Award-winning novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad has just released his first non-fiction book titled One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. The book follows his previous fiction novel, American War, which was named by the BBC as one of 100 novels that shaped our world.
The book’s title, inspired by a viral tweet Akkad posted in October of 2023, gives you a good hint that the main theme is the genocide in Gaza. Akkad joins ‘Mehdi Unfiltered’ to discuss the many themes in his book, what inspired it, and why so many are silent when they shouldn’t be.
“I think there's a lot of people who have become very well versed in looking away and keeping their head down and then checking every once in a while, to see what the prevailing opinion is,” he tells Mehdi. Indeed, the silence from so many on the suffering of Palestinians is deafening, but it isn’t new, nor is it exclusive to Palestinians, as he explores in his powerful new book.
“It is very difficult to find somebody who was on board with apartheid in South Africa. Everyone's against it, in hindsight. That avenue has always been available.” The more time passes, the more it seems everyone was on the right side of history. But in Gaza’s case - the first live-streamed genocide - Mehdi asks Akkad if looking away is the same as it used to be.
“I think operating under the systems of power that we have generally, relies in large extent on looking away, and this was much, much more difficult to look away from,” Akkad says.
You can click here to buy a copy of Akkad’s latest book ‘One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This’ and also, do share your review with us in the comments below!
If you are a paid subscriber, you can watch the full interview above to hear what Akkad considers as the “most instructive form of failure” in the media’s coverage of the genocide in Gaza.
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