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Source: https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/one-day-everyone-will-have-this-book-at-the-bottom-of-their-closet/
U.S. National Book Award Winner Encapsulates Everything that Is Wrong with Western Political Culture
(Times of Israel) Irina Velitskaya - Omar El Akkad's new nonfiction book about the Gaza conflict, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, recently won the 2025 U.S. National Book Award. The book encapsulates everything that is wrong with the state of political discourse, intellectual culture, and Western elites who favor feeling good about themselves over civilizational survival. To this day it is the #1 best-selling book on Amazon in the Middle Eastern Politics category. It argues that if you are not part of the pro-Palestinian movement now, you inevitably will be some day. And if you continue to hold out stubbornly for the right of one tiny Jewish state to exist in a world of 56 Muslim-majority states, then you are on "the wrong side of history." "This" in the title is not the Oct. 7 massacre, the 18 years of rocket fire from Gaza into Israeli communities that preceded it, nor the stabbings and car rammings and bus bombings of the First and Second Intifadas, nor the massacres of Persians, Christians, Hindus, Druze, Yazidi, Alawites, Jews, African animists, and other minorities by radical Islamist groups currently taking place worldwide. No, it is solely Israel's war against Hamas and other Iranian-backed terror groups. El Akkad has chosen precisely the wrong target for the performative denunciations that he wants people to engage in today: the only fully free and democratic state in the entire Middle East; the only one with full civil liberties and comprehensive human rights laws and institutions; the one state where the Christian population is growing; the one state where Jews are safe and well-protected; and the one state with more religious freedom for all sects of Islam than any other country in the region. In El Akkad's telling, Palestinians are being punished "merely for their electoral choices" (the election of Hamas) and not because of decades of rocket fire and suicide bombings and massacres, which are themselves a form of "collective punishment" directed against the Jews and Arabs of Israel. I do concur with his statement in the book's final paragraph that "none of this evil was ever necessary," but believe firmly that the "unnecessary evil" was that of the Palestinians who could have had a free and independent state at multiple points after the end of the Ottoman Empire if that had been what they really wanted, rather than the mass murder and ethnic cleansing of the Jews from their ancestral homeland.