One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, Omar El Akkad, 2025
It is pointless, even, to make the obvious analogies, to imagine the response had almost any other country on earth killed hundreds or thousands of civilians on a hostage rescue mission, or flattened every hospital in a city on the hunt for a terror group, and then bragged about its success. Pointless because such things assume a conversation anchored in facts or reason or even the thinnest presupposition that the people being killed, like those killed on October 7 (2023), are human beings, their loss an utter indictment of the systems and leaders and world that allowed it. Instead, as the scope and scale of annihilation intensifies, an opposite presupposition becomes necessary, one that imposes on the dead the appropriate mendacity to justify their killing. A few weeks in, the notion that Palestinians deserve to die because some of them voted for Hamas becomes insufficient to hold up the body count. Soon Palestinians become indistinguishable from Nazis, and then worse than Nazis. As their eradication continues, they must be transformed into the worst human beings on earth, the weight of their deaths only then sufficiently lightened.
Everyone involved–the dead, their killers, the arbiters of the exchange rate–knows this for what it is. In 2014, when an Israeli newspaper runs an opinion piece in which the writer describes Palestinian children as “the explosives of the future,” there’s no ambiguity as to what is happening, what is desired to happen. Seven months before the Hamas attacks of October 2023, when the same newspaper publishes and then quickly deletes a post titled “When Genocide Is Permissible,” the bedrock of polite intellectual discourse that liberalism so desperately and invariably see as a hallmark of its own enlightenment is shown to be a phantom thing–a premise that, when most needed, cedes the floor to the concrete vocabulary of violence. And then following the attacks, when Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant says Israel is fighting “human animals,” it is not a statement of belief so much as permission. When those dying are deemed human enough to warrant discussion, discussion must be had. When they’re deemed nonhuman, discussion becomes offensive, an affront to civility.
…Tomorrow, more Palestinians will die, but in the places where the bombs are built and launched it will have no bearing on mortgages, bills, employment. Indeed, in many of these places, what will have a real economic effect is if the bombing stops. In social and professional circles there will be limited tolerance for any talk about the fortunes of some exotic, dangerous-sounding people. In the context of self interest–and maybe there never was any other context–it is utter madness to risk one’s own prospects standing up for people who can offer nothing in return. Tomorrow more Palestinians will die, but the unsaid thing is that it is all right because that’s what those people do, they die. Just for a moment, cease to believe that this particular group of people are human.
Two Parties in America
And yet there is a deranged honesty about the cult to which the likes of Pence–and former South Carolinian governor Nikki Haley, who signed her own message, “Finish Them!,” to similar bombs belong. American liberalism demands a rhetorical politeness from which the fascistic iteration of the modern Republican Party is fully free. There is something stomach-churning about watching a parade of Biden administration press secretaries offer insincere expressions of concern for Palestinians as the same administration bankrolls their butcher. It is a reminder that the Democratic Party’s relationship with progressivism so often ends at the lawn sign: Proclaim support for this minority group or that. Hang a rainbow flag one month a year from some White House window. Most important, remind everyone at every turn of how much worse the alternative would be.
Against such hollow gesturing, even the most unhinged Republican will always be able to say: Look, these people have no interest in your suffering, only in empty gestures. I’ll do away with gestures, and make the right people suffer. It is an astonishingly effective technique, but would not be if the leadership of the Democratic Party had come to realize that sloganeering without concrete action means nothing.
Don’t let the Biden administration’s endorsement of mass murder distract from the reality that a Trump administration would be so much worse.
…It can’t be the case that the Supreme Court is an unaccountable neoconservative body intent on rendering the whole country unrecognizable and that there’s simply no way to do anything significant about it. It can’t be that climate change is the single most important issue facing the world, with our entire species at risk, and drilling licenses need to continue. It can’t be that innocent Palestinians have faced unbearable suffering and we care very deeply about their plight, and absolutely nothing will stop the arming of the nation responsible. It can’t be both rhetorical urgency and policymaking impotence.
…Suddenly an otherwise very persuasive argument takes on a different meaning: “Vote for the liberal though he harms you because the conservative will harm you more” starts to sound a lot like “Vote for the liberal though he harms you because the conservative might harm me too.”..Want my vote? Be less monstrous than the monsters.
To preserve the values of the civilized world, it is necessary to set fire to a library. To blow up a mosque, To incinerate olive trees. To dress up in the lingerie of women who fled and then take picture. To level universities. To loot jewelry, art, banks, food. To arrest children for picking vegetables . To shoot children for throwing stones. To parade the captured in their underwear. To break a man’s teeth and shove a toilet brush in his mouth. To let combat dogs loose on a man with Down’s syndrome and then leave him to die. Otherwise, the uncivilized world might win.
written at Guantanamo Bay in 2008.
No, there is no terrible thing coming for you in some distant future, but know that a terrible thing is happening to you now. You are being asked to kill off a part of you that would otherwise scream in opposition to injustice. You are being asked to dismantle the machinery of a functioning conscience. Who cares if diplomatic expediency prefers you shrug away the sight of dismembered children? Who cares if great distance from the bloodstained middle allows obliviousness. Forget pity, forget even the dead if you must, but at least fight against the theft of your soul.
A few months into the genocide, protestors are regularly interrupting Democratic Party events, Dozens of major universities across the country come to a standstill as students build encampments to protest the killing. It harkens most clearly to the anti-apartheid movement of the eighties and the antiwar and civil rights protests of the sixties–all of them, too, led overwhelmingly by young people and derided as naive and inconsequential until they weren’t, until they became central facets of the story the United States tells itself about how, inevitably, justice prevails.
It’s difficult to live in this country in this moment and not come to the conclusion that the principal concern of the modern American liberal is, at all times, not what one does or believes or supports or opposes, but what one is seen to be.
Whatever derangement currently occupies conservative American politics is, at least, something of very real consequence: the minority groups they want to legislate out of every facet of society, the books they want to ban, the mechanisms of democracy they want to subvert–none of it is hypothetical…every Republican will always be able to say, truthfully: At least there’s no contradiction between what I am, what I claim concerns me, and what I plan to do.
A growing number of people ask a different question; the world asks a different question, The world, full of people who factor not one iota in the calculus of those morning meetings (Democratic Party talking points of the day), looks upon this and asks, simply: Beyond self interest, what do you believe in? And every morning the answer, dressed up in anesthetic euphemism and dependent on our collective capacity for resignation to lessor of two evils, is: Nothing.
How empty does your message have to be for a deranged right wing to even have a chance of winning? Of all the epitaphs that may one day be written on the gravestone of Western liberalism, the most damning is this: Faced off against a nihilistic, endlessly cruel manifestation of conservationism, and somehow managed to make it close.
Imperialism
Maybe the real fear is that, when one begins to consider the root systems of small-scale, sometimes state supported, but often stateless evil, there’s an obligation to apply the same rigor to the large scale machinery of imperial evil. And in doing so, one might find that what drives and absolves the state of so much evil isn’t the fear that not doing so will allow some terrorist to destroy the fabric of free society. But rather that the evil itself is necessary to the system it protects. That in the end there is no international rules-based order, no universal human rights, no equal justice for all, simply fleeting arrangements of convenience in which any amount of human collateral is deemed acceptable so long as it works in the empire’s interest.
Leavetaking – Death in Palestine
In a hospital, In a refugee camp. In their beds. While make dinner for their children. While holding their siblings. While cycling. While playing on a beach. In a Market. In an incubator. Struggling to breathe, under the rubble. While trying to drag a loved one from the middle of the road. While burying the dead. While scavenging for food. While selling vegetable. While swimming in the sea, trying to catch fish. While playing soccer. While waving a white flag. With their hands raised in surrender. With their hands tied. While running away. At a checkpoint. In a torture camp. In a safe zone. In a school. While delivering aid. While waiting on aid. While performing surgery. While sitting down in a chair. By drone, from the safety of a great distance. Live on air. Away from sight.
