Long the most compelling evidence of the net good of the project called “Western civilization” has been the demand for so many to join it. No doubt it’s always included misdirection and dastardly ethical lapses but surely all told the demand showed it was worth it. What happens when that changes?
The author who overlooked the petty indignities because of the remarkable and widespread freedom — of movies and walking into a library unencumbered by fear was thrilling. But the paper thin reliance on Israel over the killing of Palestinian children has broken a growing number of adherents.
That’s what I kept thinking of while reading One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, the February 2025 National Book Award winning lyrical takedown of Western enablement of the Israeli genocide of Palestinians by novelist Omar El Akkad. It is harrowing, and beautiful and imporant.
“This is an account of a fracture, a breaking away from the notion that the polite, western liberal ever stood for anything at all,” he writes, and then later to the western liberal, of which I would likely be considered one: “It’s no use in the end to scream again and again at the cold, cocooned center of power: I need you just this once to be the thing you pretend to be”
Elsewhere: “There’s no such thing as someone else’s children.”
Below I have my notes for future reference.
My notes:
- “Stray crumbs of adult conversation”
- “Expat” is a term for white westerner who leaves by choice to move somewhere cheaper — “alien” or “migrant” is someone poor going somewhere perceived safer and richer
- “It is a hallmark of failing societies, I’ve learned, this requirement that one always be in possession of a valid reason to exist”
- His father, leaving the hotel he worked at in Egypt was almost “being made into an absence”
- We only “venerate resistance in hindsight”
- “Whatever mainstream western liberalism is – and I have no useful definition of it beyond something at its core transactional, centered on the magnanimous, enlightened image of the self, and the dissonant belief that emphasizing with the plight of the far away oppressed, is compatible with benefiting from the systems that oppress them…”
- “This is an account of a fracture, a breaking away from the notion that the polite, western liberal ever stood for anything at all.”
- WCNSF: wounded child no surviving family
- When the author first moved from Qatar to Canada, and he was first able to take William Burroughs’ groundbreaking 1959 novel Naked Lunch out of the library, “the overwhelming ordinariness of that day, and yet how it marked a small parcel of rootedness in those years when the West transformed from a thing on film and television to the place where, more likely than not, I’d live out the rest of my life. I remember thinking: if this is all there is, it’s enough. Maybe you don’t ever shake off the mangling of your name or the dumb jokes about camels, but at least you go to the library and you read whatever you choose.”
- Among immigrants “some are afforded the privilege of an arrival story, a homecoming. Others, only departure after departure.”
- Of Rambo, Hunter S Thompson and other western stories and media he consumed: “narrative power, maybe all power, was never about flaunting the rules, yelling at a cop, making trouble – it was about, knowing that, for a privileged class, there existed a hard ceiling on the consequences.”
- “As always, the dead will be made to pay the moral debt born of their killing”
- On January 6, 2024, former U.S. Vice President Mike Pence signed Israeli artillery shells, reportedly with the phrase “For Israel,” during a visit to the Lebanese border. The move occurred at an IDF military base, where he met with troops, and the shells were widely reported as intended for use in fighting against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon
- “American liberalism demands a rhetorical politeness”
- “One remarkable difference between the modern western conservative and their liberal counterpart is that the former will gleefully sign their name on the side of the bomb while the latter will just sheepishly initial it.”
- “It can’t be both rhetorical urgency and policymaking impotence”
- “When it mattered, who sided with justice and who sided with power?”
- “No it’s impossible to do the work of journalism, or at least serious journalism, and not be forced to make some kind of peace with the reality that you will be, many times over, a tourist in someone else’s misery”
- “Some things are complicated. Some things have been complicated.”
- “Allowed to wield silence so freely, any institution will become insatiable”
- In March 2013, Google Maps deployed a team to Iqaluit, Nunavut, to capture Street View imagery, where they worked closely with local residents and elders to understand how the town’s infrastructure, including roads, changes shape between winter and summer.
- In Dec. 2023, South Africa accused Israel of genocide, not Arab neighbors because though they raise flags and use Palestinians as “slogan fodder” those autocrats don’t want to encourage uprisings
- “It’s no use in the end to scream again and again at the cold, cocooned center of power: I need you just this once to be the thing you pretend to be”
- Standing with Israel but slipping in Palestinian sympathy is a “modular opinion,” letting the speaker expand later “like one of those dinner tables you lengthen to accommodate more guests than you expected”
- “Instinctively retreat into the comforting fold of empire”
- The problem isn’t a government that is cruel or indifferent, because many governments are that. What hurts is “this relentless parachuting of virtue”
- “Yes the killing happens now but there’ll be plenty of time later to write very moving stories about the shape and shade of the bones”
- Marwa Halal’s Poem for Brad
- Noor Hindi: I want to be like those poets who care about the moon
- “The half stance of the spineless”
- The fascist learned liberal weakness: “its perfunctory concern with rhetorical even-handedness gives even the most obviously bad faith allegation influence.”
- “The unavoidable reckoning” is that Republicans say they’re consistent without virtue signaling unlike the Democrats
- “On January 26, 2024, the International Court of Justice rules that Israel must stand trial for genocide. Not long after, the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and six other nations decided to cut off all funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, one of the few organizations providing any aid to Palestinians. The decision is supposedly based on allegations that about a dozen of the UNRWAs 30,000 or so workers were involved in the October 7 Hamas attacks. The allegation is enough. Hundreds of millions of dollars are withheld. More people will starve to death because of this decision, taken in the halls of power far away from where the starvation will happen, taken by people who will never be held responsible for any of it, who will live out the rest of their lives in total comfort. And should some activist interrupt their night out at a restaurant to show them pictures of the children they’ve helped kill, they will be deeply offended. Civilized people shouldn’t behave so rudely.”
- “For certain people, the only choice is between negations of varying severity. The system does not work for you, was never intended to work for you, but as an act of magnanimity our part, you may choose the degree to which it works against you”
- “Of all the epitaphs that may one day be written on the gravestone of western liberalism, the most damning is this: faced off against an nihilistic, endlessly cruel manifestation of conservatism, and somehow managed to make it close”
- “So much lives and dies by the grace of endless forgetting”
- “There’s no such thing as someone else’s children.”
- “The rainwater is the property of the state”
- In author’s American War novel, he has a massacre scene at a displaced people’s camp called Camp Patience, and it’s based on real events at Palestinian refugee camps Sabra and Shatila. The North American and Europe audiences often ask him why he had to make it so brutal. But an Egyptian book club asked him why he toned it down so much.
- “The state wants violence because in that playing field it maintains every advantage” from bigger guns to immunity and victimhood
- “The oft stated fear that to try to understand something is inseparable from pledging allegiance to it”
- In summer 2021, the author became a U.S. citizen in Portland, Oregon
- In February 2024, 5-year-old Hind Rajab’s decomposing body found, she had called for help and said she wet herself to the operator
- “On one side is a portion of society that fears nothing more than the discontinuation of normalcy.”
- “What is wrong with me that I can’t keep living as normal? What is wrong with all those people who can?”
- Aaron Bushnell, a 25-year-old serviceman of the United States Air Force, died after setting himself on fire outside the front gate of the Embassy of Israel
- On February 20, 2024, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield vetoed a UN Security Council resolution drafted by Algeria that demanded an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza
- “A system that can only ever say: there is nothing better than this.”
- Victor I. Cazares decided to stop taking their HIV medication — until the New York Theatre Workshop calls for a cease-fire
- “To be accused of speaking too loudly about one injustice, but not others, by someone who doesn’t care about any of them is to be told simply to keep quiet.”
- “For someone fortunate enough to be born wearing the boot, the capacity for mercy may well extend only to how hard one chooses to step on the neck. That anyone should take the shoe off entirely, walk from the sight of the trampling, is unthinkable.”
- “The machine swallows life, and spits out convenience.”
- “Negative resistance” of opting out as one alternative
- Author became a tech and business journalist
- On Uber: “Success, growth, profit came from taking what might at one time had been decent, stable jobs, and rebranding them as side hustles. The brilliant business idea was persuading people to expect less..”
- “It is not some corporation’s increasing capacity for better that drives the extractive world, but everyone else is in increasing tolerance for worse.”
- “In the final moments of Aaron Bushnell’s life, officers rushed to the site of his burning. One asks for a fire extinguisher, another points his gun at the flames..”
- “The same people who did the killing and financed the killing and justified the killing and turned away from the killing will congratulate themselves on doing the right thing. It is very important to do the right thing, eventually.”
- “The very sorry descendants are coming..
- “Grief in arrears is grief just the same”
- “One day, the social currency of liberalism will accept as legal tender the suffering of those they previously smothered in silence”
- “It is not so hard to believe even during the worst of things that courage is the more potent contagion.”