‘What you’re being asked to do is look away. Just look away’: Omar El-Akkad on watching the horror in Gaza from the west

Omar El Akkad was born in Egypt, grew up in Qatar, moved to Canada as a teenager and now lives in Portland in the US. He worked as a staff reporter at the Canadian Globe and Mail for 10 years, covering major stories including the war in Afghanistan, military tribunals in Guantánamo Bay, the Arab spring and the Black Lives Matter protests, and winning several journalism awards for his work. His debut novel, American War, was named by the BBC as one of 100 novels that shaped our world. He's won several literary awards, and his non-fiction debut, 2025’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, is a deeply personal reckoning with Gaza and western liberalism. It became an international bestseller, won the National Book Award for non-fiction, and has just been published in paperback.

In a Nerve live event in Bristol earlier this week, Omar was interviewed by the award-winning foreign affairs journalist, documentary-maker and author Ramita Navai, who won a Bafta for her documentary Gaza: Doctors Under Attack.

Omar: It didn't seem like a particularly profound thing when I was writing it. I tend to work in terms of pattern recognition and so I was thinking about certain patterns throughout history: for example, it's very hard to find a well-meaning South African liberal who will tell you that they used to be in favour of apartheid. It's very hard to find a well-meaning American liberal who will tell you that they used to be in favour of segregation. And so I cast forward and found myself thinking of the good liberal who is going to look back at this and shake their head at how unpleasant and awful it all was. And I wrote something to that effect, and for some reason it caught on in the way these things sometimes do.

But originally, the writing of the book was completely unconnected [to the idea in the tweet]. I often talk about writing as my first avenue of retreat when the world doesn't make sense to me. And so that's what I was doing from mid to late October onwards: I was keeping this running diary of these things I was seeing, partially because I thought a lot of the stuff would be memory-holed – it would be as though it never happened – and I wanted to remind myself so I wouldn't feel like I was losing my mind later. Then I went to dinner with my editor at [publisher] Knopf, John Freeman. I was raving and ranting about not knowing what the hell it meant to be in this part of the world and to be someone named Omar who sounds like this.

I think probably he just got so sick of listening to me talk about this that eventually he said “you should be writing about this”, and that's when it became a formal project.

I think this speaks to something else. I think it's because people feel like they're losing their minds. You wake up every day and you see evidence of the worst thing imaginable and you're told by the people who are supposed to represent you in positions of power, who could do something about this, that in fact this is good and necessary, and that if you oppose it in some way, you're the bad guy. That is crazy-making. So I think whatever value this book has had, if it has had any value at all, has been in the creation of spaces.

People come up to me and say: “I can't talk about it at work because I'll get fired. I can't talk about it with my friends because they might stop being my friend.” And so I think the creation of that space has had a lot to do with why it's got the traction that it has.

I think when you're a kid, whatever the hell is happening is what's normal. When I was five, my dad had to get the hell out of Egypt, and we followed. From the age of five, I've been a guest on someone else's land and so there are certain relationships with belonging that are no longer accessible to me and never will be. I've learned to live with that. There's never going to be a situation where I can point to any one piece of ground, any culture, any root system, narrative root system, and say “this is mine, I feel ownership of this”. 

That includes the country of my blood. When I go back to Egypt, I have this bizarre experience at security where I hand them my American passport or whatever the case may be, and they look at it and they see “Omar” and they're like: “Come on, buddy.” And then I'll start speaking Arabic and they'll know instantly that my Egyptian accent is flawless and that I have the vocabulary of a five-year-old, because that's when I left and started going to British and American schools. I don't lament these things. This is just the nature of what my life is, and there's nothing I can do about that.

I think actually it would have been different if I had grown up in the west. I didn't grow up in the west. Now I live in the west, and I wake up every day and realise I don't understand the United States at all. Every day, I understand it a little bit less, but I have conditioned myself to become acceptable to it, and I've been rewarded endlessly for that. 

The entirety of my journalism career, all 10 years, were basically in this post-War on Terror era, and there are things that you see that you want to believe desperately are unique to that situation, but what they are is, in fact, very intense derangements of something that has been happening for a long time. For example, the term “collateral damage”, I think, dates back at least to the Vietnam war.

There were lots of moments where, again, if I was a braver or less naive or less oblivious person, I would have seen that as my breaking point. 

We were in Guantánamo covering the prison camps. For decades Guantanamo Bay was just this sleepy naval base, Marine base, whatever it was. Nobody cared. And then all of a sudden they got this note saying: “Hey, you're about to get the War on Terror prisoners. Figure it out.” And so they have to build this thing as quickly as they can. It's called Camp X-Ray. They tore it down shortly afterwards and built more permanent facilities. They built Camps One, Two and Three. A bunch of people killed themselves in One, Two and Three. So they shut down One, Two and Three. They built Four, Five and Six.

Four is medium security. That means that you get these things called “comfort items”. Four is for the highly compliant. So if you played ball, you got put in Camp Four. You get eyeshades, because the lights never go off in this place. You get pens, but they're rubber pens so you can't stab someone with them. But the chief perk is communal living.

Five and Six are supermax: 23.5 hours a day in a solitary cell with a metal toilet, a cot and a little coat hanger that, if you put too much pressure on it, will flip down so you can't hang yourself.

There's also Camp Seven, which we found out about by accident. It was in a court filing that was not classified. They forgot to classify it. Camp Seven is where they keep the so-called high-value detainees. Nobody knows what the hell goes on in Camp Seven. We've never seen it.

So we're touring Four, Five and Six, and at one point I turn to the officer and I say: “So when do the prisoners …” And he stops me immediately. He says: “We don't have prisoners here, sir. We have detainees.” And it was very, very important to that person and to the entire enterprise that there be no prisoners, because a prisoner implies a prison sentence, which somebody has to define at some point. A detainee you can just hold forever.

When these folks who were the detainees went on hunger strike to protest the conditions of their detention, they were described by the US military as having engaged in “asymmetric warfare” because the soldiers can't go on hunger strike back. So it's an asymmetric form of warfare. 

I did two very short stints in Afghanistan, and those showed me the physical layer of warfare. This is what the bombs do. This is what the bullets do. And that is obviously grotesque in its own right, but it can't exist in a vacuum. You need other layers of violence to hold it up, to make it acceptable. You need linguistic violence, an example of which I just described: euphemistic violence. You need the violence of bureaucracy.

All of this stuff existed before the 9/11 era. It was heightened during the War on Terror years, and it was brought, at least in my mind, to an even greater state of derangement during the genocide, where you're watching people essentially turn to pretzels trying to figure out a way to not say the thing. For example: “The bullet found its way into the van and collided with a four-year-old young lady.” I defy anyone in this room to tell me what a four-year-old young lady is.

It's not the absence of meaning. It's the deliberate unmaking of meaning. And I think anyone who works in journalism or works with words generally has some obligation to oppose that. Or else what the hell are we doing here? 

I think everyone in their lives has certain moments where they say: “I was this kind of person, and then this happened. Then I became this kind of person.” And one of the reasons that I find it difficult to talk about some of those moments with respect to my life is (a) who the hell cares? I'm sitting on the launching side of the missiles talking about how sad it makes me to see this happen. [My taxes are] paying to kill those kids, I'm doing that.

But then also you start to realise that the most insidious thing is that you're not even being asked to support this; you genuinely aren't. I think there's a very limited group of human beings who actively support what is happening, and they're quite proud to make that known. What you are being asked to do is just look away. Just look away, it'll be fine. We can't all be sane in this situation.

I can't ask anyone in this room to go and listen to the audio recording of Hind [Rajab] begging for her life shortly before Israeli soldiers shoot up the car she's in with at least 355 bullets, killing her, killing her family members and then killing the medics who came to try and rescue her. I wish everybody would listen to it. I can't in good conscience tell you to do that to yourself; I want you desperately to do it.

The crazy-making thing is to see the worst thing imaginable and then walk out into the world that is still overwhelmingly concerned with returning the email on time and continuing to do whatever needs to be done to progress one's own career aspirations, or whatever the case may be. 

The vast majority of people who I ran into who became the subject of most of my rage – and I know this is irrational – are not the people who are cheerleading for this. It's the people who would say: “Well, it's very complicated. They've been fighting for thousands of years.” It's like, your tax money is paying to kill these kids, at least have the guts to take a stand on it. 

Certainly in the US, you were presented every day with evidence of what real, true obliviousness looks like and how incredibly beneficial it is to the people engaged in it – both at a professional level, at a social level, but at a personal, psychic level. It feels like floating through the world.

But I say all of this stuff at the same time I'm watching kids – I call them kids because they're half my age; these are young adults – at universities risking their futures to stand up against this. In US universities they routinely brutalise these kids. The central thing a university is supposed to do, ahead of educating you, is keep you safe. And they immediately abdicated that responsibility because a couple of these kids decided to put up encampments to argue that killing kids was wrong. So there's been immense bravery.

In the writing world, which is the one I operate in and obviously is relatively “who cares?”, the writers who first stood up and said anything about this at all, and the ones whose careers were largely destroyed as a result, were the ones who had the most to lose. Meanwhile, the folks in the stratosphere, with very few exceptions, just kept quiet. Because that was the smart thing to do. And I know it's irrational, but that engages a kind of fury in me that even the openly monstrous doesn't.

The reason we know anything about what is happening in this genocide is because of Palestinian journalists, 200 of whom at least are dead. And so I keep coming back to this idea of institutional abdication. 

I talk about really horrific journalism, of which there have been so many examples over the last few years. But we also have seen incredibly, incredibly courageous journalists, and a lot of the folks who did that reporting are dead because of it. They were targeted and they were killed and then our institution decided to say nothing about it. That can't be without consequences. It can't be without consequences with respect to how we feel about our profession, but also how that profession is trusted or not trusted going forward.

And I can tell you that every time I go do an event at a college, or with younger folks generally, the level of general trust in what is overarchingly called “mainstream media” is plummeting. That is not a good thing. The purpose of this institution is to let you know things you don't know, and if you lose faith in that, that giant shadow-space of things you don't know can only grow; and so this institution, which is vital to any functioning society, is damaging itself in the process. This is unsustainable. 

And on top of that, again, I don't know what the case is here [in the UK], but in the US, generally speaking, the more deranged a news outlet is, the less likely they are to have a paywall, whereas the more serious and “objective”, quote-unquote, the more likely, because they need to pay for that journalism. You hire somebody to go halfway around the world and do six months of reporting. You need to pay for it. Whereas Fox News is not asking you to pay for anything. So you have that asymmetry.

But none of this changes the fact that, over the last three years now, we've seen what the foundational principles of a certain kind of journalism, when taken advantage of and when exploited, can do. 

I was driving home from an event last year listening to NPR, our public broadcaster, and there was an interview with this woman who studies Medicare, our public health system. The interviewer was asking her about something that a Republican lawmaker had said. He had made the claim that 50 per cent of expenditures in Medicare are fraud. This claim has no basis in reality. It's a complete fantasy number. And you could tell that this woman desperately wanted to say: “Hey, this is bullshit. I don't know what else to tell you.” But she couldn't do that because she was on NPR. So instead she said: “Well, when we do our studies, we find that sometimes 5 per cent of expenditures are billing errors.”

And then the interviewer said something that stuck with me. She said: “Well, this gentleman says 50 per cent. You say 5 per cent. Is there not a middle ground there?” And I felt like this is the model that I was brought up with. “You say the moon is made out of cheese. This person says it's not. Maybe the moon is 50 per cent cheese?” This mode of journalism only works when you have an even playing field, you don't have a power asymmetry, and nobody is actively lying to you. Once one or both of those things becomes untrue, it is actively detrimental to what journalism is supposed to do. 

I'm turning towards what people much braver than me are doing individually and in community with one another. As much as I've become fully disillusioned with so many load-bearing institutional beams of the west – journalistic, academic, cultural, you name it – I've been just as inspired by what people are willing to do with no expectation of benefit. And, in fact, the opposite is true.

How many times have I seen footage from this country where an 80-year-old is being dragged off by police because they're carrying a Palestine Action sign? What do you think is the photo caption under that photo in a future history book? “Cops doing right thing”? Again, one way or another, everything in this book is going to be proven right or wrong. Maybe not during my lifetime.

I have seen people do the bravest things. I've seen people chain themselves to the gates of weapons manufacturers. I was in Iceland, and I heard about this writer who was trying to get government support to get folks out of Gaza, and they wouldn't support her. And so she went on the Iceland Facebook page and people were like: “Yeah, here's my bank account number, go for it”. And she raised enough money to start bribing Egyptian crossing guards. At one point, I think she was going to be charged with treason or something for doing this, and the government was so embarrassed that they eventually had to back her.

People are going out and doing incredible things, and overwhelmingly the people doing it are the ones with the most to lose, and I leach immense courage from that. 

There are days when I wake up and all of the joy has gone out of the world. I've seen too many dead kids for that not to be the case. And I'm killing, I'm doing that, my tax money, my Amazon packages keep arriving faster, I keep killing more kids. And there are days I don't want to get out of bed and then I'm reminded of a few things. 

One is that I live in a position of immense privilege, and I have a multiplier effect that other people don't. That's what this book is: it's a multiplier effect.

Also, if the people who have been on the receiving end of this carnage, who have faced unimaginable things not just for the last three years but for three-quarters of a century at least – if they're not willing to give up hope, then who the fuck am I to be sitting here being dejected?

And then I look at what people are doing every single day, and I am reminded that whatever institutional power hovers above us, elected or corporate officials or whatever the case may be, we have each other. I firmly, firmly believe that there are more people in this world who can tell the difference between right and wrong than those who can't. And that's fundamentally where I draw anything resembling courage.

I see this stuff every day, and it is fully unsustainable to me that the world should continue to operate this way. We're at the threshold of power. Everything that is demanded is suddenly inverted. I don't think we can continue that way. And if I have to bet on those institutions or on the people, I will always bet on the people.

There's very little doubt in my mind that there is. It's glacial relative to the carnage. Every form of power is going to have to be dragged kicking and screaming towards this direction. But it is happening. 

The most instructive thing about this whole Ed Sheeran thing – and I genuinely don't really give a shit about anybody involved in this situation, but it is instructive – if you are in that world and you are worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and your prospects are very much intertwined with the thick middle of the culture, you have to make it your business to know what the acceptable, bland, vanilla middle is. 

And what we saw there was somebody who thought it was “here” and then found out, in a very jarring way, that it had moved “over there”. Again, it's in this very frivolous arena of whatever it is – adult contemporary, Walgreens music, whatever you want to call it – but it is instructive. 

There's a ripple effect that goes out from that because, again, I think we're in this situation not as a result of overwhelming ranks of the openly monstrous. I think we're in this situation because many, many people have become deeply accepting of the idea that you just look away. You just shrug it off. You say: “I'm not political. I don't take sides.” You take sides. You take sides when it's acceptable to take sides. You take sides when it's good for the brand. 

And so where I derive hope is not so much in the rehabilitation of the politician who keeps telling me that I'm a threat to western civilisation, and not the openly monstrous. I derive an immense sense of hope from the idea that obliviousness is being demolished all around us. The idea of existing in all positions and no positions all at once, I think, is being seen for the farce that it is.

This idea of wandering through the world deliberately and very lucratively oblivious – I feel like that's coming to an end. 

The paperback edition of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is out now, published by Canongate (RRP 10.99; buy it at a discount in the Nerve Bookshop)

Ramita Navai’s new documentary Dispatches: Britain's Gaza Secrets Exposed screened on Channel 4 on Thursday 24 September and is available to watch here.