Omar El Akkad on Gaza, Power, and the Stories Empires Steal

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https://www.thestranger.com/books/2025/02/26/79942126/author-qanda-omar-el-akkad-on-gaza-power-and-the-stories-empires-steal

Feb 26, 2025 at 2:45 pm
Author Q&A: Omar El Akkad on Gaza, Power, and the Stories Empires Steal

The award-winning author discusses his urgent new book and why we must resist the impulse to forget.

EMMA PATTEE

It all began with a tweet.

In October 2023, weeks after Israel began bombing Gaza, the writer Omar El Akkad shared a video showing a destroyed city street in Gaza.

El Akkad 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 tweet went viral.

El Akkad, who was born in Egypt and grew up in Qatar and Canada, now lives in Lake Oswego. His previous novels, American War and What Strange Paradise, received significant critical acclaim. The New York Times called America War, “a disturbing parable about the ruinous consequences of war on ordinary civilians,” and BBC named it one of the 100 most influential novels of all time. What Strange Paradise won the 2021 Giller Prize, an Oregon Book Award, and was a finalist for the 2022 Aspen Words Literary Prize.

Now, what began within the constraints of 280 characters has become a blazing and feral work of nonfiction. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is El Akkad is at his most exacting. The book is the story of El Akkad’s immigration to the West, his lessons in hypocrisy working as a staff reporter for a paper in Canada and reporting on some of the biggest conflicts of the past two decades, and an evisceration of the entire concept of empire.

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