Q&A: Omar El Akkad on the War in Gaza and the Failure of Journalistic Institutions

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In the weeks after October 7, 2023, Omar El Akkad, the author and journalist, posted on X about Israel’s intense bombardment of Gaza: “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 post went viral. Around the same time, El Akkad’s editor suggested that he channel the obsessive thoughts he was having about his place in the world into writing, and so he did exactly that, without necessarily expecting to publish them. A year ago, however, his publisher decided to move forward with a book. It was initially to be titled The Glass Coffin, but was eventually renamed based on the X post: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. An editor suggested the switch; “I’m now obligated in all my interviews to mention that I didn’t just take a tweet and expand it into a two-hundred-page book,” El Akkad told me recently. The book, which came out earlier this year, is an indictment of the moral collapse of Western institutions in the wake of the war on Gaza.

To many readers and reviewers, El Akkad’s book, his first foray into nonfiction, hits many chords, eloquently echoing what so many have been feeling—utter helplessness—in the past year and a half. (He has previously written fiction, including, notably, American War, from 2017.) “Of course the Republicans would be worse,” he writes in the book, of the US elections last year. “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.”

In our recent conversation, El Akkad explained his writing process, disengaging from liberal moral frameworks, the failures of universities to handle student protests, the double standards applied to non-Western journalists, and the attempts by major institutions to appease power structures (as well as their ultimate failure to do so). We also talked about journalists from Gaza and their crucial role in covering the war. Just days after our talk, Hossam Shabat, who had reported from Gaza for Al Jazeera and Drop Site News, was killed by an Israeli strike. A message that Shabat had written to be shared in the event of his death was posted to his X account. For eighteen months, “I have dedicated every moment of my life to my people,” he wrote. “I documented the horrors in northern Gaza minute by minute, determined to show the world the truth they tried to bury. I slept on pavements, in schools, in tents—anywhere I could.… I fulfilled my duty as a journalist. I risked everything to report the truth, and now, I am finally at rest—something I haven’t known in the past 18 months.”

My conversation with El Akkad has been edited for length and clarity.

AA: How did you decide to write the book the way you did?

OEA: I found myself in a situation where so many of the institutional load-bearing beams in which I previously would have had a substantial amount of faith felt like they were crumbling around me. In the moment where you’re watching mass slaughter, I think there’s a part of you that wants desperately for your institutions to call a thing what it is, and quite the opposite was happening. When I say institutions, I mean political, cultural, academic, and, of course, media, journalistic institutions. I used to be a journalist. It was the only real job I’ve ever had. I was a reporter for ten years, and so my knowledge of the space is probably more intimate than all of those other institutional spaces. And so I knew from the moment I started writing the book that there was going to be a significant part of the manuscript dedicated to autopsying these failings that I was seeing in what used to be my day-to-day profession.

I think your publisher said that the book is a breakup letter with the West. What kind of letter is it to journalism?

There’s a chapter in the book, about fear, that took me longest to write. There’s a section where I talk about Hind Rajab [a child who was killed by Israeli forces alongside her family and two paramedics who were trying to rescue her] begging for her life. Israeli soldiers fired at least three hundred and fifty-five bullets into her car and murdered her. I talk about the word “fear” in the context of what that little girl must have felt compared to being on this side of the planet and reading a column from some opinion maker who’s deeply fearful of a bunch of student protesters, and coming to the conclusion that the word, if applied equally to both those situations, has no meaning at all. The reason I bring this up is because I think of journalism the same way. I understand that my editor or my publishing house has termed this book a kind of breakup letter with the West, and I can’t fully disagree with that, because, institutionally, that is exactly what it is. I have lost so much faith in the institutions of the Western world across the board. But individually, I don’t think I’ve ever been as inspired as I am right now—when I look at what people are willing to do individually, in solidarity with one another in community, with one another. I [think about] those student protesters in universities like Columbia and others. 

But in terms of journalism, I am equally as horrified institutionally as I am inspired individually. For the better part of a year and a half, the only information we have received from the killing fields in Gaza has come from journalists who are risking their lives to get this information out, many of whom have been executed for doing their jobs, to the deafening silence of most Western institutions that are supposed to be dedicated to the protection of those journalists. And so I come back to the same kind of calculus: if I’m going to use the word “journalism” to describe what those reporters are doing in Gaza at the risk of murder, I can’t also use it to describe a British TV newscaster who’s telling his viewers, when a four-year-old is shot to death by Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint, that a bullet “found its way into their van and hit a four-year-old young lady.” My issue is not with journalism being redeemable or irredeemable. We are witnessing some of the bravest, most profound, most necessary journalism of my lifetime right now. My issue is with using that word to describe both journalism as it should be practiced and what I consider to be institutional journalistic malpractice.

Do you think it revealed the prejudice that people from the region—from the Middle East, North Africa—are not trusted because they’re deemed too emotional, not objective, and not able to report on their own countries?

I think it’s a particularly insidious subset of a kind of all-encompassing racism that has been prevalent in this part of the world. Certainly, for as long as I can remember, we send Europeans to cover Europe all the time. Nobody blinks an eye. The idea that Arabs or Middle Easterners or North Africans or brown people in general are somehow unfit to tell their own stories doesn’t need to be dissected by me. Simply replace those ethnicities or nationalities with literally anyone else and you’ll see how plainly racist this is, and how it would be unacceptable in almost any other context.

Let’s talk about student protests, including the coverage of them.

Almost everything I’ve seen in terms of how institutions reacted to these student protests is as glaring a failure of what these institutions are supposed to represent as anything I’ve seen in the last year and a half, and possibly in my entire adult life. Across the board, it is a failure. 

More than education, more than granting degrees, more than literally anything else, the chief responsibility of universities—and I include Columbia here at the top of the list, because its failure has been the most glaring—is to protect students, to keep them safe. That is what you are supposed to do, and you have done the exact opposite. It is, secondly, frustrating because every single time an institution has engaged in this kind of repression and this kind of antagonism, history has been deeply unkind. We see it in the protests against the war in Vietnam; we see it in the protests against the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq; we see it time and again, and the same pattern repeats itself, and these people who are supposed to be in charge of institutions of higher learning and reason are failing the test entirely. It is then infuriating on a third level, because the power centers that these institutions are looking to appease cannot be appeased. And so you do the dirty work on behalf of an administration that despises these students, despises free speech, and then you’re punished regardless because you can’t appease an insatiable entity.

In your journalistic work, how did you cover the effects of US foreign policy?

While there are so many tremendous journalists working in this country, there is an almost endemic sense that however it works in the United States is just the way it works. And that tends to undercut so much of the reporting about this country by journalists based in this country, this kind of common denominator that renders whatever happens in the United States endlessly normal. Some of the best coverage that I saw about the United States for years was from the US arm of Al Jazeera, back when it was doing work here, because the reporters couldn’t take all of that for granted. It wasn’t simply the case that gun violence had to be as pervasive as it is, or that the healthcare system has to be as ruinous as it is. I don’t think you can commit to the idea of a permanent normalcy around US affairs and not tie that to a conscious or subconscious deference to American centers of power. And this, of course, becomes most glaring and most ruinous when we are talking about power being expressed in the most physically violent ways. I came of age during the post-9/11 years. Watching that machine enact its violence on quite literally millions of civilians around the world, and then watching it be undercut in the reporting as something necessary or normalized, was maybe the most egregious example of that kind of deference to power that I’ve ever seen in my life.

How would you like young journalists to receive your book?

I’ve learned over the course of three books that the things I write and the many things that people read tend to have almost no relationship at all. My hope as it relates to young journalists in particular is that they will make time at every point in their career to gauge the distance between the stories as they would report and write them in a vacuum with no external pressure, and the stories as they would report and write them under those external pressures. By external pressures, I mean the fear of advertising being pulled, the fear of access being pulled, the fear of their careers being derailed: all of the pressures that every journalist knows intimately are always at play. I would ask them to constantly ask themselves: What is the distance between the story as I would report it in a vacuum and the story as if I’m reporting it in reality? Because that distance is my definition of journalistic malpractice. 

Was it easy to get a publisher?

Going into it, I genuinely thought there was no way in hell this book was getting published—and so when my publisher decided to take a chance on it, that completely rearranged my thinking about the public life of the book. It would have been so much easier to just let this book go. And in a number of regions, that’s exactly what happened. We couldn’t find a publisher in France. We had numerous publishers bail on it in Germany and some other regions in Europe. To be fair, there were regions where the opposite was true. We had, I think, five or six publishers bid on it in the UK, for example. My Canadian publisher didn’t blink. They acquired it immediately. But one of the things to keep in mind is that this is happening in early 2024. And this is a moment that is changing culturally, I think, very, very quickly. To be in a position to make a decision on a book like this in late 2023 or early 2024 is different, I think, than the way publishers are responding to it right now.

And how did you think of the coverage of the book by the very same journalistic institutions that you critique in it?

There are so many things that a year and a half or two years ago I would have cared about deeply that I now simply don’t give a shit about even a little, and that includes reviews in the big publications or sales numbers or what this book might do to my career, be it positive or negative. A couple of years ago, if you told me any of this, I wouldn’t have believed you. Those things were deeply, deeply important to me. I should say there’s not a single thing in this book that I interrogate or indict or autopsy in which I’m not complicit. I am that middle-of-the-road liberal whose tax money is paying to kill those kids, and I was happy to be that person for the vast majority of my adult life, because it was easy and it was rewarding, and I could put the Black Lives Matter sign on my lawn, and hold all of the correct opinions as they relate to my social circles and my acceptability at dinner parties and step away when things got a little too risky in a personal sense. The epitome of such a thing being Palestine and Palestinians. All of that was available to me. And just because the horrors of the last year and a half have forced me to take my leave of it—and if I was braver, I would have taken my leave of it earlier—doesn’t change the fact that I have no idea who the hell I am now because I’ve come untethered from an orientation that was more than good enough for me for most of my life.

What is so meaningless now?

Accolades or awards or professional aspirations. When you look at the underpinnings of these things, they’re almost always tied to some kind of higher calling or purpose. This is particularly true of journalism; both in Canada and the United States and, I suspect, in many other places, the highest journalism awards are related to the idea of public service and effecting positive change. If you are going to tether your sense of self-worth or your professional aspirations to something like that, you have to believe in those underpinnings. If that suddenly ceases to be the case, then we’re talking about fancy trinkets and a little bit of prize money.

There was a version of me whose entire sense of self-worth was related to what the writing did in terms of accolades or awards or sales figures for books. I can’t do that anymore, because I don’t believe that a lot of the underpinnings of these things are worth a damn, because I’ve seen them not be applied when the moment called for it most vehemently. But one of the reasons I have a career of any kind is because of those accolades, and I can’t sit here and pretend that winning the Giller Prize [a Canadian literary award] or two Oregon Book Awards or having a bestseller didn’t pay immense dividends in my career. They absolutely did. But I come back to the same thing. I’ve come untethered from that particular orientation, and I don’t know who I am on the other side of it.

What’s next for you?

I’m hoping to disappear off the face of the earth for a month or two and try to answer that question I just posed. The things you hear [at book events], in the signing line and when people come up to you afterwards, are unlike anything I’ve heard in my life—I’ve had people come up to me who’ve lost entire swaths of their families; people who’ve been beaten up by the cops at protests and are now waiting to find out if they’re going to go to jail or not. The stakes of what people are going through make it impossible for me to approach my craft with the same kind of preciousness that I used to. A lot of things feel very trivial right now, but the only thing I know how to do is write, and so my plan is to go back to the woods in Portland and try to write my way into an understanding of who it is that I am now.

Other notable stories:

• Yesterday, the fallout continued from Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg’s revelation that Michael Waltz, Trump’s national security adviser, accidentally added him to a nonsecure group chat in which top officials discussed strikes on Yemen (which we wrote about in yesterday’s newsletter). According to various reports, Trump was unhappy with the embarrassing headlines spawned by the episode—and suspicious as to why Waltz had the number of Goldberg (who Trump hates)—but has publicly backed Waltz and attacked the media instead. Waltz himself has done likewise, including in an incoherent interview on Fox in which he notionally took responsibility but also gestured at there being something suspicious about Goldberg’s presence in the chat. He also described Goldberg as “scum.”
  
• Fallout continues, too, from the administration’s recent moves to slash funding for broadcasters under the aegis of the US Agency for Global Media (which we’ve also covered in this newsletter). Earlier this week, USAGM agreed to disburse some funds to one of the broadcasters that it had moved to cut off, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty; then, yesterday, a judge temporarily blocked the administration from terminating RFE/RL’s federal funding, ruling that doing so would violate a mandate from Congress. Meanwhile, L. Brent Bozell III, a critic of supposed liberal media bias whom Trump had previously nominated to lead USAGM, will reportedly now be tapped for ambassador to South Africa instead.
  
• The Washington Post’s Jeremy Barr assessed how the Associated Press is (and isn’t) still managing to cover the White House, ahead of a hearing tomorrow in a case that the agency brought after the administration banned it from covering official events for refusing to uniformly refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America” in line with Trump’s wishes. The agency has paid to fly in AP reporters who belong to overseas press pools to cover events involving Trump and world leaders. And reporters in the US have continued to show up for events only to be turned away—performing “Schrödinger’s Pool Duty,” as one journalist put it.
  
• Julie Cohen, a documentary filmmaker, has resigned from the selection committee for the duPont-Columbia Awards, a set of prizes for audio and video reporting administered by Columbia University, in protest of concessions that the school recently made to the Trump administration, Poynter’s Tom Jones reports. Cohen said that her decision was not “personal” toward the awards or Columbia’s journalism school (where CJR is based), but that she no longer wishes to be associated with Columbia and saw an opportunity to take a broader stand.
  
• And for CJR, Charles M. Sennott, a journalist and editor who has critically covered the Trump administration and DOGE, reflects on the complications posed by the fact that his son now works for the General Services Administration and is thus part of the “broad effort that the public has come to know as DOGE,” even if “that acronym and the scorn heaped upon it overlooks the long history of presidents seeking efficiency in government.” (Sennott’s son has refused to speak with reporters and made “no special exception” for Sennott—though “it is fair to say I have developed some solid ‘background’ material as his father.”)

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