58 pages • 1-hour read
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
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Chapters 5-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of racism, emotional abuse, graphic violence, and death.
Chapter 5 Summary: “Resistance”
El Akkad examines the concept of resistance through his firsthand experiences as a journalist reporting from Guantánamo Bay in 2008. He focuses on the pretrial hearings of Omar Khadr, a Canadian teenager who was captured in Afghanistan at age 15 and subsequently detained at Guantánamo for a decade. Through his reporting experience, El Akkad reveals how the military courts at Guantánamo operated outside normal legal frameworks, with evidence and witness names withheld, hearsay permitted, and other legal norms abandoned. He discusses a group of Uyghur detainees who, despite being acknowledged as posing no threat, remained imprisoned for years because no country would accept them. El Akkad notes that many detainees, now elderly and frail, continue to be portrayed as extremely dangerous despite never having been charged with crimes.
He then shifts to examining cultural narratives about resistance and empire through the lens of American cinema, specifically discussing the film Red Dawn. He analyzes how the 1980s original portrayed Soviet invaders as villains, while the 2012 remake initially featured Chinese antagonists before switching to North Korean invaders for market reasons. He says this cinematic example illustrates a fundamental contradiction in American cultural identity: celebrating rebellion against authority while simultaneously enforcing global dominance. El Akkad identifies this contradiction in American cultural identity as a privilege of empire, allowing citizens to maintain the comforting fiction of being underdogs while wielding unparalleled global power and inflicting violence elsewhere.
The chapter then moves to December 2023, when South Africa brought genocide charges against Israel before the International Court of Justice. El Akkad describes the mixed emotions this action evoked among those calling for an end to the violence in Gaza: relief that an official entity was taking action, recognition that South Africa’s history of apartheid made it uniquely positioned to recognize similar patterns, and frustration with Arab leadership’s performative solidarity but lack of substantive action. El Akkad critiques Western institutions’ inability to self-diagnose moral failures, revealing the disjointed responses of Western governments that verbally support international law while undermining it through their material support for the violence. He dismisses appeals to self-interest (the idea that such violence could eventually affect Westerners) as ineffective because those benefiting from the current system would dismantle it if they truly believed they faced similar threats.
El Akkad then discusses his 2017 novel American War, which he intended as a transposition of distant conflicts onto American soil rather than a prediction about America’s future. Despite this intention, the novel was interpreted as an exclusively American narrative, particularly in the context of rising political tensions. El Akkad recounts how in January 2024, a film adaptation was abandoned because production companies deemed it inappropriate to depict “freedom fighters or terrorists” (89). He connects this to other examples of cultural suppression following the October 2023 Hamas attack and subsequent Israeli military campaign, including canceled appearances and exhibitions by artists of Middle Eastern descent. El Akkad reflects on how these relatively minor professional consequences pale in comparison to the wholesale destruction occurring in Gaza, yet they function as reminders of an individual’s place in a social hierarchy.
The chapter concludes with El Akkad observing how opinions about the conflict shift based on political convenience. He criticizes both the calculated concern expressed by liberal politicians and the more straightforward but morally repugnant position that accepts mass civilian casualties as a necessary cost of maintaining Western privilege. He draws a connection between Western reluctance to intervene in genocides versus their willingness to bomb impoverished nations to keep shipping lanes open, revealing how consumption patterns drive foreign policy priorities. El Akkad concludes by questioning how many Americans, if presented with the facts without labels, would instinctively side with Palestinians, South Africans fighting apartheid, or Haitians seeking self-determination—and how many would retreat into the comfort of empire when confronted with reality. This final reflection challenges readers to recognize the gap between the stories Americans tell themselves about supporting the oppressed and their actual position within global power structures.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Craft”
Chapter 6 examines the relationship between literary craft and moral responsibility during times of crisis, particularly focusing on the response of the literary community to the violence in Gaza.
The chapter begins with El Akkad recounting his grief following his father’s death in 2010. Following Islamic tradition, he helped prepare his father’s body for burial in Egypt, where his father had always wanted to be laid to rest. This experience highlighted El Akkad’s disconnection from his extended family in Egypt, whom he describes as seeming like foreigners due to his family’s emigration to Canada.
Two years later, El Akkad returned to Egypt as a journalist, initially intending to cover Israeli military operations in Gaza. Though a ceasefire was brokered shortly after his arrival, Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi issued controversial decrees that sparked widespread protests, creating a major international news story that El Akkad covered. During this assignment, conversations with an old friend and family members revealed growing disillusionment with the aftermath of the Arab Spring. Many expressed nostalgia for strong, authoritarian leadership rather than democratic chaos—sentiments that El Akkad later heard echoed by Trump supporters in America. El Akkad connects these experiences to Western political hypocrisy regarding the Middle East. He notes that his novel American War included a scene featuring a speech by a pan-Arab empire president that was almost transcribed verbatim from Barack Obama’s 2009 “A New Beginning” speech in Cairo. When an editor suggested making the fictional speech less transparently insincere, El Akkad recognized the deeper critique: Western nations often deliver eloquent statements supporting human rights while simultaneously enabling their violation when it serves their interests.
The chapter shifts to November 2023, when protesters interrupted the Giller Prize ceremony in Toronto to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. El Akkad had declined to attend this prestigious Canadian literary award event despite being a former winner, feeling unable to celebrate amid the ongoing violence. The protest revealed that the prize’s corporate sponsor held a significant investment in an Israeli weapons manufacturer. El Akkad signed an open letter supporting the protesters and calling for charges against them to be dropped. The protest and subsequent open letter generated controversy in the relatively small Canadian literary community. El Akkad expresses frustration with writers who remained silent during the demonstration, particularly those who had previously been vocal about free speech and “cancel culture” but suddenly had nothing to say about violence against Palestinians. He questions what constitutes meaningful literary work when some established writers avoid addressing genocide while less established writers risk their careers by speaking out.
El Akkad discusses institutional cowardice in the literary world, citing the Frankfurt Book Fair’s cancellation of Palestinian writer Adania Shibli’s award ceremony for her novel Minor Detail. He notes similar patterns of institutions avoiding any mention of Palestine, including the Pulitzer Prize’s careful wording regarding coverage of the war in Gaza and The New York Times’s guidance against using the word “Palestine.” The financial precarity of writing as a profession complicates these issues, as authors often depend on grants, fellowships, and awards funded by corporations or wealthy donors. El Akkad acknowledges the dilemma this creates but argues that arts organizations that prioritize financial support over moral considerations essentially function as reputation-laundering operations. He contrasts this with instances of solidarity, such as the National Book Foundation standing firm against donor pressure, and nominees declining Pan-America literary awards in protest.
The chapter concludes with El Akkad questioning the purpose of literary craft during humanitarian crises. He references Hemingway’s iceberg principle—the idea that most of a story should exist beneath the surface—and considers its feasibility when writing from outside the dominant cultural canon. El Akkad suggests that appreciating beauty in literature should not preclude acknowledging atrocity, and he says that those who quote social justice writers like Morrison and Baldwin should not retreat into apolitical writing when confronted with contemporary injustice. Drawing on literary critic Northrop Frye, El Akkad proposes that art meets readers at “the site of our insanity” and requires the capacity to sit with mysteries that cannot be rationally understood (107), even when those mysteries involve human cruelty.
Chapters 5-6 Analysis
In these chapters, the book shifts between El Akkad’s experiences reporting from Guantánamo Bay in chapter 5 to his more personal reflections on grief, literary culture, and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in chapter 6. This structural approach allows El Akkad to position himself both as witness and participant, creating a framework where the personal and political are intertwined. El Akkad utilizes his own life experiences as a lens to examine larger geopolitical issues. He employs a nonlinear narrative structure that moves through time and space—from Guantánamo Bay to Egypt to Canada—mirroring the fractured nature of memory and the disjointed experience of those caught between cultures and conflicts.
El Akkad explores the theme of The Moral Vacancy of Western Liberalism through his observations of institutional hypocrisy. According to him, Western powers proclaim principles of democracy, freedom, and human rights while simultaneously supporting or engaging in actions that directly contradict these values. He discusses this contradiction through his reporting on Guantánamo Bay, where he witnessed a legal system operating outside the reach of law. El Akkad notes the persistent justification for this extrajudicial treatment: “Over and over, the justification for all this, the secrecy and the censorship and the treatment of prisoners outside the realm of what the country’s foundational legal principles would ever allow, is justified by the threat these prisoners are said to represent” (80). He then argues that this justification is a lie by noting that most prisoners were never charged with any crimes, saying that liberal principles were discarded when politically expedient.
Throughout these chapters, El Akkad examines the theme of Sanitized Language as a Shield for Empire by analyzing how euphemistic language serves to distance individuals from the reality of violence. He recounts a British newscaster describing the killing of a child as a situation where, “[a]ccidentally, a stray bullet found its way into the van ahead, and that killed a 3 or 4-year-old young lady” (93). This passive construction removes human agency from the act of killing, transforming a child’s murder into a tragic accident involving an autonomous bullet. El Akkad contrasts this sanitized language with the brutal reality it conceals, showing how media discourse serves to normalize violence against certain populations. The language of “accidental” deaths and “tragic” circumstances becomes a rhetorical shield protecting empires from accountability for violence they perpetrate or support.
El Akkad incorporates personal memoir as a literary device to ground abstract political concepts in lived experience. His account of his father’s death and his burial in Egypt establishes El Akkad’s complex relationship with identity, belonging, and displacement. This personal narrative creates an ethical foundation for his political critiques, positioning them not as abstract academic exercises but as moral imperatives arising from direct experience with loss, displacement, and experiences with injustice.
In chapter 6, El Akkad interrogates the moral responsibility of literature and literary institutions during times of crisis. He challenges the notion that literature can or should remain apolitical, suggesting that silence in the face of genocide represents a moral failure. He questions writers who remain silent about atrocities while claiming to value free expression, contrasting established writers who avoid political controversy with emerging writers who risk their careers by speaking against injustice. This examination exposes the tension between aesthetic concerns and ethical responsibilities, questioning whether art can justifiably retreat into beauty while ignoring atrocity.
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