One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

To say that this book began as a tweet—a single sentence posted in late October 2023, a little longer than what became its title but the same in spirit—is not to belittle it, but to capture the power of its focused eloquence. El Akkad, author of the provocative near-future novel, American War, expanded on that sentence in this nonfiction memoir/polemic not with the usual back-and-forth of Middle East historical blame but by tracing his own path: from a childhood in Egypt, Qatar, and Canada to an adult decision to become a citizen of the United States. It was a path driven in part by opportunity and the appeal of a more open society, but now, after two decades of reporting on empire and the unrelenting evidence of the destruction of Gaza, his understanding of the hypocrisy of the West and its indifference to the suffering of others becomes almost a koan of anger and anguish, tempered only slightly by the hope that there will be a future that might, at some point, see it for what it was.