One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

Summary

El Akkad's nonfiction debut moves from personal memoir to cultural criticism, tracing how the Western liberal consensus he once believed in as an immigrant was revealed—through his reporting on the War on Terror, Ferguson, and climate disaster, and then through the war in Gaza—to be contingent, selective, and self-serving. The title's ironic grammar captures the book's central argument: that moral history is perpetually rewritten to make those who stayed silent appear to have always been on the right side. It is an anatomy of complicity told in luminous, unflinching prose.