Writer Taffy Brodsesser-Akner has a question. A friend asks if she’ll interview her father, a Holocaust survivor who’s been given a terminal cancer diagnosis. The friend has asked before, and Brodesser-Akner has repeatedly refused. After being battered by stories of genocide at her Jewish high school, she’s decided she’s going to push her preoccupation with the Holocaust aside and live a normal life.

“I would survive my education,” she writes in a New York Times magazine article, “and try to live like a real American, to enjoy the life that liberation had granted me, to see what that was like.”

Yet she eventually gives in to her friend’s plea. Increasingly distressed by the rising tide of antisemitism in the U.S., she does the interview. And remains conflicted.

“How am I supposed to live?” she asks. “That’s my real question, maybe my only one…Does a life have to be meaningful? Can’t it just be a life?”

I wrote about Brodesser-Akner’s story last time, a deeply-affecting piece called “The Last Survivors.” As it happens, I read the same week as I read Omar Akkad’s moving book about Gaza, One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, and I found the two stories spoke to each other. 

El Akkad says he’s found it almost impossible to live a normal life lately himself, unable to stop thinking about genocide as his people suffer: Brown people like him, Muslim people, people with roots like his in the Middle East: Palestinians facing genocide.

By now, most of us know the date. The latest round of violence in the Mideast began on October 7, 2023, when Hamas broke out of Gaza to kill 1,200 Israelis and kidnap 250 others. It’s an outrage that El Akkad acknowledges in one brief paragraph, just as Brodesser-Akner gives only a quick nod to the Israeli response. As I’ve written, both are overwhelmingly concerned with what Spanish-speakers call su gente, their own people. 

Yet it’s true the Israeli response has been appalling: a scorched-earth campaign of bombing combined with a blockade that has killed more than 85,000 Palestinians over the past 21 months, according to a new, independent survey. More than half were women, children and people over 65. El Akkad’s book is a howl of protest against this. It’s a polemic, an accusation, a cry of anguish.

It’s also primarily about himself, something else that’s true of Brodesser-Akner’s story as well. No blame. Editors and publishers often look for a personal approach these days, hoping it makes a difficult story more approachable. And since El Akkad is a very good writer, a journalist turned novelist, he does this fluidly and fluently. As I’ve written, I admire his novel What Strange Paradise, which won the Giller Prize in 2021: a pocket-sized book of 235 pages about a nine-year-old Syrian boy taken on board a disastrously-overloaded refugee ship that capsizes in the Mediterranean.

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is even shorter, only 188 pages, and it’s El Akkad’s first book of non-fiction. It’s a contentious book, but one I broadly agree with–certainly when he writes about the horrs in Gaza, which are getting worse every day. As starvation sets in, outrage is growing around the world.

It’s not important in itself, but I’ve been taking part in protests recently in Toronto, Feminists Against Genocide, organized by writer Michelle Landsberg and her daughter Ilana. Just show up wearing black outside the Israeli consulate on Friday, she says, and we’ll have signs protesting the genocide and starvation in Gaza. 

With very little prompting, a couple of hundred women showed up for the first demo. Many of the passing cars honked their horns in support, bicyclists made peace signs and a bus driver gave a fist pump. The second time, even more women showed up.

So I’m against what’s going on, too. It’s horrendous. Awful. Yet I have trouble with some of El Akkad’s arguments, not just his downplaying of the actions of Hamas on October 7, but also his take on the 2024 U.S. presidential election.

El Akkad finished the book before Donald Trump was elected, but the campaign was well underway as he wrote. Given the Democrats’ persistent support of Israel, he had no time for their presidential candidate, Kamala Harris. I could never grasp, myself, why Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu received such unqualified support, not only from Joe Biden in the White House, but also from Canada and much of Europe, at least until very recently.

Yet if you paid attention to Trump’s speeches and rallies, it was clear he would be far worse.

“Of course the Republicans would be worse,” writes El Akkad. “What the mainstream Democrat seems incapable of accepting is that, for an even remotely-functioning conscience, there exists a point beyond which relative harm can no longer offset absolute evil. For a lot of people, genocide is that point. Suddenly, an otherwise very persuasive argument takes on a different meaning: ‘Vote for the liberal though he harms you because the conservative will harm you more’ starts to sound like ‘Vote for the liberal though he harms you because the conservative might harm me, too.’”

So who is the “me” now being “relatively” harmed by Donald Trump’s presidency? 

Maybe not the ICE agents showing up in random neighbourhoods, masked and driving unmarked cars, but perhaps the people they’ve seized. Up to 59,000 of them are now being held across the country, according to CBS News. And what about the U.S.-born children of foreign parents who have been summarily deported, one of them critically ill with stage 4 cancer? Then there’s the planeload of deportees sent to prison in El Salvador, even though Trump’s allegation they are gang members has been repeatedly challenged in court. They’ve fallen out of the news because of all the more recent outrages, but most remain in a dire super-prison in El Salvador, even though most have no criminal records, and lawyers say the tattoos many sport are fashion statements, not signs of gang affiliation.

According to a study by The Lancet, cuts to USAid could mean an additional 14 million deaths around the world by 2030, including 4.5 million children under five years of age. Children are already dying as I write. As part of its war on universities, the administration is also defunding medical research, including a $258 million program considered crucial to discovering HIV vaccines. Then there are the uncounted numbers of ordinary Americans at risk of losing their pensions, their health insurance, their farms and jobs, many facing personal disaster after former presidential advisor Elon Musk chain-sawed his way through the U.S. government.

I wonder if El Akkad doesn’t consider them his people. If so, I would call this a failure of both imagination and empathy. Yet people with whom he identifies are suffering under Trump as well, including pro-Palestinian student protesters like Mohsen K. Mahwadi of Columbia University, scooped into jail without charge after ten years’ legal residence in the U.S. and held for 100 days, not because he’s alleged to have committed illegal acts, but for exercising his freedom of speech.

There’s also Rumeysa Ozturk, another legal U.S. resident who co-authored an op-ed piece in the Tufts University student newspaper. According to a New York magazine round-up, the op-ed “rejected the school’s ‘wholly inadequate and dismissive response’ to student movements in support of Palestine and its failure to ‘acknowledge the Palestinian genocide.’ Friends of Ozturk’s told the Associated Press that beyond contributing to the op-ed, she hadn’t really been involved in campus protests.”

Would Harris have done that?

And what about the people in Gaza, Palestinians who are dying just as bloodily on the Republicans’ watch? It’s true that Donald Trump occasionally calls for an end to the war, in between saying he should get a Nobel Peace Prize over allegedly ending hostilities between Israel and Iran. Last January, he also floated the idea of clearing all 2.5 million Palestinians out of Gaza so he could turn it into a luxury resort.

El Akkad’s analysis of the U.S. election forms only one part of his book, but I find it symptomatic of a problem that keeps surfacing throughout. He focuses so fully on himself and his argument that he quotes few Palestinians and tells almost none of their stories. The IDF bars journalists from entering Gaza, but there’s no evidence that El Akkad sought to interview Palestinians in the West Bank or Israel, either in person or long distance. I find his failure to engage infuriating when I agree with his main point. Yet in a book about Palestine, where are the Palestinians?

At times I put El Akkad’s book aside, tired of the barrage of opinions. What made me keep picking it up again was curiosity about the man himself.

I admit, I started reading the book as if El Akkad were the complex protagonist in a deeply-imagined novel. Between the lines, he comes across as a fascinating, observant, combative and conflicted man.  He writes of being born in Egypt, not Palestine, and of growing up privileged in Qatar. He’s the son of a luxury hotel manager, his life constrained by Qatar’s authoritarian government but made comfortable by money and servants. After immigrating to Canada with his family as a teenager, he finds himself an outsider, possessed of less money, holding far less privilege, and facing racism as he battles to reach his goals.

Yet, like a Dickensian hero, El Akkad soon gets what he wants. Or at least, what he thinks he wants. First he’s accepted into the elite Queen’s University, and from there he’s hired as a young business reporter on The Globe and Mail, Canada’s national newspaper. He says this coveted job rather bores him, but he’s soon assigned to cover headline-grabbing international stories. My husband worked at the Globe, mainly covering international news, and while he doesn’t remember meeting El Akkad, he can tell you how rare it is to achieve that level of success.

Then El Akkad leaves the Globe to write fiction, although he doesn’t say why he takes this decision or how he floats it economically—which, speaking as a novelist, I always find enormously interesting. I can’t help wondering if the woman he’s married to initially supports him and their children, maybe since my husband has at times supported me.

In any case, his first novel, American War, becomes a prizewinning international bestseller, published in 13 countries, a lucky break that very few writers get. He follows it up by writing What Strange Paradise, which in 2021 wins the $100,000 Giller Prize, Canada’s richest literary award.

Jump cut. Two years after El Akkad wins the award, protesters rush the stage at the Giller ceremony. It’s November, 2023. Israel’s war on Gaza is underway, and they’re protesting the fact that Scotiabank, the Giller’s sponsor, is heavily invested in the Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit Systems, which builds bombs designed for use in “heavily-populated urban areas.”

Writes El Akkad, “Watching the footage of the demonstration later, what fascinates me isn’t the smattering of boos from the audience as the protesters take to the stage, it isn’t even the protest itself—it’s all the people in that room, so many of them either involved in or so vocally supportive of literature, who keep their heads down, say nothing, wait for it all to just be done. A room full of storytellers, and so many of them suddenly finding common cause in silence.”

He adds, “I so desperately want to believe that, were I in the ballroom that night, I would have done something different. Maybe I wouldn’t have, maybe I would have been silent too.”

It’s fascinating to read such honesty coupled with such scorn, even though he can’t know the feelings of people who were there. I wasn’t among them, but I know who some of them were, and would imagine their opinions covered a spectrum. This isn’t the only time in the book that El Akkad rockets from an honest acknowledgement of his privilege to resentment at what he perceives as the privilege of others; from enjoying his success to rejecting it, and depicting himself once again as an outsider. I found it hard to work out what he enjoys more, although I eventually wondered if El Akkad feels most at home at a place where he can both enjoy privilege and reject it.

Take his revealing interview with CBC Radio host Elamin Abdelmahmood in July, 2024, when he says that winning the Giller changed his life.

“It saved my career,” he says. “I had this book that nobody cared about, and then suddenly everybody cared about it. Also,Wishlist it gave me a kind of confidence — everything that you would expect from winning an award of that magnitude.”

But, he adds, “Most of the money is still sitting in the bank. In fact, the most of that money that I have spent is taxes on that money…. Having the money sitting there in a bank account is a kind of stability, of course. But in terms of actually going out and buying a Maserati or something, that never happened.”

Nor, apparently, did he donate the money to an organization that helps people in Gaza, or at least donate the interest on the money, which one hopes he’d invested ethically. Perhaps Akkad has found a way to deploy it over the past year; I have no idea. 

Meanwhile, there was no hint in either the book or other online articles about why he and his wife moved to the States, why they became citizens, why he doesn’t leave, and whether he spends his time working in journalism, writing fiction, protesting or being afraid to protest in case he ends up in prison himself. While appearing candid, he’s actually rather chary with biographical facts.

(I did find one personal detail in a 2021 issue of the climbing magazine Gripped, where an article about El Akkad is headlined: “Canadian Climber Wins $100,000 Giller Prize.”)

His reticence is both frustrating and fascinating. I understand, of course, why El Akkad wants to protect his family, but I’m not sure that withholding so much helps his argument. Was he afraid to write this book? Yes? No? Why? 

As I said earlier, writers have been advised for years now to insert themselves into their writing. Taffy Brodesser-Akner does it with great emotional honesty and an unbridled sense of humour, Omar El Akkad in a more intellectualized fashion. I have no any idea in either case if this is a matter of personality or a chosen persona. 

The problem is, writers can get so attached to their voices, real or amplified, that they out-shout others in their own work. (Where are the Palestinians?) I have an idea this trend may have begun as editors became wary of people who wrote with great authority about groups of people to which they didn’t belong. 

It’s more ethical for writers and safer for publishers if authors write about themselves and their gente. Yet in this age of selfies and social media, personal journalism has roared into overdrive, and I sometimes wonder if that’s one cause of the lack of respect for journalism as a whole these days. It can seem too full of itself, too knowing, and too self-involved. 

I’m glad I read both Brodesser-Akner’s article and El Akkad’s book. and both are well worth reading. Yet humility is a virtue, I think. Restraint, empathy, making connections. 

It would also be nice if there were peace in the world, as both writers hope, and safety for the children.

Not that there ever has been, I’m afraid.

This is the third in a series of three posts. You can read the first one here and the second one here. And let me know what you think.