A book born of a historic crime
Omar El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been
Against This emerges from one of the defining atrocities of the twenty-first
century: the US-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza. On October 25, 2023, three
weeks into the bombardment, El Akkad published a brief social-media post
predicting that, once accountability became impossible and dissent cost
nothing, “everyone will claim to have always opposed the slaughter.” Viewed
more than ten million times, the post captured a truth millions instinctively recognised:
having justified and facilitated the mass killing, the political and media
establishment would one day try to rewrite its own record. Published by Alfred
A. Knopf, the book that grew from that sentence has resonated deeply with those
horrified by Gaza’s destruction and repelled by the complicity of governments,
universities, cultural institutions, and the press.
That response is itself politically significant. It
expresses the profound alienation of broad sections of the population,
especially young people, from the political establishment that has funded,
armed, and defended the annihilation of an entire population. The disgust is
real, deep, and justified. It reflects not only revulsion at images of children
pulled from rubble, hospitals bombed, and entire neighbourhoods levelled, but
also the recognition that institutions claiming to embody democratic values
have revealed themselves as instruments of imperialist violence. Millions have
watched the Trump administration, the European Union, and every major
imperialist power provide diplomatic cover, military hardware, and political
legitimacy to a campaign of extermination. Millions have watched the media
parrot lies, suppress evidence, and smear protesters as antisemites. Millions
have watched university administrators summon riot police against students
demanding an end to genocide.
El Akkad’s book gives voice to this disgust. It catalogues
the moral cowardice of editors who refused to use the word “genocide,” cultural
figures who stayed silent to protect their careers, and a liberal
intelligentsia that retreated into evasions and platitudes. Written in anger,
the book’s anger is entirely justified. But disgust, however sincere, is not a
political programme. Here, El Akkad’s book reveals the limitations of an entire
social layer: the liberal intelligentsia, shaken by the abyss but unable to
explain how it arrived there or how humanity can escape it. The book is framed
as a “breakup letter with the West,” a lament for betrayed values. But the
genocide in Gaza is not a betrayal of Western values; it expresses the real
interests of the ruling classes of the United States and Europe. Imperialism
did not lose its soul in Gaza. It revealed its essence.
El Akkad’s category of “the West” is therefore politically
useless. It treats imperialism as a moral failure rather than a socio‑economic
system rooted in the domination of finance capital and the struggle for global
hegemony. It conflates rulers and ruled, obscuring the decisive fact that the
same governments that bomb Gaza are waging war on the living standards and
democratic rights of workers at home. The millions who marched in London, New
York and Berlin; the dockworkers who refused to load arms shipments; the
students beaten by police- these too are “the West.” The question is not
whether the West has lied, but which class rules it, and which class can end that rule.
El Akkad’s book records the moment when a section of the
liberal intelligentsia saw the abyss. But seeing the abyss is not the same as
understanding it. And understanding it is not the same as developing the
political perspective required to overcome it. The task is not to mourn the
collapse of liberal illusions, but to arm the working class with a scientific
understanding of imperialism and the revolutionary programme needed to end it.
The book’s strengths: A searing portrait of moral
cowardice
El Akkad, born in Egypt, raised partly in Qatar and educated
in Canada, spent years as a journalist covering Guantánamo, the war in
Afghanistan and the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson. These
experiences form the emotional and political substratum of his book. He writes
not as a detached observer but as someone who has repeatedly witnessed the
machinery of state violence and the moral evasions that accompany it. His anger
toward the media, cultural institutions and the liberal intelligentsia is
genuine and sharply expressed. He catalogues the editors who refused to use the
word “genocide,” the university administrators who summoned riot police against
peaceful encampments, and the literary figures who remained silent to protect
their careers. As he puts it, these were the people who “would not use the word
‘genocide,’ the university administrators who sent riot police against
encampments, the literary figures who stayed silent to protect their careers.”
His contempt for the bien-pensant press's “both sides”
evasions is entirely justified. The media’s role in laundering the genocide
through euphemisms, distortions, and the systematic erasure of Palestinian
voices was not an incidental failure but a structural function. The press acted
as an ideological arm of the state, manufacturing consent for mass murder while
presenting itself as a neutral arbiter. El Akkad’s indictment of this cowardice
is one of the book’s strongest elements. As a description of the moral rot of
official society, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
has undeniable force. But a description is not an explanation. And moral
revulsion is not a strategy.
This is the book's decisive limitation, and the
social layer it represents. El Akkad’s outrage targets individuals and
institutions that failed to live up to their professed values. But the failure
is not personal; it is systemic. The media did not avoid the word “genocide”
because of individual cowardice alone. They avoided it because acknowledging
genocide would implicate the entire political and economic order of American
imperialism. University administrators did not call riot police because they
were personally timid; they did so because universities function as corporate
entities integrated into the state apparatus. Literary figures did not remain
silent merely out of fear for their reputations; they remained silent because
the cultural establishment is structurally dependent on the same class
interests that prosecute imperialist war.
El Akkad’s book captures the symptoms but not the disease.
It records the moral collapse of liberal institutions but does not explain why
that collapse was inevitable. The abyss shakes the liberal intelligentsia, but
it cannot comprehend the historical and class forces that produced it. Its
response is emotional rather than analytical, moral rather than political. It
recoils from barbarism but cannot identify the social force that could end it.
The tragedy of Gaza cannot be understood through the lens of
personal betrayal or institutional hypocrisy. It must be understood as the
outcome of an imperialist global system driven by the interests of finance
capital and enforced through military violence. To oppose genocide requires
more than disgust; it requires a scientific understanding of this system and a
strategy rooted in the independent mobilisation of the international working
class.
The central flaw: “The West” as a moral category
El Akkad’s central analytic category is “the West,”
understood as a set of professed values- freedom, human rights, the rule of
law- now exposed as hypocrisy. This framework is profoundly inadequate. It
treats imperialism as a moral failure rather than a socio‑economic system
rooted in definite class interests. It assumes the ruling classes of the United
States and Europe have betrayed their own ideals, when in fact those ideals
have always served as ideological cover for pursuing global hegemony.
The genocide in Gaza is not a betrayal of the “values” of
American and European capitalism. It expresses the ruling classes' real
interests in those countries. For more than a century, imperialist policy in
the Middle East has been determined by the drive to control the region’s
resources, strategic routes and geopolitical chokepoints. From the Sykes–Picot
Agreement to the CIA‑engineered coup against Mossadegh, from the arming of the
Shah to the invasion of Iraq, the imperialist powers have treated the region as
a battleground for the assertion of their economic and strategic dominance.
Israel functions as the spearhead of US imperialism in the region, a heavily
militarised outpost whose role is to enforce American interests through
overwhelming violence.
The Biden administration’s unconditional support for the slaughter
continued and escalated under Trump; it was not a moral lapse. It was policy.
It flowed from the strategic calculations of the Pentagon, the State Department
and the intelligence agencies, which view Israel as indispensable to
maintaining US control over the Middle East. The bombs dropped on Gaza were not
the result of moral confusion or political cowardice; they were the logical
outcome of imperialist strategy.
To speak of “the West” as a single moral
community obscures the decisive question: class. It collapses rulers and ruled
into a single category, erasing the fundamental antagonism between the
capitalist class that directs imperialist policy and the working class that
suffers its consequences. The same governments that bomb Gaza are waging war on
the jobs, wages and democratic rights of workers at home. They slash social
programmes, attack trade unions, criminalise protest and funnel billions into the
military‑industrial complex. The working class is not the beneficiary of
imperialism; it is one of its victims.
The dockworkers who refused to load arms shipments, the
students beaten by police, and the millions who marched in London, New York and
Berlin are also “the West.” Their actions demonstrate that opposition to
genocide is not geographically or culturally determined but socially
determined. It arises not from “Western values” but from the objective
interests of the working class, which has no stake in imperialist domination
and every reason to oppose it.
The question is not whether the West has lied, but which
class rules it, and which class can end that rule. The ruling class
lies because its interests require it. It speaks of human rights while arming
dictatorships, of democracy while supporting coups, of peace while preparing
for war. These contradictions are not accidental; they are inherent in a system
based on exploitation, competition and the global struggle for markets and
resources.
El Akkad’s category of “the West” therefore functions as a
political diversion. It directs attention away from the capitalist class and
toward an amorphous cultural entity. It encourages despair over analysis, moral lamentation over political struggle. It suggests that
the problem is hypocrisy rather than imperialism, values rather than class
power.
Liberal disillusionment: Expecting better from those who
never offered it
The emotional centre of El Akkad’s book is disappointment
with liberalism, particularly the Democratic Party milieu in which much of the
American literary world lives. He writes as a man who believed the West offered
justice and discovered that much of what it promises is a lie. This sense of
betrayal permeates the text. It is the disillusionment of someone who expected
moral courage from institutions that have never demonstrated it. The shock is
genuine, but it also reveals the political naïveté of a social layer that
mistook liberal rhetoric for liberal reality.
Yet the book never draws the necessary political conclusion:
the Democratic Party is a party of Wall Street and the military‑intelligence
apparatus. It is not a vehicle for reform, and appeals to its conscience are
politically bankrupt. The same party that postures as defender of human rights
has overseen drone assassinations, mass surveillance, wars of aggression and
the arming of Israel to the teeth. Its role in Gaza is not an aberration but
the continuation of a decades‑long imperialist trajectory. To imagine that such
a party can be pressured into moral action is to misunderstand its class
character entirely.
Instead, El Akkad retreats into the language of individual
moral choice- refusal, bearing witness, what one person can do as a citizen and
father. These impulses are not ignoble. They reflect a sincere desire to resist
barbarism. But they are politically impotent. Individual refusal does not stop
bombs. Bearing witness does not halt the machinery of imperialist war. The
moral courage of isolated individuals, however admirable, cannot substitute for
a collective, organised, class‑based struggle against the system that produces
genocide.
The book is permeated by helplessness, the direct product of
its failure to identify any social force capable of transforming society. El
Akkad sees the abyss but cannot locate the agency capable of overcoming it. His
narrative is moral collapse without political resolution, outrage without strategy, and despair without direction. This is not a personal failing but
the liberal intelligentsia's characteristic limitation: it recoils from the
consequences of imperialism yet remains ideologically tethered to the very
institutions that enforce it.
The tragedy of Gaza demands more than sorrow or revulsion.
It demands a scientific understanding of imperialism and the recognition that
only the international working class mobilised independently of all capitalist
parties possesses the power to end the system responsible for such crimes.
The politics of moral witness: A dead end
This impasse mirrors the pseudo-left's broader crisis. In a March
2024 lecture at the University of Michigan, David North addressed Aaron
Bushnell's self-immolation and journalist Chris Hedges's celebration of it, who
hailed the act as “a potent political message.” North’s answer applies equally to El Akkad’s politics of moral witness. He insisted that the turn
toward individual acts of desperation reflects not political clarity but
political exhaustion. As North explained:
“The fundamental driving force of social revolution is not
inchoate and desperate rage but an understanding of the objective
contradictions of the world capitalist system and the mass social action that
is guided by the comprehension of these contradictions.”
This is the essential point. Rage, grief, moral shock- these
are powerful emotions, but they do not constitute a strategy. They do not
identify the social forces that can halt imperialist barbarism. They do not
explain the historical and economic processes that produce genocide. And they
do not provide a path for the working class to intervene as an independent
political force.
The problem confronting the movement against the genocide,
North insisted, “has not been public indifference but the absence of a
political perspective and strategy.” Millions have marched, occupied campuses,
blocked ports, and defied police repression. The obstacle is not apathy but the
political framework that has confined these actions. As North noted, the
protests “have remained within the confines of the existing structures of
bourgeois politics… directed not toward the independent political mobilisation
of the working class against capitalist rule but to the application of pressure
on bourgeois governments.”
This is precisely the dead end El Akkad’s book expresses.
His narrative is one of moral collapse without political resolution. He
documents institutional cowardice but cannot explain why those institutions
behaved as they did. He condemns hypocrisy but does not identify the class
interests that make hypocrisy inevitable. He recoils from genocide but cannot
conceive of a social force capable of stopping it. The result is a politics of
witness, not a politics of struggle.
El Akkad’s book is therefore a literary expression of the
broader impasse of the pseudo‑left: a movement that responds to imperialist
barbarism with moral anguish rather than scientific analysis, with individual
gestures rather than collective strategy, with despair rather than
revolutionary perspective. It is a politics that sees the abyss but cannot see
beyond it.
Identity politics: A reactionary diversion
The promotional framing around El Akkad’s book speaks of a
“deep fracture” for Black, brown and Indigenous Americans and for younger
generations who had kept faith in Western ideals. This racial and generational framing-
the stock-in-trade of identity politics- divides the working class precisely
where unity is required. It interprets political disillusionment not as a
universal response to imperialist barbarism but as the particular trauma of
specific demographic groups. In doing so, it transforms what is fundamentally a
class question into a mosaic of racial and generational grievances.
The opposition to the Gaza genocide has cut across every
racial, ethnic and national line. Millions of workers and youth of every
background have marched in London, New York, Berlin, Paris, Johannesburg,
Sydney and São Paulo. Dockworkers of diverse origins refused to load shipments of arms. Students from every demographic category faced police repression.
Healthcare workers, teachers, postal workers, artists and engineers joined
demonstrations demanding an end to the slaughter. The movement’s strength lies in
its universality: it expresses the shared interests of the international
working class.
Identity politics serves the ruling class by fragmenting
this unity. It encourages people to view political questions through the lens
of personal identity rather than social position. It substitutes demographic
categories for class analysis, obscuring the fact that imperialist violence is
directed not at particular racial groups but at entire populations whose land,
resources and strategic position are coveted by the major powers. It reduces
the struggle against genocide to a matter of “representation,” “visibility,” or
“betrayed ideals,” rather than confronting the capitalist system that produces
such crimes.
Moreover, identity politics provides the ruling class with a
convenient ideological shield. Governments and corporations promote diversity
initiatives, symbolic gestures and rhetorical acknowledgements of historical
injustice while continuing to wage war, suppress dissent and attack workers’
living standards. The same institutions that celebrate “inclusion” and “equity”
have supported the bombardment of Gaza, armed Israel, censored pro‑Palestinian
voices and deployed police against student encampments. Identity politics
allows them to present themselves as progressive while pursuing reactionary
policies.
By adopting this framework, El Akkad's book inadvertently
reinforces these divisions. It interprets disillusionment as a crisis of
particular groups rather than a crisis of the entire social order. In doing so,
it obscures the only force capable of ending imperialist barbarism: the
unified, international working class.
The embrace of the establishment: Outrage without threat
The book's reception carries a bitter irony. One Day,
Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This won the 2025 National Book
Award for Nonfiction, alongside a stream of honours from the same cultural
establishment whose silence El Akkad condemns. Institutions that spent two
years averting their eyes now celebrate a book about averting one’s eyes. The
very editors, prize committees and cultural gatekeepers who refused to speak
plainly while Gaza burned now congratulate themselves for recognising a work
that laments their cowardice. In this sense, the book’s success is not a
contradiction but a confirmation of El Akkad’s own prediction: the official
world is already preparing to have “always been against this.”
This embrace is possible because the book, for all its
anger, poses no threat to anyone. It indicts complicity, not capitalism; hypocrisy, not the profit system that requires it. It condemns silence but
does not expose the class interests that make silence inevitable. It mourns the
collapse of liberal ideals but does not challenge the social order that
weaponises those ideals in the service of imperialist violence. A literary
establishment can absorb moral outrage. It cannot absorb a programme.
The cultural institutions that now celebrate El Akkad’s book
are deeply integrated into the capitalist state's ideological apparatus. Their
function is not to challenge imperialism but to manage dissent, convert political anger into safe moral sentiment, and ensure outrage never
develops into revolutionary consciousness. They can reward a book that
expresses sorrow, disappointment and disgust. They cannot reward a book that
identifies the working class as the revolutionary force capable of ending
imperialist war. They can honour a narrative of personal disillusionment. They
cannot honour a call for the overthrow of the system responsible for genocide.
The establishment’s embrace of El Akkad’s book therefore
reveals more about the establishment than about the book. It demonstrates bourgeois
culture's capacity to metabolise criticism, turn even the documentation of its
own failures into a commodity, and present moral anguish as a substitute for
political clarity. The book’s success signals not institutional repentance but institutional
self‑preservation. It allows the ruling class to acknowledge “mistakes” without
confronting the system that produced them.
In the end, the book’s reception underscores this review's
central argument: moral revulsion, however sincere, is not a strategy. Only a
scientific, class‑based programme can confront the forces responsible for genocide,
and that is precisely what the cultural establishment cannot tolerate.
What is to be done: From revulsion to revolutionary
consciousness
None of this dismisses El Akkad’s sincerity or the genuine
emotion the book has evoked. The disgust millions feel toward the political and
media establishment is a healthy, progressive development. It marks a profound
shift in consciousness: a recognition that the institutions long presented as
guardians of democracy, human rights and liberal values have revealed
themselves as instruments of imperialist violence. The revulsion is real, deep
and justified. But disgust, however sincere, must become consciousness.
The lesson of Gaza is not that “the West” has lost its soul.
It is that imperialism, in its death agony, is driving toward ever greater
barbarism, including world war. The genocide in Gaza is not an aberration but a
warning: a demonstration of what the ruling class is prepared to do as it
confronts economic crisis, geopolitical rivalry and mounting social opposition
at home. The same governments that levelled Gaza are preparing for
confrontation with Russia and China, expanding military budgets, militarising
society and attacking democratic rights. The logic of imperialism inexorably leads to catastrophe.
Only the international working class, mobilised independently of all capitalist parties on a socialist programme, can stop it. As the WSWS editorial board has stated, the genocidal
war in Gaza “can only be stopped through the unified and revolutionary action
of the international working class.” This is not a rhetorical flourish but a
scientific assessment of social forces. The working class, bound together
across borders by global production, possesses both the objective interest and
the collective power to halt the machinery of war. Dockworkers refusing to load
arms shipments, autoworkers striking against militarised austerity, students
defying police repression- these actions point toward the real agency capable
of ending imperialist barbarism.
El Akkad’s book records the moment when a section of the
liberal intelligentsia saw the abyss. But seeing the abyss is not the same as
understanding it. And understanding it is not the same as developing the
political perspective required to overcome it. The liberal intelligentsia
recoils from genocide but remains ideologically tethered to the Democratic
Party, identity politics and the moral language of individual witness. It
mourns the collapse of liberal ideals but cannot conceive of a world beyond capitalism.
Its despair stems from its political limitations.
The task is to explain how humanity reached the edge of the
abyss and how it can escape. That requires not moral revulsion but a scientific
understanding of the state's class character, the nature of imperialism, and
the historical role of the working class. It requires building a revolutionary
leadership capable of turning outrage into strategy, protest into power, and
moral clarity into political action. Only by consciously mobilising the
international working class can we bring the profit system to its knees and
finally end the barbarism it generates.
Bibliography
Primary Text
- El
Akkad, Omar. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2025.
Statements, Lectures, and Editorials
- North,
David. “The Political Meaning of the Self‑Immolation of Aaron Bushnell.”
Lecture delivered at the University of Michigan, March 2024.
- World
Socialist Web Site Editorial Board. “Mobilise the Working Class to Stop
the Gaza Genocide.” World Socialist Web Site, 2023.
- North,
David. The Crisis of American Democracy: The Political and Social
Foundations of the January 6 Coup Attempt. Mehring Books, 2022.
- North,
David. The Heritage We Defend: A Contribution to the History of the
Fourth International. Mehring Books, 1988.
WSWS Coverage of Gaza and Imperialism
- Grey,
Andre Damon, et al. “The US‑Backed Israeli Genocide in Gaza.” World
Socialist Web Site, 2023–2025.
- Kishore,
Joseph. “The Role of the Working Class in the Fight Against Imperialist
War.” World Socialist Web Site, 2024.
- Van
Auken, Bill. “US Imperialism and the Middle East: A Century of
Intervention.” World Socialist Web Site, 2023.
Historical and Theoretical Works on Imperialism
- Lenin,
V. I. Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. 1916.
- Luxemburg,
Rosa. The Accumulation of Capital. 1913.
- Trotsky,
Leon. The War and the International. 1914.
- Trotsky,
Leon. The Permanent Revolution. 1930.
- Trotsky,
Leon. The Transitional Program. 1938.
Works on Liberalism, Identity Politics, and the Crisis of
the Intelligentsia
- Reed,
Adolph. Class Notes: Posing as Politics and Other Thoughts on the
American Scene. New Press, 2000.
- Michaels,
Walter Benn. The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love
Identity and Ignore Inequality. Metropolitan Books, 2006.
- Lasch,
Christopher. The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy.
W. W. Norton, 1995.
Journalistic and Political Context
- Human
Rights Watch. Israel/Palestine: Events of 2023–2025. HRW Annual
Reports.
- United
Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). Gaza
Situation Reports, 2023–2025.
-
