I think that there were a number of reasons why I wrote the book. And none of them is to say that, you know, it’s a good book, or it’s worth anybody’s time. Simply that these were the reasons this felt necessary for me to do. 

One of them is that it’s the only thing I know how to do. I’m not good at anything else. I know how to write and I know how to do nothing else. And so when the world doesn’t make sense to me, I tend to sit with that on the page. And again, I have no expectation that once I’m done sitting with it on the page, that I’ll have some new insight or catharsis, or anything like that. It’s simply the place I go when the world doesn’t make sense to me. So that was one part of it. 

The other is that I felt like a lot of the things that I was seeing, and a lot of the things I was being told, to justify some of the most grotesque things that I’ve ever seen in my life, was all going to be thrown down the memory hole eventually. And that it was going to be easier for all of us in a year, two years, 10 years’ time to simply forget about this. And so there was an act of basic witness, which I think I describe in the book as being the most necessary empathetic sort of mode of literature. So that was another reason for it. 

There is also a selfish component to this, and it would be disingenuous of me to pretend otherwise, which is, at some point I wanted to be able to say that I had said something. You know, has this book changed anything? I doubt it. I have no idea, but at the very least I can say that I wasn’t completely quiet during the worst thing I’ve ever seen in my life, which, again, is a fundamentally selfish reason to do anything….

You know, I live in the United States these days, and I remember during the first Trump election, all the people who supposedly had voted for him because of economic anxiety. Nobody voted for him because of economic anxiety. Everybody knows the cruelty that they were actively supporting, and we’ve stopped pretending otherwise. Nobody uses the phrase “economic anxiety” to describe his second election. We’ve gotten over that charade. So I think part of writing the book was also to try and get over the charade that we were sort of accidentally stumbling into the kind of conclusions that colonialism and any insatiable system of theft was always going to naturally lead to.

That’s really interesting. One of the things that I was struck by in reading the book was your sort of candid discussion of the faults of liberalism and neoliberalism. And, you know, I’m going to bring it back to Mark Carney and his speech at Davos. When he talks about the disruption in the world order, he essentially lays out what you’re saying in a very different way. He says that the rules based order that we’ve come to tell ourselves these morally convenient tales about is gone and that it was always a fiction. You know, he’s saying that, and then he’s saying, but we’re going to continue with our neoliberal agenda and our capitalist approach to the problems that exist in the country and in the world. You’re sort of laying it bare and saying this fiction of liberal convenience in having, you know, a rules based international order has never been there. And you’re very clear about laying out the litany of horrors that it has perpetrated upon people in Palestine and other places in the Middle East and around the world. I commend you for doing it. 

Obviously, the book is resonating with an audience. You have sold many copies. You’ve been on the New York Times bestsellers list. You have won the National Book Award in the US. But when you come back to those questions, they don’t go away. So I’m conscious of this tension in the writing, where you’re raising these things, and, you know, it’s not a prescriptive book in the sense that you’re telling people what to do. But you do in some places say that resistance is worth carrying out, right?

Yeah, I think so. I mean, I should say that I think the reason the book has gotten the traction that it has–and it has gotten far more traction than it deserves, I think–is not necessarily the quality of the book. Rather the fact that there’s such an immense institutional suppression of any discussion around these topics that, when something like this comes out, I think it tends to act like a bit of a steam vent for a lot of people. 

I mean, I was on the road for most of last year, including a pretty long stint in Canada. And at almost every event I did, somebody would come up afterwards and say, you know, “This is the first place where I’ve been able to think through these issues without fear,” right? Because if I talk about this at work, I might get fired. If I talk about this with my friends, they might not be my friends anymore. If I talk about this at a dinner party, I’m probably not getting invited to the next dinner party. And so I think there’s been a kind of steam vent component to the book. 

And obviously, you know, the response has been almost completely polar in the sense that I’ve gotten a lot of “hey, this is great,” and a lot of “hey, this is the worst thing I’ve ever read,” which you can sort of expect for a book like this. That’s not particularly surprising, but, you know, it’s… I think we’re in this situation where a lot of people feel like they’re losing their minds. They just have to live in the middle of what feels like a direct contradiction, you know, and it’s been around for a long time. You know, just because people like me have finally become slightly less oblivious enough to see it doesn’t mean that this hasn’t existed for a long time. Anyone who has been in the field of international human rights law, for example, will know full well that it is the attitude of many, many Western representatives that these rules and these courts and these war crimes legislations are for them, not for us. 

And so again, we come to this sort of fork in the road where I think this idea that we can continue with the very flowery speeches about the importance of international human rights law and so on and so forth, while at the same time acting in a way that makes it clear that these rules are for thee and not for me, I think that’s coming to an end. And, you know, I think the fact that this book sort of addresses that in some way has caused it to gain, you know, the traction that it has. But I strongly suspect that, you know, there are many more and probably far better books coming down the pipeline that address the same issue. Because everywhere I go, people are finding it much, much more difficult to be as oblivious as is necessary to continue living under this fairly direct contradiction.

You’re very right about the fact that it is a polarizing book. I mean, personally, I found it quite courageous and just very honest in its explication of what is happening before our eyes. And, you know, the crazy making stuff that we see from governments and in the media on a regular basis. 

Irina Velitskaya wrote–in February, in The Times of Israel, after your book won the National Book Award in the US–very dismissively that “Liberals love to be lectured about how morally deficient and hypocritical they are; they eat it up; they just never do anything about it.” And so, you know, you mentioned earlier that you’re feeling a little more nihilistic about things, maybe. But it seems like there’s a driving force in this, in exposing the issue you are hoping that people will do something about it. Rather than just, you know, have liberals kind of conveniently hold your book and say, “Look, he’s exposing this horror. We need to just sit in our castigation here about it and be self-flagellating.” I’m assuming that that’s not your hope.

It’s a really good question. A few weeks ago, I was having lunch with a friend of mine who had been on the first Gaza flotillas, and he had ended up in an Israeli prison before he got out and returned to the US. And we were talking about this idea of why it always seems like trying to create positive change in a society–particularly positive, structural or institutional change–feels like such an uphill climb and feels so glacial almost all of the time. 

And I think the closest I can come to, in terms of trying to describe it, is that you effectively have this house, and it’s an incredibly spacious and luxurious house, and it has all of the amenities. And everyone knows how everything in the house works, and what you need to do to get a bigger room in the house, and so on and so forth. And then you’ve got a few people outside building a shack, because they see that in this very nice house there are termites in the foundations. And they’re trying to convince people to come over and help them build this shack, because eventually the shack will get into, you know, become something bigger, and will have enough room for us all, and so on and so forth. And anyway, no matter how pretty this other house looks, there’s termites in the foundations. It’s coming down at some point. 

And that’s a really difficult sales pitch, I think, because until the day the beams come crashing down, it’s going to be far more comfortable for a lot of people to live in that nice house. 

And that’s effectively, I think, where we end up right now, where we have institutions that are based on endless theft. Capitalism, in whatever stage we’re living under right now, is an endlessly expanding form of being in the world. Colonialism has always been a mode of endless theft. And then you have a few folks trying to build something else, and with very limited resources, and it does not seem appealing to a lot of other people, because, you know, why? Why would I want to be a part of this? 

And the answer is, you know, because this other system is burning up our planet and using up all of our resources, and eventually will lead to ruin. Well, eventually we’ll all be dead. 

So I think that’s one of the reasons we end up in this situation where progress feels so difficult, and why someone like me finds the prospect of cynicism, or even nihilism, more appealing than he should on most days. 

But I also see the work that is being done to build solidarity and build institutions from the ground up. I mean, here in Portland, we have members of city council who have been elected, who are willing to speak up on this issue. Even that is a massive achievement. We have people building their own–you know, obviously, I live in the world of sort of literary institutions–and there are people building their own literary institutions from the ground up. You know, do they have the resources of The New York Times? No, but it’s something, right? It’s someone trying to build this shack with the hopes that it will keep getting better, and that when we’re done whatever it is, it’s not going to have termites in the foundations. But that’s a hard sell for most people, and so that’s my way of trying to think through it. 

And you know, it’s not the most hopeful way of putting it, but I think the fact that people are doing the work despite these odds and despite this great asymmetry is something that is incredibly hopeful.

Omar, I’d like to thank you, first for writing the book, and second for taking a few minutes to chat with me today. I really appreciate it.

Thanks so much for having me. I appreciate it.

Omar El Akkad was at the Brilliant Cultural Centre in Castlegar, BC, on May 14, 2026, to deliver Selkirk College’s Mir Lecture.

interview Mir Centre Omar El Akkad Palestine