NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2025 PALESTINE BOOK AWARDS • From award-winning
novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad comes a powerful reckoning with what it means to live in
a West that betrays its fundamental values "[A] bracing memoir and manifesto."— The New York
Times “I can’t think of a more important piece of writing to read right now. I found hope
here and help to face what the world is now all that it isn’t anymore. Please read this. I
promise you won’t regret it.”—Tommy Orange bestselling author of Wandering Stars and There
There On October 25 2023 after just three weeks of the bombardment of Gaza Omar El Akkad
put out a 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.” This tweet has been viewed more than 10 million times. As an immigrant who came
to the West El Akkad believed that it promised freedom. A place of justice for all. But in the
past twenty years reporting on the War on Terror Ferguson climate change Black Lives Matter
protests and more and watching the unmitigated slaughter in Gaza El Akkad has come to the
conclusion that much of what the West promises is a lie. That there will always be entire
groups of human beings it has never intended to treat as fully human—not just Arabs or Muslims
or immigrants but whoever falls outside the boundaries of privilege. One Day Everyone Will
Have Always Been Against This is a chronicle of that painful realization a moral grappling
with what it means as a citizen of the U.S. as a father to carve out some sense of
possibility in a time of carnage. This is El Akkad’s nonfiction debut his most raw and
vulnerable work to date a heartsick breakup letter with the West. It is a brilliant
articulation of the same breakup we are watching all over the United States in family rooms
on college campuses on city streets the consequences of this rupture are just beginning. This
book is for all the people who want something better than what the West has served up. This is
the book for our time.
