Some books begin with an idea so contained it fits in a single sentence, and then spend two hundred pages proving the sentence was only the opening move. Omar El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This grew out of a tweet he posted in October 2023, three weeks into the bombardment of Gaza, that has since been viewed more than ten million times: a prediction that history would eventually let everyone claim they’d opposed the violence all along, even those who said nothing while it happened. The book is his attempt to sit with that prediction rather than just post it, and to figure out what it costs a person to watch atrocity unfold through institutions that pride themselves on moral clarity.
Structurally, it’s a hybrid: part memoir, part polemic, part open letter to the Western liberal establishment El Akkad himself was, by his own account, raised to believe in. He traces his own path from Egypt to Qatar to Canada to the United States, a journey he was taught to understand as a story of arrival into enlightened institutions — a free press, an independent judiciary, an international order built on human rights. The book’s animating tension is watching those same institutions, in his telling, fail a very specific, very visible test in real time, and the personal material gives the political argument somewhere to land emotionally rather than just rhetorically.
What distinguishes the book from a straightforward opinion column is its formal control. El Akkad writes in short, often aphoristic sections that accumulate rather than argue in a linear line, building a mood of moral vertigo instead of a debate-team case. The prose is frequently quotable, sometimes to a fault — there’s a sentence-level polish here that occasionally calls attention to its own craft — but the intimacy of the personal chapters, particularly the ones about his young daughter and about what he owes her honesty about, keeps the book from reading as pure broadside.
Critical reception has been largely admiring, and the book won the 2025 National Book Award for Nonfiction. Many reviewers have praised its moral urgency and the discipline of its prose, with several calling it one of the more forceful indictments of Western institutional hypocrisy published in years. It has not been without pushback: some critics, particularly those more sympathetic to Israel’s position in the war, have argued that El Akkad’s account leans on selective framing and that it treats an extraordinarily contested geopolitical situation as more morally legible than it is, flattening debate that serious, good-faith observers are still having. Even sympathetic reviewers have noted that the book is more interested in indictment than in the harder work of proposing what comes next.
Whether readers find it a bracing act of witness or an oversimplified one will likely depend on where they already stood before opening it. What’s harder to dispute is the book’s craft: El Akkad has written something built to be argued with, which is a different and in some ways more durable achievement than writing something built to be agreed with.
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