Omar El Akkad: "One day everyone will say they were against the genocide in Gaza."

BarcelonaOmar El Akkad (Cairo, 1982) was born in Egypt, raised in Qatar, and when he was a teenager, his parents dragged him to Canada. He was already old enough to realize that, in this new environment, record stores sold Nirvana's album with the cover of an uncensored naked baby. Or that he could go to the library and borrow any book he wanted. He grew up idealizing the United States as the homeland of freedom and made a career as a journalist with the Canadian newspaper Globe and Mail, for whom he covered the invasion of Afghanistan, the Iraq war, Guantanamo Bay prison and the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt in 2011. He has published two award-winning novels, American War, that imagines the United States torn apart by war and climate change, and What a strange paradise, the story of a Syrian boy who survives a shipwreck in Greece. Despite all the disasters he'd seen, he still thought the West was a good place to live. Until the response to the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023. Now he's visited Barcelona to present his new book. Someday everyone will have always been against you. (La Otra Editorial, Spanish edition by Libros del Kultrum).

What will we think of the genocide in Gaza when we look back?

— One day, when he's no longer dangerous, when calling things by their name no longer has consequences, when it's too late to demand accountability, everyone will have been against him all along. This is what I wrote in a tweet on October 25, 2023, to denounce the complicity of the centers of political, cultural, and ideological power, with silence, justifications, or explicit support.

A reality check?

— All my life, I tried to convince myself that there were values in the West, and when these values didn't fit with reality, I tried to believe it was just a specific situation and move on with my life. Trying to speak the way winners sound. But in the last 20 months, this has imploded. I couldn't carry on as if nothing had happened. Especially because I'm directly complicit in what's happening in Gaza. Because I wake up every day and see the worst images imaginable, and I know I'm complicit because I live where I live. The West has made this genocide possible: it hasn't just looked the other way, it has been actively involved in it.

As?

— There is military and diplomatic support, but beyond that, public opinion is manipulated. As happened with the lie that Hamas had decapitated 40 babies on October 7. A lie that Biden repeated and that was published on the front pages of many newspapers. In reality, the story itself wasn't very important: the important thing was that it was assumed that these people were capable of doing such a thing. The same thing happened with the lie about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. A narrative has been constructed that covers up the continuing horror in Gaza. We have also seen videos of Israeli soldiers raping a Palestinian prisoner, but they haven't had the same impact. We can assume that some human groups are monsters and others are not.

To massacre, it is first necessary to dehumanize.

— Yeah. Try this: take the title of any novel, of any genre, and add the word Palestinian and think how it would be received: The Palestinian Da Vinci Code, Palestinian Crime and PunishmentYo, One Hundred Years of Palestinian SolitudeIt will become an uncomfortable title. It already happened to Edward Said when he suggested to an American publisher that they translate the work of the Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz: the publisher rejected it, saying, "Yes, it's good, but Arabic is a controversial language." Then Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize for Literature. All this imagery is necessary for the horror to continue. Because there must be a monster in the equation. If Palestinians are savages, barbaric, inhumane... everything is justified. The moment you see them as human beings, you must accept that you too are complicit in the horror. And it's much easier not to. Especially where I live, where many people, in their entire lives, will never have met a Palestinian. This facilitates genocide, but at the same time, it destroys our humanity.

And where is journalism?

— I've been touring the world for months to present the book, and I've spoken with many journalists who are absolutely horrified by the treatment their media is receiving. Including some of the largest newspapers in the United States. There's an incredible disconnect between what journalists see on the ground and what the editorials or media outlets want to convey. Because decisions are made by people who have probably never met a Palestinian. And everything that's happened in these past 20 months has begun to expose the gap between an article explained without external pressure and one under pressure. Pressure from advertisers threatening to pull advertising, people sending letters to management, journalists who have been cut off from their careers... In what other context would you say "a bullet ended up hitting a 4-year-old girl in a van"? It's insane. And it's made even more evident by the extraordinary journalism coming to us from Gaza, the only source of information we have on the ground. These people are risking their lives, and in many cases, giving their lives to get this information out. At the same time, we are seeing the best and the worst of journalism.. I sincerely hope I'm wrong, but I fear that the day Western journalists can return Gaza and start writing articles confirming what our Palestinian colleagues have been reporting for all these months, they will win many awards. And it won't be because their journalism is better, but because they will be considered sufficiently humane.

Why doesn't the word come out? genocide on the covers?

— First, because if we use this word, we are forced to act to stop the genocide. And the second reason is that Palestinians have been dehumanized. If they weren't Palestinians, would we be discussing whether we can speak of genocide? If it weren't the leaders of Israel but those of any other country who were calling for the killing of every man, woman, and creature, would we be talking about it? It's an insult to intelligence that we have to go through this pantomime of pretending that this word is offensive, when what is happening in Gaza is the most flagrant example in the world I have ever seen.