POLITICS
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
Omar El Akkad
Text, $32.99
There are too many horrific stories to recount. Tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed by Israel in Gaza since October 7, 2023, the day that Hamas attacked Israel and murdered about 1200 people, and yet we barely know any of their names or stories. The nightmares inflicted by the Israeli army, and backed, armed, defended and endorsed by virtually every Western state including Australia, has left the Gaza Strip in ruins, its civilian population destitute, maimed, hungry and trapped.
Just one example will suffice. In May last year, a senior officer in the Israeli military’s Nahal Brigade tied an explosive cord around the neck of an 80-year-old Palestinian man in the Zeitoun neighbourhood of Gaza City and forced him to be a human shield. After his job was done, the solders pushed the elderly man and his wife to flee, and both were soon executed by other soldiers.
Have you heard this tale of woe? Almost certainly not. Their lives don’t matter, at least not like Israeli hostages held by Hamas. There’s a hierarchy of compassion and Palestinians reside at the bottom. Jewish existence means more than shredded Arab bodies. As a Jew myself, this is a direct rejection of our humanistic values for millennia and yet, it’s aggressively pushed by Israel and its wild-eyed supporters across the globe.
How to describe this wilful blindness among many politicians, journalists and editors? “For now,” writes Omar El Akkad, the Egyptian-born author and journalist living in the United States, “it’s just so much easier to look away, to keep one’s head down, periodically checking on the balance of polite society to see if it’s not too troublesome yet to state what to the conscience was never unclear.”
Displaced Palestinians returning to Gaza City in January during the ceasefire.Credit: Bloomberg
In this blistering book, a response to decades of reporting on the US-led “war on terror” and the elitist response in the West to Israel’s genocide in Gaza (Israel denies the allegation it is conducting genocide), El Akkad issues a warning that the “rules-based order”, parroted as gospel from Canberra to Washington, is little more than a fig leaf for decimating brown and black bodies without remorse.
The author may live in the West but wants nothing to do with the sanctimoniously stated message that tells millions of Arabs, Muslims, black Africans and Palestinians they aren’t important, not like Israeli Jews, and certainly not like white Ukrainians or other allies of Western capitals.
All foreign journalists are banned by Israel from entering Gaza, leaving the world reliant on the remarkably brave Palestinian journalists who have been both transmitting the grim realities in their homeland and killed in record numbers by the Israeli army; 2024 was the deadliest year ever for reporters being killed while working and Israel was behind two-thirds of this death toll.
Egyptian-Canadian journalist and author Omar El Akkad.Credit: Getty Images
Have you heard the global outrage? No, me neither because Palestinian journalists are inherently suspect by virtue of their birthplace, accused of terrorism and extremism.
El Akkad notes that this is due to the “cognitive dissonance that can be seen in every corner of the [media] industry”. The “contradiction” at the heart of journalism is repeated ad nauseam by virtually every mainstream outlet. Stay neutral. Don’t be biased.
“Yet journalism at its core,” he writes, “is one of the most activist endeavours there is. A reporter is supposed to agitate against power, against privilege. Against the slimy wall of press releases and PR nothingspeak that has come to protect every major business and government boardroom ever since Watergate. A reporter is supposed to agitate against silence.”
The contempt that many especially Arab and Muslim journalists have for their profession these days is due to the hypocrisy at the heart of the industry. El Akkad states that many reporters expressed outrage when Wall Street Journal journalist Evan Gershkovich was unjustly tried in a sham Russian judicial process but suddenly lost their voices when Israel arrests, tortures and kills innumerable Palestinian journalists in the West Bank and Gaza.
“Most journalists know how to be tenacious”, El Akkad explains, and “know how to chase down a story, how to speak truth to power.” But it’s comparatively easy to do so when writing about the supposed enemies of the West.
“In articles committed by groups or nations that are not Western allies, nobody ever perishes in a blast,” he writes. “Buildings don’t collapse of their own volition. Civilian victims aren’t ordered by their interviewers to performatively condemn groups with which they have no affiliation. The violence is named, as is its perpetrator.”
Mourners wait outside a morgue for the funeral of six Palestinians killed in an Israeli airstrike in January.Credit: AP
What happens to this moral clarity when an “Arab child [is] torn to shreds by shrapnel or a black motorist shot dead in a traffic stop”? El Akkad knows the answer, and it’s damning on the entire media establishment.
His writing is crisp, powerful and haunting. There’s no hiding the author’s anger, wholly justified in this current moment, as he painstakingly details how Palestinians have been so demonised that killing them is viewed as a necessary, even noble, act.
“As the scope and scale of annihilation intensifies, an opposite presupposition becomes necessary, one that imposes onto the dead the appropriate mendacity to justify their killing … Soon, Palestinians become indistinguishable from Nazis, and then worse than Nazis.”
I’ve lost count with the number of articles and opinion pieces in the mainstream Israeli and Western press that have claimed since October 7, 2023, that Palestinians are all guilty just by being born and living in Gaza. This genocidal thinking is often perpetrated by Jewish writers, yet another stain on our beleaguered religion and morality.
El Akkad doesn’t spare any political entity, and nor should he. Though written before the return of Donald Trump to the US presidency, the Democrats are slammed as trying to convince voters that they’ll be more humane in their embrace of mass murder.
There comes a time, the author opines, “beyond which relative harm can no longer offset absolute evil. For a lot of people, genocide is that point.”
Antony Loewenstein is an independent journalist, filmmaker and author of The Palestine Laboratory (Scribe).
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