One Day, Not Everyone Will Be Against This

At the time of writing this, my inboxes are overwhelmed with messages from friends in Gaza. 

“The shelling”, one tells me, “is closer than it’s ever been before”. 

Others send updates about what food they have been able to gather while others send desperate updates about their forced displacement to the south of Gaza, as Israel intensifies its ethnic cleansing offensive in Gaza City. 

Palestinians in Gaza find themselves in what can be characterized as the final solution stage of what has now been a two-year long genocide. The resistance on the ground continues to push back against the attempted Israeli takeover, but watching from afar—the destruction, the dismantling and the desperation—renders one into disparate parts of oneself. Nothing is recognizable, everything smells rotten; the stench of the decay does not leave your nose no matter which way you turn. 

We become witnesses to not just the bloody collapse of a nation but to the collapse of our own worlds we exist in on a day-to-day basis, intimate and shared.

In his fiery book One Day, Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This, journalist Omar El Akkad traces the anatomy of that decay in institutions and ideals—of democracy and freedom—he once believed in but that ended with “the slaughter”: the slaughter of Palestinians that began in October 2023. The title of the book takes from El Akkad’s October 25, 2023 post on X, in which he wrote:

“One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.” 

The sentiment is familiar: that to be against evil, after it has come to a punctuated end, is an inevitability. 

Many believe that this will happen with the genocide of the Palestinians. Those who stood by silently as the bombs, bullets and disease annihilated the population of Gaza will come to condemn it, will come to rewrite their silence; those who cheered it on, justified it, will come to collect their accolades for their eventual moral repositioning. 

Believers of this point to recent rhetorical “pivots” by governments and public personalities in the US-backed Israeli starvation of the Palestinians. Over July and August, we were inundated with statements of condemnation, demands of “letting aid in” and incensed podcasts as images of dead, emaciated Palestinians—especially children—have been difficult to justify and ignore. 

Since then, a quiet has set in, and in that quiet is the loud, resounding truth that no, not everyone will have or even pretend to have moral clarity on Gaza. This is because Gaza reveals the primary contradiction; it unearths the foundational lie of our current world order and its governing morality.

Most of the world, by every measure, is already against the extermination of the Palestinians. Hundreds of thousands continue to flock to their streets, across the world, demanding an end to the genocide and the occupation. 

The overwhelming majority of the world’s governments support an immediate ceasefire. Many major US academic groups have come out to condemn the Israeli campaign. Over 250 media outlets across seventy countries staged a front-page protest of Israel’s targeting and massacring of Palestinian journalists. Major human rights groups have called what is happening to the Palestinians a genocide and the biggest academic association of genocide scholars just passed a resolution coming to the same conclusion.

 These examples are, of course, a drop in a bucket showing just how much of a moral consensus there already is on what is happening to the Palestinians. There isn’t a blindness to the horrors that have been live streamed to us every single day for two years. 

And so this idea, that all evil eventually becomes undeniable, that every genocide or slaughter eventually reaches the point where we all nod in agreement that “yes, that was wrong, yes, we were against it”  becomes a sort of comfort blanket. 

Acknowledging that the opposite is more likely is not only a terrifying indictment of people, institutions and ideals we believe in fundamentally but also is an unwilling confrontation with what our immediate present and our future are being moulded into. 

The belief in eventual moral clarity lets us believe that time itself will sort out moral failure, that history has a correcting function. 

But Gaza is not Rwanda, it is not Srebrenica. 

The very nature of the existence of Palestinians, post-Nakba, makes it a story that cannot be neatly packaged into “good and evil” by the very endowers of power who believe in and perpetuate the right of that evil to exist.

There is too much invested in maintaining that this is not what it is. There’s too much at stake to admit, fully, that this is what it is. And that’s still assuming that those who wield power in this world even care.

In July, U.N. Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese released From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide, a report tracing the sharp rise in global corporate investment in Israel since October 2023. The findings are blunt: while Israel’s assault has devastated Palestinian lives and land, the Tel Aviv stock exchange soared 213%, adding $225.7 billion in market gains. Albanese identified forty-eight corporate actors – along with their webs of subsidiaries, licensees, and partners across weapons, tech, finance, construction, and energy – profiting directly from the war. Investment is surging not in spite of Israel’s actions, but because of them.

And nowhere is this more visible than in the boom in Israeli drones, cybersecurity, and A.I. American tech companies have poured money in precisely because of how these tools have been field-tested on Palestinians, especially in Gaza. 

As journalist Anthony Loewenstein argues in The Palestine Laboratory, this is not new: for decades, Palestinians have been the proving ground where Israel and its partners refine technologies of surveillance and repression—machinations of social and civilian control that are then exported regionally and globally to governments that otherwise offer restrained lamentations on the conditions and suffering of the Palestinians.

And then there is the ideological and political investment: how could the United States, the leading perpetrator of the genocide of Palestinians and regional destabilization, ever come to recognize its own crimes when it has yet to do even a modicum of the same for the Indigenous peoples it annihilated to build itself? How could it offer a mea culpa when every institution–from education to media to government to corporate and tech–has a vested financial and ideological interest in the eradication of Palestinians?

History here can serve as instruction: the first genocide of the 20th century, against the Herero and Nama peoples, was carried out by the German Empire; it was there that the concentration camp was perfected. Germany only acknowledged its crimes a century later, in 2004, with a carefully hedged apology and no real accountability. To this day, only thirty countries recognize the Armenian genocide (1915-1917) committed by the Ottoman Empire. And this list is long: entire nations have faced expulsion and extermination, their memory buried or contested while their killers were never condemned. Recognition, if and when it comes at all, is always partial and delayed with a sanitized retrospective meant to ease the guilt of those who were complicit. The Holocaust may be the standard of that which we all universally condemn and compare to, but it is exceptional in that by design.

At the risk of sounding Huntingtonian, there is a core “civilizational” logic that sustains Zionism, beyond Israel: erasure is recast as survival, dispossession as self-defense. In this framework, the genocide in Gaza is not an aberration but it is the logical outcome; it is not unspeakable but necessary–even if sometimes tragic and “crossing a line”. 

Without the dismantling of this ideological foundation, there will be no punctuated end to the evil itself—and thus no moral correction. 

And that’s why the repression is layered so aggressively: propaganda disguised as journalism, algorithmic suppression, the shadow-banning of Palestinian voices, governments criminalizing protest, schools and workplaces punishing dissent while protecting those who cheer extermination. What we have been witnessing is the system laid bare: a system designed not just to kill, but to erase even the naming of the killing.

If moral clarity does come, it will not be against the system that carried out the extermination. It will be against the images: the photographs of starving children, the bodies pulled from rubble, tragedies easy to lament once the killing has moved out of view. It will not bring reparations or accountability or the dignity of Palestinian political existence. It will not recognize the resistance of a people who fought annihilation. Instead, it will package Palestinians as a pitiable tragedy, stripped of politics and struggle.

Gaza buried the myth that “everyone is eventually against evil.” The truth is this: Israel and the United States can cage Palestinians and starve them of food, water and light. They can burn families alive, execute fathers before their children, mark mothers with numbers and call it order for “Jewish safety.” 

And still, it won’t matter. 

It won’t matter how closely these scenes mirror history’s darkest crimes, because outrage was never about the method.

And so Gaza will not be remembered as the place where the world finally stood hand in hand and turned against unfathomable evil, but rather the place where the world chose to let it reign.