One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (w/ Omar El Akkad) | The Chris Hedges Report

Egyptian-Canadian novelist and author Omar El Akkad reckons with the genocide in Gaza through personal stories of the past and analysis of the present in this episode of The Chris Hedges Report.

This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.

To the West, the concept of the rules-based order functions either as a list on paper to be ignored, or a strict set of laws to be weaponized. Omar El Akkad, Egyptian-Canadian novelist and journalist, has witnessed many instances, both in the West and in the Middle East, where banners of virtue were used to justify hypocritical behavior. El Akkad details these stories in his new book, “One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This,” and he joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to discuss them.

In the West, El Akkad admits there is a tendency of including indigenous land acknowledgements at gatherings like literary festivals and while it may be honest, he argues it continues the same pattern of theft. “You steal land, you steal lives, and what's left to steal at the end but a narrative? The narrative that absolves all that came before,” he tells Hedges. This has always been the playbook of colonialism, he explains. “We can all be sorry afterwards.”

With regard to the genocide in Gaza, Western media brushes over the daily acts of brutality with “neutral,” unassuming language. Akkad recounts the description of children being killed as as bullets colliding with their bodies, and says “What [they’re] trying to do is give someone on the other side of the planet who has the privilege of looking away the language with which to look away without feeling a pang in their conscience,” El Akkad says.

Many in the West are quick to pillory resistance movements in places like Palestine, but resistance and the right and methods of resistance, El Akkad illustrates, belong to those under oppression and occupation. He explains:

“I have zero right to tell anybody anywhere who lives under occupation and injustice how to resist that occupation and that injustice. There is no acceptable form of resistance in the view of the institutions doing the oppressing. You engage in boycotts, that's economic terrorism. You try to march peacefully, you are shot with the intent to kill and or maimed. You boycott cultural institutions, you are being illiberal. You take up arms, you are a terrorist, and you will be wiped out. All you can do is die. That is your only acceptable form of resistance.”

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Host

Chris Hedges

Producer:

Max Jones

Intro:

Diego Ramos

Crew:

Diego Ramos, Sofia Menemenlis and Thomas Hedges

Transcript:

Diego Ramos

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Transcript

Chris Hedges

Omar El Akkad’s new book, “One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This,” is a powerful and penetrating examination of the bankrupt morality of industrialized nations, especially the United States, which have sustained the genocide against Palestinians and justified it with racist tropes and lies. He exposes in his book our innate barbarity, our cloying hypocrisy, our latent racism, our narcissistic self-adulation, our demented belief, embraced by liberals and conservatives, that we have the right to impose our supposed virtues on the “lesser” breeds of the earth we subjugate and exploit with campaigns of industrial violence whether in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya or Palestine. Omar, who was born in Egypt, grew up in Qatar. He moved to Canada as a teenager and currently lives in the United States. He is a two-time winner of both the Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Award and the Oregon Book Award. His books have been translated into 13 languages. His debut novel, “American War,” was named by the BBC as one of 100 novels that shaped our world. Joining me to discuss “One Day, Everyone Will Have Been Against This” is Omar El Akkad.

I loved your book. I read it all in one sitting. I'm going to begin right at the beginning. And you talk about language, you do that a lot about your book. I'm just going to read this passage and then have you comment on it.

“Language, too, forces the air from the lungs. Beyond the high walls and barbed wire and checkpoints that pen this place, there is the empire. And the empire as well is cocooned inside its own fortress of language. A language through the prism of which buildings are never destroyed but rather spontaneously combust in which blasts come and go like Chinooks over the mountain, and people are killed as though to be killed is the only natural and rightful ordering of their existence as though living was an aberration. And this language might protect the empire's most bloodthirsty fringe, but the fringe has no use for linguistic malpractice. It is instead the middle, the liberal, well-meaning, easily upset middle that desperately needs the protection this kind of language provides. Because it is the middle of the empire that must look upon this and say, yes, this is tragic, but necessary, because the alternative is barbarism, the alternative of the countless killed and maimed and orphaned and left without home, without school, without hospital, and the screaming from under the rubble and the corpses disposed of by vultures and dogs and days old babies left to scream and starve is barbarism.”

And, just as a caveat, you and I ran straight into this buzzsaw when we were supposed to do an event together and the organizers refused to allow us to use the word genocide in the description of the talk. But you make this point, I think, very presciently about language and the way it serves as a kind of buffer or a mask from reality especially vis-a-vis but not explicitly not only but vis-a-vis this genocide. Can you talk about that?

Omar El Akkad

Yeah, thank you very much for having me. First of all, I really, really appreciate it. I've been a long time reader of your work. A very long time ago, I was reporting in Guantanamo Bay in the prison camps there, and they were giving us a tour of the place. And I asked a question, I asked something like, you know, so when do the prisoners... When I got to that word, one of the soldiers stopped me and said, we don't have prisoners here, sir. We have detainees. And it was very, very important to that person's worldview that there be no prisoners here because a prisoner implies a prison sentence, which somebody has to define at some point, a detainee you can hold forever. There were no interrogations at Guantanamo Bay. Of course, people were interrogated left, right, and center. They just didn't call it that. They called them reservations, as in detainee 8692 has an 8:30 PM reservation, it means they were going to be taken into the interrogation shacks.

I did far, far less war reporting than you did. I did very, very brief stints. But one of the things they sort of informed in terms of my worldview is that the physical layer of violence in wartime or in what might be described as peacetime, even though it isn't, can't stand in a vacuum. It can't stand on its own. It needs other layers holding it up. And one of those layers is linguistic violence, euphemistic violence, the violence of calling a thing something other than what it is, collateral damage instead of, oops we bombed a wedding party. And that you see, I mean, in varying degrees of intensity, particularly over the last 25 years or so, but in the last year and change, it's had this almost numbing quality to it where it's not just the general from the invading army telling you this. It's the anchor on the nightly news describing a little girl as a young lady who collided with a bullet. What the hell does any of that mean, right? But it's necessary because fundamentally what you're trying to do is not represent the situation as it is. What you're trying to do is give someone on the other side of the planet who has the privilege of looking away the language with which to look away without feeling a pang in their conscience. All of this essentially works the moment somebody in the privileged side of the world is able to say, yeah, that's also complicated and turn away from it. That's all they're being asked to do. And this is the language that facilitates that.

Chris Hedges

Well, it also, even though the images are there, when you adopt this kind of false metaphor to describe it, it drains it of its atrocity in some sense, doesn't it?

Omar El Akkad

Oh absolutely. I mean, that's... Otherwise it wouldn't have its power. I mean, the distance that you can impose with this kind of language is so modular. You end up in a situation where you can apply this language to anybody whose presence, whose existence is inconvenient to the project. And I mean, we're going to see this, right? We're going to see this with the language being used by the government of the United States with regards to migrants, over the next four years is going to use the same kind of anesthetic language. And it's almost the employment of language for the exact opposite of what language is supposed to do. There's supposed to be some concern with precision here, with using the word that most closely describes the thing. And this is the exact opposite of that. And it cannot be said to be done accidentally. This is an incredibly deliberate kind of linguistic malpractice. And overwhelmingly, it works. Overwhelmingly. You call someone an enemy combatant, and who the hell wants to stand up for an enemy combatant? Who wants to be that person? You call someone a terrorist after the fact, they're dead, they can't defend themselves. Maybe they were a terrorist. Maybe they were this incredibly evil person. I don't want my reputation to be destroyed, standing up for a kind of person like that. So overwhelmingly all evidence is that this kind of thing works. And so I can fully understand why institutions of all kinds, not just the military, not just the government, would rely on this. It's the fastest way to avoid dealing with something that would otherwise make very privileged people very uncomfortable.

Chris Hedges

Well, it shuts down any ability to give any situation any context. So I debated Christopher Hitchens on his ridiculous book, “God Is Not Great,” at Berkeley. And in the middle of it, he starts shouting at me, shame on you for defending suicide bombers, which, of course, I've never done and didn't even do in the debate. But it becomes, if there is no context, then whatever happens, like on October 7th, becomes not only incomprehensible, but the people who carry out something like that after 16 years of being locked in a concentration camp, they become incomprehensible.

Omar El Akkad

I mean, I think a big part of this, necessary component of the world as it exists today that would allow something like this to happen, by which I mean not only the genocide of the last year and change, but three quarters of a century of occupation at the very least, is a kind of imaginative poverty, which is to say that kind of accusation and accusations like it you want to kill all Israelis, you are a terrorism supporter, all of this sort of stuff, I think makes perfect sense if you believe in a world where there are only two options. You are either wearing the boot or you're having your neck stepped on. And so to speak up on behalf of anybody who's having their neck stepped on is immediately assumed to mean, you want to step on my neck.

Those are the only sort of worldviews that are acceptable under that ordering of the world. And it's disastrous, because the obligations put on somebody who's trying to imagine a better world are unlimited. If you and I both want something better than this, I guarantee you within five minutes of talking about it, we will have some kind of disagreement as to what better looks like, because the imaginative obligations placed on us are infinite. Somebody who is served by the system doesn't have to imagine anything else and so can safely live within the confines of this fantasy where, yes, either these people will be killed or those people will be killed. Either this genocide happens this way or an even worse genocide is going to happen. And it is such imaginative poverty. And it's applicable to virtually every facet of life under an empire. It has to be this way because somebody has to do the killing and it may as well be us.

Chris Hedges

I think one of the things that gives your book such power, you're beautiful writer, first of all, but, one of the things that gives your book power that even though, of course, your English is not only fluent but highly literate, you nevertheless are seen by the wider society as an outsider. And you talk early on in the book about an experience with your father. I think he's working in Cairo and he gets stopped by the police, but for the intervention of somebody who knows him, he could have been hauled off to an Egyptian prison, this was in Egypt. And you write about that memory, you said you come back to it often. And then you write rules, conventions, morals, reality exist, all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power, otherwise they, like all else, are expendable. And that small incident with your father and that observation is just of course writ large with the breakdown of any kind of even pretense about a rules-based order and the genocide in Gaza.

Omar El Akkad

Yeah, I mean, that moment, I think, was one of those that, you know, long before I showed up or had any kind of agency altered the trajectory of my life because my father loved Egypt. I mean, he grew up there. He, don't think, ever imagined leaving that country. It was home for him. And still he had to get the hell out. And so the sort of defining way in which that has altered my life is that I'm relatively unrooted. There is no geography, certainly no nation state that I can point to and say this is mine. And that'll never be the case for me for the rest of my life. One of the things I find really interesting in people's sort of perception of me is that it varies wildly depending on which facet of my identity they decide to latch onto first. So if it's my name or my religion, that's a very different person they believe they're talking to. Whereas if it's this accent, where I could call you up and tell you my name was John Smith and you'd probably believe me, that's an entirely different person they believe they're talking to, or if it's the books and so on and so forth.

And so it's not so much existence as something lesser, which appears in sort of brief moments, a lot of “go back where you came from” or that sort of thing. And I had my fair share of that. I mean, I was a journalist. I was a full-time journalist in the peak of the internet comments era when newspaper websites used to leave those comments on. So I've certainly seen my fair share of that kind of thing and it doesn't trouble me at all. It is relatively meaningless. The more sort of pervasive mode of existing in this part of the world is preemptively preparing for which version of my phantom self this person is going to latch onto and trying to put them at ease. So this is a very silly example, but you go through security at an airport, for example, and for the longest time, because I'm perpetually terrified of that interaction, even though it's never gone wrong for me, I would walk in and it would be yes, sir, no, sir, and very sort of polite. And then I realized over time, empirically, that I was having an easier time if I was much more casual, because that's what the people who are from here, that's the way they're behaving.

And so you sort of build up this kind of cultural survival kit that you keep in your back pocket. And most of the time it's not a huge deal at all, it's just how you get through the day. But the cumulative effect of it is such that you are made cognizant of an entire spectrum of dealing with institutions of power and with the load-bearing beams of a society that folks who do feel rooted to that society never really think about. It's a kind of shadow world that some of us inhabit and some of us don't know exists. I've come to terms with that, but all of that traces back to that one day when a soldier working for the Egyptian regime decided to give my dad a hard time and my dad realized that there was no rationality. You could be in the right, you could have done nothing wrong, and it wouldn't matter in the slightest because somebody with some modicum of power has decided that today's your day.

Chris Hedges

Well, it may not have happened to you, but it happened to your father. He was denied entry to the United States. He was, because of a similar kind of name, he was even profiled. So as a child, you did watch this happen.

Omar El Akkad

Yeah, and I mean, I've seen relatives of mine who have similar names, who look the same, but who don't have this accent get treated entirely different. You know, for a very long time, I think I thought of this in, I was very proud of myself that I had become this person, that I had become fluent in this language, in this culture, that I could maintain a conversation with somebody and they wouldn't even know that I wasn't from here, you know, that sort of thing. Precisely because I'd seen what happened to people who didn't have that, who are much better human beings than me, but who are regularly dragged into secondary because there's this distance, there's this implied otherness, and a lot of my life, I'm not particularly proud to say this, but a lot of my life has been about causing myself as few headaches as possible by adopting whatever it takes to close that distance, to say to somebody, hey, don't be scared. I'm like you. I get this. I'm not far away. And the worst part about it is that empirically, it has worked. It has proven wildly successful for me. And the proof is, among many other examples, my relatives who don't have this and have seen a much darker side of daily interactions than I regularly do.

Chris Hedges

I want to talk about this, the hallmarks of Western liberalism. You write,

“it is an assumption in hindsight of virtuous resistance as the only polite expectation of people on the receiving end of colonialism. While the terrible thing is happening, while the land is being stolen and the natives still being killed, any form of opposition is terroristic and must be crushed for the sake of civilization. But decades, centuries later, when enough of the land has been stolen and enough of the natives killed, it is safe enough to venerate resistance in hindsight.”

And of course, what you are talking about now that it's over, we can talk about ceded land, which we have no intention of giving back, or the ethic of indigenous peoples, et cetera, now that they've been exterminated. But of course, this applies directly to what's happening to the Palestinians at this moment.

Omar El Akkad

Yeah, I mean, a long time ago I was at a literary festival up in Canada and literary festivals in Canada started with land acknowledgements well before US festivals started doing the same. And we were sitting there, we were about to start our event and one of the organizers gets up and says, just before we begin, you know, I just want to take this time to acknowledge the really important acknowledgement that we are on unceded indigenous territory and to also thank the hedge fund that is sponsoring this event. And I was like, this is the most honest land acknowledgement I've ever heard. I think of it, particularly this idea of after the fact acknowledgement as, and maybe this is particularly cynical of me, but I think of it as a continuation of theft. You steal land, you steal lives, and what's left to steal at the end but a narrative? The narrative that absolves all that came before. You know, when I wrote the title of this book when I was first thinking about it, I wasn't thinking in terms of weeks or even years. I was thinking if I'm fortunate enough to live the average lifespan in this part of the world, maybe by the end of my life, I'll be watching a poetry reading in Tel Aviv that begins with a land acknowledgement. I think it's a fundamental part of any system of endless taking, which, you know, colonialism and whatever stage of capitalism we're in are fundamentally part of. There are very few systems as well-versed in after-the-fact shame and after-the-fact guilt as the ones that are predicated on endless taking.

And you see it all over the place. I mean, there's an incredible poetry collection by a Layli Long Soldier called “Whereas,” which is all about sort of repurposing and undermining a U.S. government declaration that basically said, sorry about all that genocide, indigenous people, sorry about the theft. And it was passed in the most sort of bland manner hundreds of years after the fact. And that is such an important part of the entire project. We can all be sorry afterwards. The taking happens now and the apology comes later. It's a hallmark of every colonial society. The thing that makes it so dangerous to acknowledge right now is that we're not after the fact. We're in the middle of the fact. And so the people who disagree with the content of this book or with the assertion of that title are going to disagree vehemently until one day they don't have to. And then they're going to acknowledge it and there will be no repercussions and we can sit around and listen to a very flowery land acknowledgement when it's too late to do anything about it.

Chris Hedges

Right, at Jared Kushner's resort in northern Gaza. I want to talk about this point you make. You talk about this moment in Qatar where you lived as a boy and, of course, I've been in Qatar twice in the last few months. And much of the labor is performed by South Asians, Southeast Asian and you witness a small traffic accident and the Southeast Asian man is beaten with a sandal or something. But anyway, you said you talk about non-existence. Non-existence is necessary to the self-conception of this place. Qatar is hardly exclusive to this. Think of undocumented workers here and how uncontrolled was the rage whenever the non-existence is violated. Talk about that, how we live in the midst of it. Undocumented workers all around us essentially occupy that position.

Omar El Akkad

Yeah, and I should say here that a lot of this book, I mean, I think it comes out, comes in through the door swinging like it's a series of arguments, like I'm trying to pick a fight with somebody. And I don't think I am. And I think a lot of this book is a self interrogation because particularly that moment that you mentioned where it's me and my buddy, we're teenagers, he's just gotten his driver's license. We're driving around and we see this like very slight fender bender where this man who was probably Pakistani or Indian comes out and the man who I strongly suspect was a local, was a country man, comes out and starts beating him, like starts physically assaulting this man over a minor fender bender. I was on board with that, right?

Chris Hedges

You were laughing. You and your friend were laughing at it.

Omar El Akkad

I mean, the people driving past were lowering their windows and honking their horns and smiling and hooting. And we were fully on board with this idea that, yes, we live in a society where there's an underclass, and that is perfectly fine, and I don't have to think about it. And I come to this part of the world, and I'm effectively asked to partake in a similar deal. Where the hell are these fruits and vegetables in my grocery store coming from, and whose life is being made miserable to provide this? Well, just don't think about it. There is people whose non-existence is central to your privilege of daily existence. All you have to do is not think about them. All you have to do is look away. And when I was living in Qatar, I mean, granted I was a teenager, but I fully bought in. But yeah, that's just the way these things work. And I think about that now because it shaped me to a large extent. I worked that muscle to the point that it was very powerful, that I could look away from almost anything, that I could normalize almost anything. And in trying to correct that, and to be honest, mostly failing because it was so ingrained for so long, that has come to be how I think about any society now. I don't care about your GDP. I don't care about the standard markers of quality of life, those are all fantastic, more power to you.

Whose non-existence is central to this project? And I've asked that about every society I've been a part of, every society I've ever looked at since that point. Because not only does it happen everywhere to certain degrees, it is so easy to normalize. I mean, you know this, you've been there. Life in a place like Qatar, if you sign that deal to look away, is one of the easiest lives you will ever have. Incredible comfort, incredible wealth, all the rest of it. And I don't know that that's super far removed from the deal I sign over here, where my grocery store shelves are fully stocked and there's a certain ease of life that is part and parcel of me not thinking about the people who make this happen. That's just come, it's a very minor incident in the grand scheme of things, this minor fender bender in the streets of Doha one day. But it has heavily influenced how we think about the world ever since.

Chris Hedges

Well, it's of course how the Israelis looked at the Palestinian day workers when they were allowed to go into Israel and build their houses and do other menial work. You write about the press and you write quite pressingly about the press. There's one little passage I want to read and then have you comment on. Of course, we were both journalists.

“More than a few of my former colleagues in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the Hamas attacks on Israel proudly boasted of their support for both Ukraine and Israel. When Russian authorities detained and eventually convicted Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who has since been released, in an obvious sham of a judicial process, almost every Western media outlet called it what it was. But as the Israeli military wiped out both Palestinian journalists and their entire families in a deliberate campaign to silence the flow of information out of Gaza, virtually all the same colleagues, all the same outlets took a very different approach. The profession of journalism necessitates a capacity to understand things, and all who watch the killings understood what was happening.”

The press has played such a shameful role in all of this, but just comment a little bit on that incredible duplicity.

Omar El Akkad

Yeah, so was a journalist for 10 years. I covered all kinds of different beats and I was all over the place. I think one of the facets of journalism that is somewhat difficult to get across is that journalism demands, or at least journalism in the sort of corporate environment or an institutional environment, demands two almost directly contradictory things. I mean, I was a journalist in Canada where we have something called the Michener Award, and the Michener Award is widely regarded as sort of the highest award for journalism in the country. And it's very much predicated on the idea of public service, which is to say, journalism that causes institutional change.

You know, there were some amazing pieces of journalism that caused, for example, a lot of our police forces to completely re-examine how they deal with sexual assault cases. And that was the result of work done by a reporter named Robyn Doolittle. It was an incredible piece of journalism. But I don't know how somebody looks at that and doesn't see a measure of activism. You have to believe in something. You have to believe that you are in this to cause positive change. And yet there is a part of the spectrum where the switch can be flipped. And suddenly you have to be sort of capital O, objective and neutral, whatever those terms mean. And you have to shut off the part of you that would result in the best, most important kind of journalism.

And I think one of the things about the situation in Gaza where you're watching this ongoing genocide, is that rarely in my life have I seen the switch flipped so quickly and so flagrantly. You had the immediate juxtaposition of what journalists are allowed to say about Ukraine. You had the immediacy of these being journalists that are being killed. These aren't members of another profession even. These are your colleagues. And suddenly you see the switch flipped. And, I mean, the result is not only sort of detrimental to the souls of the people who are involved in this, or guess, non-involved. It also creates some real garbage journalism. I mean, you can see the tortured constructions in some of these headlines, you know, bullet collides with lives lost, the flower massacre headlines, as though the bags of flour had committed the massacre. I mean, the whole thing just results in almost cartoonishly bad journalism. And people are okay with it because the alternative is personal consequences, the alternative is institutional consequences. Somebody might pull an ad, somebody might pull access. Whereas if you do subscribe to this and you do use this tortured passive construction, yeah, maybe somebody will yell at you on Twitter. You know, journalists are very well-versed, I think, in weighing consequences. We sort of have to be. And in this case, the relative consequences are clear. You could lose your job. You could lose your livelihood on one hand. On the other hand, you could get yelled at by somebody on a social media platform or something like that. It's not—I can see how the case is made internally, but that doesn't mean I have to agree with it.

Chris Hedges

You talk about the—that's what, by the way, [Noam] Chomsky used to call worthy and unworthy victims. I used to see that overseas all the time. So when church people are murdered and raped in El Salvador, where I was, they're working with the terrorist rebels or they aren't really church people or whatever. And then when a Polish priest is murdered under the communist regime in Poland, he becomes a saint at the same time and exactly the same moment. That's what you're describing. Just talk, as you do in the book, this, you know, least-worst kind of scenario in the midst of a genocide, which you kind of eviscerate. Talk about that, that argument that, we can't—of course, too late now—but we can't not vote for Harris because we'll get Trump.

Omar El Akkad

Yeah, I mean, this, think for me, dates back to my earliest memories of growing up in the Arab world. I almost universally am not a huge fan of any of the governments of the Arab world or any of the governing organizations in the Arab world. And a big part of, from a young age, looking towards the West for something. That something was almost always a negative space. It wasn't what it offered. It was what I didn't have to deal with. And so, you could talk about politics without worrying about the secret police coming to get you or that there were underlying principles of free speech and equal justice and so on and so forth. But they were all relative to the place I grew up in. And so you come to this part of the world and I think that there's a kind of stickiness to that initial impulse that causes you to to constantly think of things in terms of what is the least worst option here.

Which, to be perfectly honest with you, this is how I behaved for most of my life. You know, there have been several elections where I looked at the ballot and saw an R next to somebody's name and voted for whoever the hell had the best chance against that R. I think one of the things that has become, that became really clear over the last year and change is that for some people there is a hard line after which I can no longer do that, after which this idea of relative evil is consumed by absolute evil. And for me and for I think a lot of people, a genocide is that point. Over the last year, I have become conditioned that whenever I see a picture of a smiling child on my social media feed, that is probably there because that child has just been murdered, dismembered, or is starving to death.

I cannot go from that mode, just as a human being, just as somebody with a soul, and I'm sure your listeners will disagree with me on a million political points, but setting all of that aside, just as a human being, I cannot go from that to voting for an administration that would allow or bankroll or cheerlead for this and say to myself that, well, at least I'm voting for the lesser of two evils. I know the Trump administration is evil. I know Republican politics has become a kind of deranged fascist cult. I get all of this.

But at some point, you have to decide what the hell it means to you to be human. And for me, I cannot continue to think of myself as human and then casually vote for somebody who would allow something like this to happen. And I've lost friends over this and I can see where they're coming from, right? I had a friend who talked about this idea of, we need to vote for Harris and then push her on Gaza and then push her on climate change and then do all of this stuff. And I thought, you know, if that works for you, fantastic. Do your thing, I guess. But also, I'm not 100% sure that you're going to be pushing for any of this stuff. I think that you're either horrified by what has happened or you're not. And if you're not, that's okay. That's your life. But we are on opposite ends of a chasm. And it precludes me from voting for this person.

Chris Hedges

You describe it, I think, the words you use are theft of your soul. That's right. That's how I see it. It's the theft of your soul.

Omar El Akkad

Yeah, I mean, we can have a political argument about almost anything. And I will compromise and I will find common ground and all the rest of it. But there are certain points where, no, I'm not going to do that. I understand that Trump might be a million times worse on every facet of foreign and domestic governance. I'm not going to put my name in alignment with somebody who allowed the last year to happen. I'm just not.

Chris Hedges

I just have to read this even though it doesn't—because I thought it was great. You're quoting the Palestinian-American poet Noor Hindi. She says, “I want to be like those poets who care about the moon.” And the name of the poem is titled, “F your lecture on craft. My people are dying.” That's it. Isn't that great? That kind of gets right to the point.

Omar El Akkad

Yep, that's become one of my go-to poems over the years.

Chris Hedges

You write,

“The problem with fixating on the abyss into which one's opponent has descended while simultaneously digging one's own is that eventually it gets too dark to tell the difference.”

Explain what you mean by that.

Omar El Akkad

I think one of the sort of hallmarks of Republican politics over the last 20 years is that you could safely go back a decade or so and take any piece of ideology or policy proposal that was previously on the fringe, and now it will be in the center, now it will be in the mainstream. And that kind of derangement has been ongoing for a very long time. And I think instead of sort of standing in opposition to that, there has been an impulse within mainstream progressive liberal democratic circles to sort of present oneself as a kind of endless centrist—I'm high minded, I'm above it all, I find the center position and that's the correct one to take. And I think at some point everybody in the right wing realized that you could take advantage of this and just push things further to the right, further towards fascism. And these very same people will gladly move further to the right alongside you because they want to remain in the center. It's just that the center keeps changing. I've heard variations of this argument in every part of the world.

You know, we need to keep this autocracy or this dictator in place because the alternative is Islamic fundamentalists. Sure, okay, I don't want that, fine. But at some point, if you're constantly tethering yourself to this idea of being slightly better than what's assumed to be the worst thing, you must be cognizant of what direction you're headed. Which is, I mean, I think something that the Democratic Party, despite their every effort is going to have to contend with at some point. I don't need you to be half as tough on migrants as the Republicans are, because the Republicans are just going to get tougher on migrants and you will have to move your position and it is indistinguishable from having no position at all. I don't need you to be that. I need you to stand for something. And I think this idea of tethering yourself to being slightly less evil than the most evil thing essentially becomes indistinguishable from that over time.

Chris Hedges

Yeah, that's precisely what happened. Democratic Party transformed itself into the Republican Party, certainly begun by Clinton. And the Republican Party became a cultish, insane movement embracing magical thinking. But you're exactly right. It also happened in Israel, by the way, where I was, I lived in Israel when they outlawed the Kach Party in Meir Kahane. And now people running Israel are all the heirs of Kahane, this is this radical racist rabbi. I want to talk about nonviolence. One of the most damaging, longest lasting consequences of the war on terror years is an utter obliteration of the obvious moral case for nonviolence. Talk about that.

Omar El Akkad

Yeah, I think one of the more difficult parts of this book, and I talked about it a little bit as a sort of self interrogation, I don't think you can write this kind of book and not contend with the many things you are, including some things that I'm not particularly proud of. And one of those interrogations has to do with this notion of how I describe myself. I describe myself as a pacifist, as a fairly committed proponent of nonviolence. But I have the privilege of saying those words in a relative vacuum, a vacuum created by the fact that I live on the launching end of the bombs. I live within the heart of the empire. And so two things come into clarity that I wish hadn't, but being as though they have, I need to address them. The first is my right to tell anybody under a state of occupation how to resist that occupation, which is no right at all. I have zero right to tell anybody anywhere who lives under occupation and injustice how to resist that occupation and that injustice. Particularly when there is no acceptable form of resistance in the view of the institutions doing the oppressing. You engage in boycotts, that's economic terrorism. You try to march peacefully, you are shot with the intent to kill and or maimed. You boycott cultural institutions, you are being illiberal. You take up arms, you are a terrorist, and you will be wiped out. All you can do is die. That is your only acceptable form of resistance. So first of all, I have absolutely no right to tell anybody how to resist their occupation or a state of injustice. But second, I can sit here and I can tell you how committed I am to nonviolence. And I can believe that fully. But by virtue of the society I live in, by virtue of what my tax dollars are being used to do, I am one of the most violent human beings on earth. And I can't simply brush that away and say, hey, I haven't thrown a punch since I was 15 years old, I'm fully committed to non-violence. I am part of a society that exercises great industrial violence. And at the very least, I should acknowledge that. And that makes it much, much more difficult to then go around parading my views about how violence [inaudible] as a whole. Sure, it does, but I am actively engaged in it right now. That has been a very difficult thing to contend with and I wish I had a sort of easy wraparound answer for it, but I don't.

Chris Hedges

Well, first of all, it's always the oppressor who determines the configuration of resistance. And the Zionist oppressor has made it clear that whether it's nonviolent resistance or it doesn't make any difference, you'll still be obliterated. But it's also, as the theologian James Cone, writing about the difference between Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, he said Malcolm X grew up in an environment where he didn't have the luxury to be nonviolent. And I want to talk about love at the end here. This was really important. It's something I certainly saw in places like Gaza.

But “It's a love that,” you say, “cannot be acknowledged by empire because it is a people's love for one another. Anyone who has dragged a relative out from under the wreckage of a bombed building, who has held a friend bleeding to death in the street while the officer who pulled the trigger looks on, who has watched their water poisoned, their land burned, their community starved, is intimately well-versed in love. But in the eyes of the empire, such a thing can never be called love, because the directive was never in the first place love, but rather love me, in spite of it all, love me.”

Omar El Akkad

Yeah, I think this has to do with the idea of nonviolence as well, which is not only a matter of strategy or conscience, but also of narrative. I think this is part of the narrative of empire. I don't know how many books I've read at this point from former US soldiers who came back from Iraq and then wrote about how sad it made them to have to kill all those brown people. Narrative exercises are sort of fundamental to all of this, but I think as dejected and as cynical as the last year has made me, especially with regards to our institutions, obviously our political institutions, but also our academic and cultural institutions, it has caused the exact opposite impulse with respect to individuals. I mean, yes, I've lost friends and yes, there's people that I now realize I served only as the token brown friend to, and I get all of that. But I'm watching, daily, incredible acts of solidarity. I'm watching Jewish folks shut down one of the biggest train stations in the world, calling for solidarity in opposition to the oppression of people of another religion on the other side of the planet. I'm watching people exercise acts of love at great personal risk. You don't chain yourself to the gate of a weapons manufacturer and expect to get away scot-free. I've watched people go into a killing field and practice surgery to ease the suffering of children. I mean, there are immense acts of love happening right now. I wish that they weren't necessitated.

I wish that they weren't necessary. But what I am no longer interested in is love as a form of institutional camouflage. I'm no longer interested in that. I'm no longer interested in stories that talk about how everything was great at the end after all the bad stuff happened. I am interested in that active form of love that is trying to stop the bad thing from happening right now. And I'm seeing so many examples of it and it is the one thing keeping me going. I'm a deeply, I'm not a particularly strong person. I'm a deeply weak person and I need that kind of inspiration. And I am getting it daily from people who are much stronger than me and who are engaged in the kind of love that matters more than any other, I think.

Chris Hedges

Well, you point out, you quote the Palestinian poet Rasha Abdulhadi, “Wherever you are, whatever sand you can throw in the gears of genocide, do it now. If it's a handful, throw it. If it's a fingernail full, scrape it out and throw it. Get in the way however you can.”

And I think that speaks to an issue you raise in the book, that sense of frustration we all feel that no matter what we do, it will go on. I don't expect the ceasefire to last. I think the Netanyahu government is quite clear that it won't. They're hardly done with their killing project and they've accelerated their killing sprees in the West Bank. But it is absolutely imperative, and I think it gets back to that point of on the theft of the soul, that we can't measure what we do empirically, but it keeps us whole, that resistance. And I think that's a point you make, and you also at the end of the book tie it into the breakdown in the climate crisis and everything else. This is, what we're watching in Gaza, is a harbinger of what's coming as the world breaks down and it's an imperative that those of us who have some kind of a conscience, however futile it may seem, must, as Rasha writes, get in the way, however we can.

Omar El Akkad

Yeah, I often go back to, I was on this panel once, it was for a climate essay anthology, and the final question of the panel was something like, where do you derive hope? Where do you get your hope from? And that sort of thing. And people gave the sort of answers you'd expect, except the last guy. The last guy, his house had just burned down in the California wildfires. And he said something like, there is no hope. We've gone too far. We've done too much damage. But we must act as though there is. And I think about that a lot. You know, I come from a long line of malfunctioning hearts. The men in my family don't live very long. I have young children who will have to deal with whatever this world is that we've created much, much longer than I. And this, of course, ties into the idea of climate breakdown, of this overarching existential mess that we have made that, of course, is going to impact the most vulnerable first, but will impact everybody eventually. And I think that even on my worst days, and look, I haven't done anything. I've written a book, who cares? There are people who are every day doing acts of resistance and acts of standing up to this machine that are far more courageous than anything I've ever been able to muster. But whatever the hell it is that I'm going to do on any given day, it means something. Because I remember being that kid in the school when the speaker came in and said, sorry, we've screwed everything up, but your generation is going to be the one to fix it. And now I'm that idiot going into high schools and saying, I'm so sorry, we've screwed this up, but your generation is going to be the one to fix it. That's not enough.

We are obligated to give a damn about one another. We are obligated to want something better than this. I think we're obligated to love one another even in this incredibly cruel moment and this culmination of so many cruel moments. That keeps me going every day, even when I do the bare minimum or do nothing at all. And I truly believe that right now there is a huge chasm between what people want and what our institutions of governance are doing. But we have one another. And that, I think, is a form of strength that no institution can ever mimic. There are days I wake up and realize that I don't have an ounce of the resources of the machinery aligned against me. But we have one another, and I hold on to that. And if that's my only source of hope, then so be it. That's enough.

Chris Hedges

Well, get enough of us, we can bring it down. We're talking with Omar El Akkad on his book, “One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.” I want to thank Diego [Ramos], Sofia [Menemenlis], Max [Jones], and Thomas [Heges], who produced the show. You can find me at ChrisHedges.Substack.com.

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Photos

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