Omar El Akkad’s New Book Critiques American Hypocrisy On the Gaza War
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Support for KQBD podcasts comes from Landmark College, offering a fully online graduate-level Certificate in Learning Differences and Neurodiversity program. Visit landmark.edu slash certificate to learn more.

Support for KQED Podcasts comes from Berkley Rep. Presenting here, there are blueberries. Unearth the chilling truths hidden within a Nazi-era photo album and what they reveal about our own humanity. Playing April 5th through May 11th. Learn more at berkeleyrep.org. From KQED. From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Alexis Madrigal. One day, everyone will have been against this. One day, everyone will have been against this.

That's the title of the new book from journalist and writer Omar El-Akkad. But it's also his provocation and intuition about the war Israel has waged in Gaza, which has now killed 50,000 and displaced nearly everyone. It's a book about reckoning with the actions and ideas of the West. It's about the nature of morality and politics in

We'll talk with Elikad, born in Egypt, about the ways Americans have shielded themselves from confronting the true impact of our power. That's all coming up next, right after this news. Welcome to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Before we start, I just want to say that I know it will be a tough show for nearly everyone listening.

I understand that there are people who remain enraged and fearful about the October 7th attacks by Hamas and do not feel that those losses have been avenged, I guess is the word. I understand that there are many people listening who have lost family in Gaza, who have friends and allies who have and are grieving. I understand there are Jews opposed to the war and those who support it and that both of those groups might feel the panic of rising anti-Semitism and not knowing quite what to do about it.

Many, many people feel helpless, especially those who've been trying to stop Israeli weapons from falling in Gaza, and also those who want to imagine another future, an end of the war, and a peace that promises more than a moribund two-state solution. All this to say, Omar El-Akkad's One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is not a book to comfort any of us. This is a book meant to indict and enrage one way or another.

It is a book with a clear moral vision and a devastating accounting of how American and Western institutions have failed to live up to the values they've expressed and promoted across the world. You may find yourself disagreeing in all or some parts, I know I did, but this book forces a reckoning with yourself about what is happening in Gaza.

There is no end in sight to the war, no future on offer for Palestinians. More than 50,000 people are dead. A third of them are children. The Trump administration offers to Gazans to become refugees as they build a resort where they once lived. How did we get here? Like, how did we get here? Welcome to Forearm, Omar Al-Akkad. Thank you so much for having me.

I want to understand where you're coming from. I mean, you do bring a lot of your life experiences into this book. So let's just like kind of start at the beginning. You know, you're born in Egypt, but then you left fairly young. Yeah? Yeah, my dad was coming home from work one day in Cairo, and there were soldiers at a sort of makeshift checkpoint at a street corner, effectively.

and they were bored, and so they decided to give him a hard time. So one of them says, you know, "Show me your papers." My dad takes out his little ID card, hands it over, and the soldier tears it up and throws it on the ground and says, "Show me your papers." And by luck, my dad gets out of that situation, but I think it was the moment he decided he needed to get the hell out of Egypt. And so he originally found a job at a hotel in Libya, of all places.

but there was someone with the same name on the Libyan terrorism watch list, and so he wasn't allowed to fly. And a few months later, he found a job in Qatar.

And so I end up growing up in one of the richest countries on earth instead of Libya because of a coin flip at an airport. But that happened when I was four or five years old and has affected my life more than anything I've ever done. Yeah. I mean, in part because Qatar, you know, then and now is this country of vast oil wealth, but also kind of caste system and brutal socioeconomic inequality. Yeah.

I mean, it's a place where 90% of the population is from somewhere else. Like my father, like almost everyone, the parents of almost everyone I grew up around, they'd come in to cash in on that oil and gas money. But there's a very real hierarchy in place. You know, it's not just in Qatar, it's certainly in this country as well, but it's much more overt in a place like Qatar where at the bottom of the ladder,

You have what are called third country laborers. These are the people who basically built this entire country. They built all these skyscrapers. They pull the oil out of the ground. And these are folks from India, Pakistan, Nepal, the Philippines. And they have almost no rights at all. And they exist at the bottom of this caste system that nobody else in Qatar above them on that ladder can pretend doesn't exist.

the entire country looks the way it does and exists in the form it does because of these folks, but they have almost no access to the wealth and to the privilege that this country exists on top of. I mean, did you see that as a kid or was that something that you, going back through your memories of growing up, that pattern has emerged for you?

No, I normalized it almost completely. And I should say, you know, you and I are going to chat for an hour, and I'm sure we're going to cover some pretty contentious stuff. And I know that this is a book that sort of barges in through the door pretending to want to pick a bunch of fights. But I don't think there's a single thing in this book that is indicted or interrogated or autopsied

in which I am not personally complicit. And that begins at a very young age in Qatar, where you just look at the state of affairs and you say, "Yeah, this is how it works." There are people at the bottom of this ladder, and there are people at the top, and I'm somewhere in the middle, and that's just how life is. Your family eventually moves to Canada, and you become a journalist.

I really, you know, also as a journalist, I could really feel the war on terror era reporting that you did. In particular, the ways that kind of language in that period, people probably remember this as kind of jokingly in the sort of freedom fries kind of era, but of course, torture being called advanced interrogation techniques.

Talk to me a little bit about how being a journalist in the war on terror era of American power changed who you were. So, I mean, I often talk about writing as my first avenue of retreat. Ever since I was a little kid, when something doesn't make sense to me, or when I'm trying to sit with questions, I do that on the page. I try to tell stories about it.

And so, you know, because I come from an immigrant background, and I suspect some of your immigrant listeners will know what I'm talking about here.

You don't grow up to be a writer. You don't grow up to be a poet, a painter. Science is on top. Engineering, actually, maybe. Engineer, lawyer, doctor. Exactly, right? And so my degree is in computer science. Now, I can't program my way out of a paper bag. I was useless at it. I still am amazed that they gave me that degree.

And one of the many reasons I was useless at it is because I spent all of my time at the student newspaper. Because that was a place where I could tell stories. And that's how I got into journalism. It happened to be right around the time of September 11th. It was that year, actually. It was late 2001 that I started at the... Or early 2002 that I started at the student newspaper. And for me, it was...

this sense of knowing that the world was changing in some way and wanting to be engaged with that. And the only way I know how to be engaged with anything is to tell stories about it. So that was my entryway into journalism. And I was fortunate enough to get a summer internship that ended up transforming into the only real job I've ever had in my life. I was a reporter at a Canadian newspaper for 10 years. And those 10 years were

you know, overlapped almost directly with the post, sort of, 9/11 era. So I got to see a lot of the hallmark moments and visit a lot of the hallmark places of whatever that age was. Yeah, I mean, some of the scenes in the book from Guantanamo Bay, you know, the facility we still have, which is back in the news because we have sent people there again,

There was something about the way that you described it as this kind of legal system that's outside the legal system, right? That something has been built there which has the features of a legal system, but not the one in the United States. Yeah, so I spent a lot of 2008 going back and forth to Gitmo. And that was sandwiched in between two years where I went and did assignments in Afghanistan.

2007-2009, I was in Afghanistan covering the NATO invasion. And those trips to Afghanistan sort of gave me a very close look at the physical layer of violence in wartime. You know, what the bombs do, what the bullets do. And of course that was grotesque in its own way. But one of the things I learned in that in-between year in Gitmo is that that layer of physical violence can exist in a vacuum.

It needs other kinds of violence to hold it up. And Guantanamo Bay was the central location where you could see those other forms of violence: linguistic violence, euphemistic violence, the violence of bureaucracy. You know, we would get these court documents at the end of every hearing, and they were the sort of exhibits that were handed in or, you know, the motions from the lawyers. And they would look like this warped chessboard because half the lines would be blacked out.

And at one point they gave us one that had, you know, to give you a sense of what I'm talking about here, they gave us one that had an appendix that was mostly blacked out. It was censored left, right, and center. But the appendix was just a copy of a New York Times article that the defense lawyer had sort of attached to make the judge's life easier.

So, immediately all the journalists run to their computers, bring up the New York Times website, and you can see the thing that was deemed too dangerous for you to read. And to just think about the process by which a leadership team decided that a publicly available article in the most well-known newspaper on earth had to be censored for our safety.

It gives you a sense of what I mean when I talk about linguistic violence, bureaucratic violence, the violence of omission. All of that was on full display in a place like Gitmo. Yeah.

We're talking with Omar El-Akkad, a journalist and novelist about his new book. It's about the war in Gaza called "One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This." You may also know him from his novels "American War" and "What Strange Paradise."

We obviously want to invite comments into this conversation. What are your reactions to what Omar El-Kad is saying? You can give us a call. The number is 866-733-6786. That's 866-733-6786. I've seen this book in every bookstore in the Bay Area. Maybe you've read it and you have thoughts about the book. You can email your comments.

and questions to forum at kqed.org. You can find us on social media, Blue Sky, Instagram, or KQED Forum, or of course there is the Discord. I'm Alexis Madigan. We'll be back with more right after the break.

Landmark College's fully online Certificate in Learning Differences and Neurodiversity provides educators with research-based skills and strategies that improve learning outcomes for neurodivergent students. Earn up to 15 graduate-level credits and specialize in one of the following areas. Post-secondary disability services, executive function, or autism on campus or online. Learn more at landmark.edu slash certificate.

Support for KQED Podcasts comes from Berkley Rep. Presenting here, there are blueberries. Unearth the chilling truths hidden within a Nazi-era photo album and what they reveal about our own humanity. Playing April 5th through May 11th. Learn more at berkeleyrep.org. Welcome back to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. We're talking with Omar El-Akkad about his book, One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.

Speeding ahead a little bit in your timeline, you write two books, you achieve like real literary standing, you're living in Oregon where I still believe you still are outside of Portland, Oregon. Hamas executes the October 7th attacks, punishing Israeli response begins.

Three weeks in, you tweet: "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." What happens after that tweet and how did it turn into this sort of book-length treatment?

Yeah, it's an interesting thing because back then, you know, I would tweet maybe once a month or something. I'm not a big social media guy, you know. Your listeners can probably tell from my rambling answers that character limits are not my strong suit. You're a storyteller, you know. Yeah, yeah. That's such a polite way of putting it. Thank you. I, you know, now I'm not on really on social media anymore at all. But back then, I would tweet every once in a while and I put out what I thought was a fairly innocuous tweet.

And for some reason it sort of gained all this traction and went viral. Independent of that, my editor was in town in Portland for the Literary Festival in early November, and we went out to dinner and I was ranting and raving about how I didn't know what my place was in this part of the world anymore. And you know, maybe he just got so sick of hearing me talk about this that a few days later he called and said, "You should be writing about this."

And I was writing because again, like I said earlier, it's my first avenue of retreat when the world doesn't make sense to me. I take it to the page. But originally, the thing that became this book was called The Glass Coffin. That was the working title that I was operating under. And it was only after I think the first or second draft was completed that another editor suggested that I repurpose a part of that tweet as the title.

But as a result, it's now compulsory in every interview for me to try and convince people that I didn't just take a tweet and expand it out to 200 pages. I promise you that's not what I... It doesn't read like that, I promise. I very much promise it does not. You know, when you start writing this book, you end up with what you call an account of a fracture, a breaking away from the notion that the polite Western liberal ever stood for anything at all.

When you began writing what was then The Glass Coffin, did you know that that's where this was going to land, or did you come to that through that process of working it out on the page, as you've described? That's a really interesting question. I think I knew the headline of it. Because again, like, you know, there's a reason I sound the way I do. And I often say there's a reason that if I called you up and told you my name was John Smith, you'd probably believe me. I've spent a very long time

making myself of this place. You know, I grew up in a part of the world where most media was censored, where there wasn't a semblance of democracy, where you kept your mouth shut. Above all else, you keep your mouth shut. And so I needed the West to be a certain kind of place, and I needed to make myself acceptable to that place. And that is the reason for most of who I am, because I've spent the last 40 years doing that.

And then suddenly I find myself untethered from that because I can't make peace with the horror I'm seeing every day and the reality that I am committing those atrocities. I am paying for that. My tax money is doing that. And so, like I said earlier, I know that the book has provoked immensely polarized responses. I get that.

But for me, and I think I say this somewhere in the book, I'm not interested in arguing with anybody. I'm not interested in changing anybody's mind. I'm past that. And that's not necessarily a good thing. That's not something I'm proud of, but it is the case. I think for me, the defining aftertaste of this book is a deep kind of uncertainty because I've come untethered from a way of being that has marked my life since I was five years old.

And I have no idea who the hell I am on the other side of that. It's interesting too because, you know, I think about this in terms of my own family's background, you know, sometimes you can dream when something's happening in the United States, "Oh, I'll go back to Mexico," you know. Got family there, everything, you know, could live a different life, could have that.

It's difficult though because you know the reality of many other places too and so it isn't even if you've untethered it's not as if there's a a fanciful other place maybe that you can imagine you wouldn't be struggling with these same kind of issues. Yeah and I mean that that's not just somewhere else that's that's here as well um and what I mean by that is

You know, today is the first day back in Portland after two months on the road. I've been doing this book tour for two months. And so if I sound like I need an oil change, that's the reason why. But, you know, I would do these book events and afterwards, you know, you'd be at the signing table and almost without fail, you would get someone or in some cases many, many people

coming up to you and saying like the same thing. I don't know. You know, I'm second-generation immigrant. I only know this place, but now I can't say I belong here. But like what the hell is home? You know, my blood is from somewhere, but I've hardly ever spent any time there. And I think that's true when you're looking outward, but it's also true of this place, right? Because I think I talk about this in the book somewhere.

the imaginative obligations of trying to imagine something better than this are infinite, right? If the system as it stands, if the country as it stands works for you, you don't have to imagine anything else. You can engage in a deep kind of imaginative poverty. In fact, you can engage in negative imagination where all you do is spend time thinking about how horrible it would be if anybody changed this system. But if you and I are sitting here trying to imagine something better,

Maybe you want to burn it all to the ground and start fresh, and maybe I just want to tax billionaires a little bit more. The ceiling is infinite, and this is why so many progressive groups end up dealing with so much infighting. And so it's not just a matter of the difficulty of imagining a somewhere else. It's the difficulty of imagining something else right here as well that forces one into a deeply uncertain place.

Yeah, I found myself thinking so much in this book about the moral clarity and even say purity in this book and kind of comparing it to the way that people I know in politics at sort of all kinds of levels think. And this is a generous interpretation of their of this thought process. But I think it's actually real for a lot of people that

They have a moral compass, but they also have this other dimension, which is kind of this ability to affect change around the things that they care about. And maybe they won't, they kind of will sacrifice clarity in their views because they want to make sure that they're passing the Americans with Disabilities Act or creating a law to combat climate change or, you know, protecting marriage equality. You know, there's these very deep questions.

trade-offs and it doesn't necessarily feel like standing for nothing it feels like that they have seen this trade-off and made a different choice or they have compromised something for something else yeah yeah I mean I remember listening to an interview once with Barack Obama where he he used the football analogy right you know sometimes you can sneak a yard or two and sometimes you just have to punt and

And sometimes you find an opening and you might actually gain yards. And it's a really interesting analogy because I think it works 99.9% of the time. You know, I covered politics a lot during my years as a journalist. And I understand the necessity of the pragmatic, almost Machiavellian nature of day-to-day politics. I get that. Where it falls apart for me is in that 0.1%.

And I feel like the last year and a half was that. What I mean by all of this is, you know, there's a section in the book where I talk about how it became impossible for me to vote for the Democratic Party in light of the slaughter in Gaza. And this, more than any other part of the book, which is an interesting thing for this kind of book, but more than any other part of the book, has provoked the strongest responses.

And I fully get that, and I'm not trying to tell anyone else how to vote, nor am I trying to undermine people who were desperately, desperately fearful of what would happen when this other administration took over and were proven right in every respect. I'm not trying to undermine any of that, nor am I even trying to undermine somebody who was behaving from a purely pragmatic political perspective. I don't care.

In this situation, there was just a personal moral threshold that had been crossed. And I couldn't check that box. I just couldn't on a personal level. And I understand that this is naive. And I understand that I need to grow up and understand real politic and all the rest of that. And the vast majority of the time I do. I was that guy, right? I was that guy who picked up every ballot, looked for...

whoever had the R next to their name and then voted for whoever had the D next to their name because, hey, lesser of two evils. There are just certain moments where I think the relative gives way to the absolute. And so it's been a very sort of contentious part of the book. Because here we are, right? Like we listen to

the little news roundup ahead of the start of our conversation where it was like, "President Trump says this thing will happen. Most every other economist on Earth says no. Also, the rivers are drying up." And, you know, like, it's not like the stakes are low. And I would never tell anyone in a position, in a vulnerable position, which most of us are in right now, that they can't resort to the pragmatic to avoid the worst possible outcome. There are just certain situations where

I can't continue to behave in that way and also look myself in the mirror. And that's not a strength, that's not a weakness, that's just a function of the kind of human being I am. I will stipulate I felt differently. But I also don't really want to fight about this topic, as you've noted. This has been something I'm sure that you've had a lot of discussions about, and I think you answered many of the objections that probably occurred for listeners.

The one thing I do want to ask about, though, is whether something could happen in the Trump administration that would make you rethink that position. Like, is there can there ever be a comparable weight on the other side of the scale? Or is it like a singularity in your mind about what has happened in Gaza such that there there there is no other side of the scale? Oh, God, no, no. It's not even a case of of.

Could something happen? Many, many things have happened already. Again, I think it goes back to this notion of me wanting to pick a fight in a book form. And I promise you it's not that.

I also think picking fights in book form is okay, for what it's worth. Yeah, because it's great. Because you put it in the reader's lap and then you run away and don't have to deal with it. Except on live shows where there's call-ins, and then you do. No, what I mean by that is, I think one of the saddest things about the moment we're in is I don't think it's unique to a particular administration.

You know, it feels like the current administration has been in power for about five or six years. You know, it's been a couple of, it's been a few weeks, right? It's been a couple of months. So no, I sit with this and I doubt it every single day. Every single day. The only sort of, and again, I'm not,

I'm not arguing about this with you. I think you're absolutely right. I don't think of it in terms of a balance between two sides of a scale. I understand that I live in a country where there's only two parties that have a shot in hell of running things. I love the Working Families Party. Are they going to take the White House next election? Probably not. And so I understand the lure of

of thinking of everything in terms of this binary, right? This weight and this counterweight. My sense is, particularly now, we as writers, as journalists, as anybody who works in the mode of saying something about what it means to be human are obligated to document these outrages, these scandals, these incredible cruelties, because there's going to be a lot of them and there's already been a lot of them in such a short time. But that obligation doesn't suddenly disappear

when a democratic administration takes over. And so that's been my approach. But there's not a part of me that would ever, ever try to convince somebody to vote against their own interests when they're in such a vulnerable position when the systems could be trying to crush them and say, "No, you have to follow me to this place of supposed moral purity." I have no interest in that at all. The only thing I'm telling you is

what happened to me in that moment and what I couldn't bring myself to do in large part because I'd seen too many dead kids. A couple of comments. We'll probably have to get to the response right after the break. One listener writes,

I so appreciate this morning's forum, the wonderful book he has written, which so perfectly sums up exactly how I feel. I'm a bewildered progressive Catholic, and for my entire life, almost all of my closest friends and serious relationships have been with people of Jewish faith. I was in a Jewish sorority in college. My friends are liberal, well-educated people with strong moral values.

But for the past year and a half, I feel like I've been living in alternate reality from them, one where I see blown-up children and all they can think about is terrorists. Only a few of my Jewish friends ever speak up about Gaza online or in person. Recently, I've been in heated discussions over my social media posts. They say I'm anti-Jewish children because I criticize the leadership of Israel and call Netanyahu a war criminal. What I just can't understand is how some of my dearest friends don't agree that murdering children on purpose is unlawful.

always, always wrong. We are mothers. How could we all not feel this way? I have close Palestinian friends, so perhaps that personal experience is important to morality.

Alex writes in to say,

And for Americans, I ask, what would we do under similar circumstances? What did we do after 9-11? I see no options unpleasant as the only effective option may be. Two totally different frames for what is happening. Gaza, I'm going to have you respond to both when we come back from the break. We are talking with Omar El-Akkad, a journalist and novelist, about his new book,

It is about the war and Gaza, as you've heard, his path through his own moral reckoning. The book is called One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. He's also the author of the novels American War and What Strange Paradise.

We're going to get to more of your comments and reactions. If you can't get through on the phones, the email address is forum at kqed.org. You can find us on social media, Blue Sky, Instagram, etc. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned for more right after the break. At Sierra, discover great deals on top brand workout gear like high quality walking shoes, which might lead to another discovery. 40,000 steps, baby.

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Welcome back to Forum here with Omar El-Akkad, author of the book One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.

I was thinking maybe you could respond to Alex, who is trying to get at the sort of how of Israel's response. This is like an entirely different frame from how you approach the book. Yeah, I mean, I think, to be honest, the two statements that you read out before the break are such perfect encapsulations of how a lot of folks are feeling right now.

I couldn't have said it any better on both counts. Obviously, it doesn't mean I agree with both counts, but it's very much indicative of how people are feeling, at least from my experience. I think a lot of this has to do with narrative. When I was growing up in Qatar, I had a couple of Palestinian friends. I would go over to their house every now and then and...

The one kid's grandmother, you know, had the key up on the mantle. And it was the key to the house that is no longer hers, but the key meant something, right? If your starting point of narrative is October 7th, then yeah, absolutely. Everything in that statement makes perfect sense. We are in a situation where we are watching what appears to me anyway as a fairly logical outcome.

of decades of occupation, of decades of people living in an open-air prison. Regardless of wherever the hell I stand on this, and what does it matter what I stand on? I'm a guy who writes for a living and, you know, ten people have read this book, fine, whatever. The reality is that this really only ends one of two ways, right? Either with an end to an occupation,

and to a state where an entire group of human beings have been subjected to all manner of humiliation and eradication in some cases. Or it ends with the outright eradication of an entire group of human beings. And until we reach one of those two points, we are effectively having conversations about narrative framing. Where does history begin such that it justifies any amount of violence on the part of this side or that side?

And I think, you know, not to belittle or to overgeneralize the two statements that you read before we went to break, but to me, those seem like perfect examples of very different narrative framing, right? You know, one that chooses a very particular starting point for history.

And I fully understand that, right? I mean, this was not a benign event. This was an incredibly traumatic event. And this notion that I'm sitting here assigning different weight of grief to human beings murdered, I think strikes me personally as pretty grotesque. And I don't want to assume that anyone's making that on my behalf. But then you have another statement that says, there is no narrative container you can give me

that is going to allow me to look away from the sight of tens of thousands of murdered children. That just doesn't exist. And the overarching sort of facet of that is that you and I get to sit here and have this very nuanced discussion about these narrative containers and this narrative framing and where history begins with the privilege of living on the launching side of the bombs. You know, I'm talking to you from the studio out in Portland, and not to be presumptuous, but

I'm not seriously concerned that it's going to be razed to the ground as I talk to you. We have this immense privilege of distance from this very blood-soaked moment. I have no interest in sort of trying to change the minds of either of your listeners who wrote those statements. I just think that there are certain narrative containers that used to hold for me, and I could use them to look away

or to enforce a kind of position that made my life easier in this part of the world. And many, many dead children later, I'm no longer able to do that.

Thinking about the future, you have a passage in the book where you're talking to another writer at a residency working on the book. And she says to you, you know, I'm not a Zionist, but you know, I'm not anti-Zionist either. It's all just so complicated and...

Yeah, I thought about this a lot in part because of some of the people we've had on the show over time who are sort of arguing for something that kind of goes beyond a two-state solution that has these other components of self-determination and voting rights and all these things that are that actually kind of to my mind actually sort of are neither Zionist nor anti-Zionist.

like it almost feels like at least as in so far as i understand the politics and the realities of the region like that is kind of a future in which all people living in that place could have a real opportunity at a future i mean i was you know before i came to do this this show i was on a zoom call with the heads of a cultural organization um

who have been dealing with a lot of pushback and a lot of antagonism because of the positions they've taken or more to the point haven't taken about what's happened over the last year and a half. And we were having this conversation and these are, you know, I think they're good people and it was a very civil conversation. But I kept thinking about, you know, they'd released a statement recently in which they said,

you know, we didn't respond initially as well as we could have or, you know, something to that extent. And I kept thinking about the statement that's going to come a year from now, five years from now, ten years from now, and why it can't be written right now. When we talk about this idea of, you know, I'm not a Zionist, I'm not an anti-Zionist, a lot of this has to do with what that definition means to different people. Because I would imagine for some people it means

I believe the Jewish people should live in safety in the world. And for some people, I'm sure it means any criticism of the nation-state of Israel is by definition anti-Semitic and should be outlawed by any means necessary. And to be perfectly honest with you, I don't particularly care what definition a person uses individually. I care about the practical reality of a situation in which millions of human beings live

in deep, deep unfreedom, in violation of international law, their treatment almost always at the very least asymmetrical, if not, such as the moment we're in right now, overwhelmingly violent. I care about the practical reality of the moment. But in terms of defining yourself one way or another, and we all do this, not just with the term Zionist, but with every term, again, there is the privilege of altering that as the moment

deems necessary. You know, this idea of it's all just so complicated, a lot of things are complicated. Complexity is a part of the human condition. But if I'm talking to somebody and they say something like that, and I feel like they're saying it not because they want to engage with complexity, but because they want a narrative fire exit that they can escape out of, that leads me to believe that the end goal here

is not to find a solution to anything. It's not to discuss anything. It's not to argue anything. It's to be able to leave this moment, this conversation, this whatever, with your own sense of self intact and the desire to be a particular kind of person intact. More power to you, but that's not particularly useful to me or to anybody else. Let's bring in caller Max. Max in Oakland, welcome.

Yeah, really good show, in-depth discussion. I don't want to go back to October 7th as the starting point. Obviously, it goes back thousands of years. But at least go back to when Hamas took over Gaza, right?

And I think there were a lot of Gazans that were not that happy with that situation. And they've been finally portrayed in the media recently, a couple of articles about them starting to demonstrate and risk their lives

to say, enough, stop Hamas. You're ruining our lives. You've been ruining our lives for 18 years. So I was just wondering what your author would say about that. Sure. Thank you. Thanks for that, Max. Omar? Yeah, thank you for that. I appreciate it. You know, I often say that there's not much I would like more than Hamas.

than to see a world in which Hamas doesn't exist. Because for me, that would mean that a decades-long process of occupation and imprisonment and humiliation has come to an end. I know that it's a particularly easy thing, especially in this part of the world, to... And I'm not saying that your caller did this, and I don't think he did, but I find myself even sort of lured into this desire

to paint entire groups of human beings as having a sort of monolith opinion. I have no idea which Palestinians support Hamas and which oppose it, and nor can I say that about any position held by any group of human beings. I know that groups like Hamas must by necessity come to form in a vacuum of all other options. And more than anything for me,

the existence of a group like Hamas. And listen, I'll tell you right now, I grew up in this part of the world. It's not just Hamas. There's not a single group in the Arab world governing entity that I don't in some way despise. This idea that Hamas would have existed in a situation where anyone in any part of the world with any amount of power gave a damn about Palestinians, to me, seems ludicrous. This is

This is the endpoint of any situation in which a group of human beings are given absolutely no option. And this isn't just true of Palestinians, this is true of many, many groups, including this part of the world, including in this part of the world. The existence of a violent armed entity is something that I can safely sit here again on the launching side of the bombs and condemn.

And I can tell you I'm a pacifist, and I can tell you that I abhor violence in all forms, and I can believe that. And I do believe it. But that's a privilege I have here when I'm not seriously concerned that my neighborhood is going to be bombed to the ground or that my bloodline is going to be wiped out. I would be quite happy to see Hamas disappear off the face of the earth tomorrow, but the conditions

that are going to allow that to happen and not just have another group exactly like Hamas come out afterwards are the ending of an occupation and the ending of the humiliation of a people, not some artificial notion in which this group just lays down their arms and continues to be okay with the conditions that spurred this in the first place.

Couple of comments pushing back on both of us actually. Lois writes, "The host," that would be me, "introduced the speaker by calling the Israeli motive in the war retribution. That is nonsense. Israelis are fighting enemies led by Iran who are committed to nothing less than Israel's annihilation. To view the conflict through any other lens is at best

naive. I suppose I will take that charge. Patrick writes, the guest says he is not interested in arguing, convincing anyone what is happening in Gaza. But the title of the book indicates he does not have to as time will prove him correct.

He fails to account for Hamas essentially holding the population hostage as human shields, the neighboring nations for not taking in refugees. The attack of October 7th was a well-planned declaration of war, and war is what we have. In time, we will all say that we wanted peace, but not agree with his premise. Yeah, I mean, I guess there's not much to say to that other than the book is titled what it's titled. In one way or another, we're going to find out, right? Mm-hmm.

I mean, I get it. I've talked to people who, when they read that title, seem to think that, A, I mean next week, and B, that it's going to be the celebratory event. And neither of those are, at least were part of my intent. But, you know, one way or another, we're gonna, maybe not in my lifetime, maybe long after, we're gonna find out if the title was accurate or not.

Obviously we're coming to the end of the show and there is There is something of a few like the future will happen one way or the other as you said, right? It's not should have been in the title of the future will happen Having you know written this book talked to so many people over the last couple of months about it. Do you have a sense that

something is changing, like not just for yourself, but for people in the world that this, that we're any closer to peace than when you wrote the tweet on October 23rd of 2023? Oh yeah, I have no doubt about that. That's one of the few things I am certain about. I mean, I'm uncertain about most things, but not that. I, you know, we've spent most of the show talking about Israel and Palestine, I suppose for good reason.

But this book to me is overwhelmingly about this part of the world because it's the part that I have the most familiarity with and it's the part that I now find my relationship with to be the most fractured, the most complicated, the most uncertain. And you know I think somewhere in the synopsis my publisher calls the book a breakup letter with the West or you know something like that. And as a result I've gotten a lot of the like

go back where you came from type stuff, which you're going to get anyway. Like that's not, you know, that's the price of admission. I get that. But I also, I mean, I think of it as a deeply hopeful book. Certainly the most hopeful thing I've ever written. Now, granted, that's not, that's an easy bar across. Yeah, well, your other book was about a civil war in the United States, so, you know. I write stone-cold bummers, so it's not, you know, it's not a high bar. But, you know, I often say as dejected as I've become about books,

almost all the West's institutional load-bearing beams, you know, political, academic, cultural, journalistic. I've been so inspired by what people are doing and willing to risk individually and in solidarity with one another. I'm not a particularly brave person. I leech courage wherever I can find it. And I found it in all these folks who are willing to stand up and say, this is not okay. And right now,

You know, it's not like the price of that has ever been low, but right now it might involve you getting snatched off the street and thrown into an unmarked van. Right? These stakes are not low and people are still doing the work. And I have no doubt so long as that kind of situation exists, we are moving towards something better. We might just have to crawl through hell to get there.

We've been talking with Omar El-Akkad, journalist and novelist. His new book is One Day. Everyone will have always been against this. Thanks for joining us, Omar. Thank you so much. Thank you to everyone who wrote and called in to the show as well. Appreciate your perspectives. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned for another hour of Forum Ahead with Mina Kim.

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