One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Summary, Analysis and Themes

One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been by Omar El Akkad is a searing, deeply personal meditation by Omar El Akkad on war, exile, complicity, and moral clarity in a collapsing world.

Blending memoir, political essay, and cultural critique, the book interrogates Western liberalism’s hollow moral posturing in the face of atrocities like the Gaza genocide. Through reflections on migration, identity, language, journalism, and parenthood, El Akkad maps the internal landscapes of grief and disillusionment. His writing is urgent, mournful, and unflinchingly honest—an effort to name what must be named, to resist erasure, and to confront the violence of systems that claim virtue while perpetuating harm.

Summary

One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been unfolds as a powerful and unrelenting confrontation with the self, empire, and the machinery of modern liberalism. Structured across ten thematic chapters, it opens with “Departure,” where Omar El Akkad juxtaposes the innocence of his daughter building an imaginary city in Oregon with the devastation unfolding in Gaza.

This contrast becomes a foundational tension: how does one protect their child from a world steeped in systemic violence while remaining morally honest?

His own journey—from Egypt to Qatar to North America—is a story of physical and ideological departure, shaped by repression, racism, and survival under empire.

In “Witness,” El Akkad explores the burden of seeing. Recounting his arrival in Canada and his path into journalism, he reflects on the limits of “objectivity,” particularly in covering atrocities like those in Gaza.

Western media, he argues, often hides behind euphemisms, stripping violence of its moral weight and sanitizing genocide into palatable headlines. True witnessing, El Akkad insists, requires naming perpetrators and refusing neutrality.

“Values” deepens the moral critique by addressing assimilation and inherited silence. A humiliating episode at the U.S. border involving his father becomes emblematic of how immigrant dignity is always conditional.

El Akkad rejects celebratory narratives of immigration, exposing how the West demands not just labor but quiet compliance. He sees in his own parenting a reflection of the colonial logic passed down across generations: speak the language of power, wear the mask, survive.

The fourth chapter, “Language,” focuses on how words can reveal or erase. El Akkad mourns the loss of Arabic’s emotional richness and condemns the bureaucratic, dehumanizing vocabulary used to describe war—terms like “collateral damage” or “conflict.”

Language becomes a weapon that comforts the powerful while concealing horror. To reclaim truth, we must resist linguistic complicity.

“Resistance” interrogates how the West frames defiance. Resistance is only romanticized once it’s safely buried in history; while alive, it is labeled terrorism.

El Akkad reflects on how his ancestors assimilated to survive, yet laments the psychic damage of that submission. He exposes the hypocrisy of demanding that Palestinians resist politely, within frameworks designed to defeat them.

Real resistance, he suggests, is simply the refusal to disappear.

In “Craft,” El Akkad turns the lens inward. As a writer, he confronts his own compromises—softening language, self-censoring, or packaging pain for liberal readers.

He rejects the idea of neutral storytelling. Craft, for him, must serve moral clarity.

Art detached from justice is not harmless—it enables harm.

The chapter “Lesser Evils” dissects the logic of liberal pragmatism, where choosing the “lesser evil” becomes a habit of excusing systemic violence. El Akkad critiques Western voters, journalists, and politicians who tolerate genocide as long as it is polite or strategic.

He reflects on his own silences and rejects the fetish for nuance when it obstructs truth.

In “Fear,” he examines how fear is wielded by both empires and authoritarian regimes to control people. It’s also internalized—used to justify apathy or complicity.

El Akkad explores how he, too, was deformed by fear, made quiet when he should have spoken.

“Leavetaking” marks a break—not just from places or traditions, but from belief in systems that mask cruelty as order. El Akkad recounts personal and ideological partings, recognizing that comfort in the West requires forgetting the cost.

He chooses not to forget.

Finally, in “Arrival,” he offers no redemption, but a form of clarity. Having grieved illusions, he arrives at conviction: that silence is no longer tolerable, and that writing must now serve testimony.

There is no return to neutrality or comfort—only the ongoing, unflinching work of naming violence, resisting complicity, and refusing to look away.

Analysis of the Important Characters and Institutions

The characters in One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been are not just individuals, but representations of larger themes and struggles—migration, memory, resistance, and the moral and emotional costs of confronting systemic injustice. 

The protagonist and narrator, Omar El Akkad, plays a pivotal role, but the book is more about the emotional and ideological transformations of various figures that represent both personal and collective histories.

Omar El Akkad

Omar El Akkad is the central character of the book, and his journey is one of self-reflection and critique. His experiences as an immigrant from Egypt, his dual consciousness as a journalist, and his role as a father highlight the tension between personal survival and the moral demands of history.

Through his eyes, readers witness the horrors of war, the dehumanization of others, and the internal conflicts of trying to live with a clear conscience in a world rife with violence. Omar’s identity as both an insider and outsider—shaped by a rich cultural heritage, but also marked by the alienation of immigration—makes him a deeply complex character.

He struggles with how to balance his own survival with the duty to speak truth to power, especially when faced with the systemic oppression that marks both his homeland and his adopted countries.

His Family

Omar’s family also plays an important role in the book. His father, whose humiliating encounter with Egyptian soldiers catalyzes the family’s migration, represents the generations of people who endure trauma and seek refuge elsewhere.

The family’s experience is a microcosm of the broader immigrant struggle—marked by the anxiety of assimilation and the fear of erasure. The relationship between Omar and his daughter is particularly poignant, as he grapples with the desire to shield her from the harsh realities of the world while still wanting her to understand her heritage.

His family’s journey is not just physical but emotional, as they leave behind their past lives in search of a future that can never truly erase their experiences of loss.

The Victims of War

The victims of war, especially in Gaza, serve as symbolic characters that represent the ongoing violence and destruction inflicted upon marginalized peoples. Through the brutal images of wounded children and the victims of the Gaza genocide, the victims become more than just statistics—they embody the trauma of generations, the consequence of political apathy, and the human cost of imperialism.

They serve as the silent witnesses to the narrative, urging the protagonist to confront his complicity in systems that perpetuate violence.

Western Institutions

Western institutions, particularly those representing the media, political systems, and liberal democracies, function as antagonistic characters throughout the narrative. These institutions are not individuals but serve as forces that perpetuate systemic violence, sanitize language, and normalize injustice.

The media’s role in framing narratives, the political establishment’s reliance on “lesser evils,” and the cultural institutions that profit from marginalizing non-Western voices all serve as characters in their own right. They are the mechanisms of power that the protagonist must contend with, often feeling powerless against their vast influence.

These institutions represent the moral failures of the West—its failure to truly address the atrocities it enables, and its continued denial of the full humanity of the oppressed.

Resistance Figures

Finally, there are the figures of resistance—those who, in the face of overwhelming odds, refuse to accept erasure. These characters, though not always in the spotlight, embody the quiet acts of defiance that are necessary for survival.

Their resistance is not always violent or confrontational but often subtle, as they preserve memory, identity, and truth in a world that seeks to erase them. Their stories are often told in silence, but they echo through the protagonist’s narrative as a reminder of the need to resist even when the outcome seems uncertain.

Analysis of Themes

The Inherited Logic of Exile and the Compulsion of Leavetaking as a Generational Survival Mechanism

Omar El Akkad constructs a haunting tapestry of departures—literal, ideological, spiritual—that run through generations. Migration is never painted as a singular act of hope or adventure but as a pattern of forced abandonment, a survival instinct shaped by authoritarianism, war, and empire.

From his father’s coercive exit from Egypt to El Akkad’s own transplantation to Canada, and even the metaphorical departure from belief in Western liberal values, the book traces how exile is both a family heirloom and a political inevitability. The leavetaking is never merely spatial; it’s an unraveling of one’s past, culture, and illusions.

El Akkad unflinchingly maps how systems of oppression leave the colonized with little choice but to flee. And how even flight rarely offers sanctuary from violence, suspicion, or alienation.

Linguistic Imperialism and the Weaponization of Neutral Language in the Age of Genocide

A central argument woven through the chapters is that language is never innocent. In the West, institutional language—the kind used by journalists, politicians, and bureaucrats—is shown to serve empire by obscuring atrocity.

Words like “airstrikes,” “clashes,” or “collateral damage” drain moral urgency from violence, especially in contexts like Gaza. El Akkad juxtaposes this with the intimate, lyrical vocabulary of Arabic, whose emotional weight cannot be carried into English without loss.

He forces the reader to recognize that dominant linguistic norms are not merely a tool of communication but a regime of erasure. Through media, schooling, and even casual conversation, the language of the colonizer not only narrates events—it defines what suffering is legible, and whose lives are considered mournable.

The act of naming, in his telling, becomes a battleground of its own.

Moral Disintegration of Western Liberalism and the Collapse of Selective Empathy

Throughout One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been, El Akkad dismantles the ideological scaffolding of Western liberalism, particularly its pretense of moral leadership and human rights. What once appeared as flawed but improvable governance is revealed, in his eyes, as an irredeemable system built on hypocrisy.

The liberal fixation on process—civility, dialogue, balance—becomes complicit when it mutes or rationalizes genocide. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the West’s reaction to Gaza: a chilling moral void filled with platitudes, conditional sympathy, and euphemisms.

El Akkad’s severance from Western ideology is not a turn to cynicism, but a moral reckoning. For him and for many disillusioned readers, this is an arrival at clarity: that one cannot both uphold empire and honor justice.

Empathy that hinges on political convenience is not empathy at all—it is denial masquerading as virtue.

The Aestheticization of Suffering and the Ethical Crisis of Literary Craft under Empire

In grappling with his role as a writer, El Akkad interrogates the ethics of storytelling in a world on fire. He exposes how Western literary institutions commodify the trauma of others—particularly marginalized voices—for the consumption of elite audiences.

There is a tension between craft and conscience. Can a well-turned phrase justify itself if it hides complicity?

Is there beauty in ambiguity when the subject is mass death? These questions are not rhetorical but existential.

El Akkad ultimately rejects aesthetic detachment in favor of moral urgency. Writing, he insists, is not merely an artistic act—it is an act of witnessing.

The book advocates for storytelling as resistance, not performance. A sentence must serve truth, or it risks becoming yet another structure that prettifies brutality.

Resistance Vilified in the Present, Romanticized in the Past, Silenced in Real Time

El Akkad’s treatment of resistance is layered with historical betrayal and present-day erasure. He observes how acts of defiance—especially from colonized or occupied peoples—are rarely honored in their own time.

Resistance that inconveniences empire is branded terrorism. While sanitized versions are later lionized for liberal comfort.

This paradox is central to understanding how imperial powers maintain control. By determining not just who can resist, but when, how, and in what language that resistance becomes acceptable.

El Akkad refuses this moral trap. He draws a line between resistance as violence and resistance as memory, as refusal, as truth-telling.

Even survival becomes a form of resistance in systems designed to erase. He shows that to resist is not always to win—but it is to assert one’s humanity against the machinery of erasure.

The Myth of the Lesser Evil as the Central Ideology of Modern Complicity

Few themes are as scathing as El Akkad’s indictment of the “lesser evil” paradigm that underpins liberal democracy. He argues that by continually asking citizens to choose between degrees of harm, society trains itself to accept harm as a baseline.

This logic has hollowed political discourse into a language of compromise where morality is always deferred, never demanded. From electoral politics to global warfare, the ideology of lesser evilism permits structural violence under the guise of pragmatism.

What emerges is a culture of fatalistic moderation. Where critique is seen as idealistic or naïve, and silence becomes a mark of maturity.

El Akkad challenges this orthodoxy by reframing so-called radicalism as the only ethical response to moral collapse. True politics, he contends, must reject harm altogether—not merely ration it more “reasonably.”

Fear as a Mechanism of Control, Internalization, and Deferred Accountability

The book’s exploration of fear transcends mere anxiety. It is about the deep psychological architecture that underlies both authoritarian and liberal regimes.

El Akkad traces how fear is institutionalized in places like post-9/11 North America and Mubarak-era Egypt alike. It is weaponized to discipline behavior, stifle dissent, and manufacture obedience.

But the more insidious effect is fear’s internalization. He writes of people—immigrants, minorities, even the liberal middle class—who police themselves in anticipation of punishment, erasing parts of themselves to remain palatable or invisible.

This self-surveillance becomes a form of moral deformation. By naming fear not as a private emotion but as a public tool of control, El Akkad indicts the systems that profit from keeping populations afraid.

He calls for a collective courage rooted not in bravado, but in clarity and truth.