One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

Fear functions as a political currency in Omar El Akkad’s analysis, and he says that it has differential value depending on who experiences it and who wields it. This “currency” operates along power gradients, in which the fears of the powerful (particularly Western nations and their citizens) purchase military action, surveillance, detention, and various forms of state violence against designated perpetrators. El Akkad notes that fear creates its own logic that justifies any response, allowing those in positions of privilege to rationalize virtually any action in the name of their safety. He claims that the “exchange rate” of fear is fundamentally unequal—the fears of marginalized communities, particularly Arabs and Muslims in Western contexts, purchase nothing and are often reframed as hatred or ungratefulness. According to El Akkad, this asymmetry in the value of fear allows imperial powers to present their violence as defensive and necessary while dismissing the legitimate fears of those who are subject to that violence.

Genocide in One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This refers to the systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group, specifically addressing the 2023 Israeli military campaign against Palestinians in Gaza. El Akkad examines how genocide becomes possible through a process of dehumanization, in which victims are portrayed as less than human or morally deserving of extermination. He claims that Western liberal democracies facilitate genocide through financial and military support while using rhetorical strategies to distance themselves from moral responsibility. El Akkad particularly focuses on the moral threshold genocide represents, suggesting it marks the point “beyond which relative harm can no longer offset absolute evil,” challenging the “lesser-evil” political calculus often used in Western democratic discourse (59). Throughout the text, genocide serves as both literal reality and metaphorical touchstone for evaluating moral systems that prioritize certain human lives over others.

Growth by negation refers to an economic model El Akkad identifies in One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This in which prosperity is achieved by taking away rather than creating value. This approach to profit-making involves reducing worker benefits, lowering standards, or diminishing services while maintaining or increasing prices. El Akkad illustrates this concept through examples such as airline executives who boost profits by eliminating employee pensions and health benefits, or ride-sharing companies that rebrand stable employment as “side hustles” with fewer protections. Growth by negation represents a fundamental shift in late-stage capitalism where innovation increasingly means finding new ways to extract value from vulnerable populations rather than generating genuine improvements or efficiencies.

Late capitalism describes the contemporary phase of economic development characterized by extreme wealth concentration, corporate dominance, and the commodification of previously non-commercial aspects of life. In El Akkad’s analysis, late capitalism manifests as a system that normalizes both increasing loneliness and widespread theft of labor, ideas, and dignity. It represents a stage where growth increasingly comes through exploitative practices rather than genuine innovation or value creation. El Akkad portrays late capitalism as a structure that demands perpetual consumption and compliance while delivering diminishing returns to most participants, prioritizing convenience for some at the expense of basic dignity for many others. The term encapsulates the author’s critique of an economic system that has moved beyond productive creation into extractive and often predatory practices.

In the Introduction, El Akkad uses the term “the middle” to refer to the liberal-centrist political position that claims moral superiority while ultimately enabling violence and oppression. (Elsewhere, he refers to this position as centrist, centrist liberal, the modern centrist, or Western liberalism.) El Akkad characterizes this group as “well-meaning” and “easily upset,” emphasizing their self-perception as reasonable moderates despite their complicity in systemic violence (5). Unlike extremists who openly embrace brutality, the middle requires sanitized language and moral distancing to justify atrocities as unfortunate but necessary evils in service of preventing “barbarism” (5). The concept represents El Akkad’s critique of Western liberalism’s fundamental moral compromise, in which centrists position themselves between perceived extremes while still accepting the suffering of others as the cost of maintaining their way of life. For El Akkad, the middle’s most insidious feature is its transactional approach to morality, wherein values like human rights and dignity become negotiable when they conflict with self-interest or established power structures.

Negative resistance represents a form of protest that involves withdrawal from, rather than confrontation with, systems that enable injustice. El Akkad defines negative resistance as the act of refusing to participate or engage with institutions, products, or relationships that fall below one’s moral threshold. This concept encompasses actions ranging from boycotting companies complicit in atrocities to declining professional opportunities with problematic organizations, or even cutting ties with individuals who remain silent in the face of injustice. El Akkad argues that negative resistance is particularly threatening to power structures because they depend fundamentally on participation, making the simple act of walking away potentially more disruptive than active protest. The concept illustrates how non-participation can function as a powerful political tool when systems of power have become adept at neutralizing more confrontational forms of resistance.

Settler-colonialism refers to a form of colonization in which foreigners move to a region and establish permanent settlements on land already inhabited by Indigenous peoples, while simultaneously working to erase or replace the original population and their culture. In One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, El Akkad uses this term to critique Israeli policies toward Palestinians, drawing parallels to historical examples such as European settlement in North America. The author particularly highlights how settler-colonial narratives often justify displacement through claims of bringing “civilization” to territories they occupy. El Akkad demonstrates how contemporary literary and political discourse can normalize these dynamics by avoiding direct confrontation with the violence inherent in settler-colonial projects. His reference to a “settler-colonial homage to The Blind Side” pointedly criticizes how mainstream culture can repackage colonial narratives as heartwarming stories of rescue and salvation (100), obscuring the underlying power dynamics and erasure of Indigenous perspectives.

Terrorism, in El Akkad’s examination, functions less as a descriptive term and more as a malleable designation that serves state interests through its deliberate “diaphanousness” or lack of clear definition (139). El Akkad argues that this designation is selectively applied along racial lines, almost exclusively to Brown people, while similar acts of mass violence committed by white perpetrators are typically classified as crimes or hate crimes. The book demonstrates how the label of “terrorism” creates sufficient distance between state and perpetrator to justify extraordinary measures, including new laws, detention policies, and surveillance apparatuses. El Akkad’s analysis of his reporting on the “Toronto 18” case highlights how the term transforms ordinary crime reporting into sensational coverage, with the label itself serving to silence questioning about state violence while simultaneously demanding constant condemnation from those racially or religiously associated with labeled terrorists. He says this selective application reveals the term’s primary function as maintaining imperial power structures rather than protecting public safety.