An unflinching journalist, a genocide and the quiet West

Omar El Akkad asks us to boycott those who look away from the destruction in Gaza. By Clare Corbould

- By Clare Corbould

Omar El Akkad does not want you to look away. An award-winning journalist and novelist, El Akkad was born in Egypt, lived as a teenager in Qatar and Canada, and migrated as an adult to the US, where he now lives with his family in the Pacific Northwest.

His essay collection, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, draws on his life, from childhood to new fatherhood. He combines these reflections with a sharp grasp of modern history to examine responses in the West to “the world’s first livestreamed genocide” in Gaza.

Finding that response wanting, he urges readers to watch, listen, reflect and act.

As someone whose parents migrated to the West for the freedoms and opportunities it would afford their children, El Akkad has an acute sense of the past events, ideas and structures that have shaped the present. He pays attention to the legacies of colonial rule.

Witnessing history

El Akkad’s descriptions of atrocity are not easy to read. Nor is his blunt demand to do something. Yet the force of his observations and the bite of his prose make it hard to turn away.

His purpose is akin to many famed witnesses in history. Contemporaneous statements about violence often serve later as testimony in determining what happened, who was responsible, and what recompense is due.

Think of George Orwell on propaganda in Spain. Or British journalists Gareth Jones and Malcolm Muggeridge exposing famine in 1930s USSR, while other western communists looked away. Or Victor Klemperer’s diaries, published after the war, which tracked how the Nazis twisted everyday speech.

Above all, this kind of testimony guards against future claims of innocence, against the reassuring assertion that “they didn’t know what was going on” or “they were of their time”.