There’s No Such Thing as Other People’s Children
by Tadhg Hoey
Canongate 208pp, ISBN 9781837264186, £16.99
On October 9, 2024, a year after Hamas’ brutal attack on Israel, the New York Times published accounts of what 65 American doctors, nurses, and paramedics saw while working in Gaza’s hospitals during the following year of siege, slaughter, and famine. One type of medical issue that repeatedly occurred was children with gunshots to the head or left side of the chest. ‘I couldn’t believe the number of kids I saw shot in the head,’ Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, the article’s author — who worked at a hospital in Khan Younis for two weeks — told another doctor who had also worked there, after returning home. ‘Yeah, me too,’ that doctor responded. ‘Every day.’
A lot has been written about Israel’s war on Gaza. Like many, I have read as much of it as I can find or am able to live with. That piece, published by the world’s most renowned newspaper, was the thing I found most difficult to read. Though it ends with an impassioned plea for the U.S. to stop arming Israel, it is mostly made up of short quotes from medical professionals who witnessed, firsthand, the young children taken into the overcrowded, undersupplied emergency departments of partially destroyed hospitals, with bullet holes in their skulls, listless and wasting away from malnutrition, dying of preventable diseases from the lack of medical supplies, or those labelled WCNSF (‘wounded child, no surviving family’) in severe psychiatric distress, declaring that they wished they had died with their families.
The lack of narrative forces one to make sense of the incomprehensible, the scale and immensity of both individual and collective suffering. There is a clarity to this approach that makes it difficult to argue with. It struck me as odd that it had fallen on American doctors to paint such an accurate, harrowing picture of what life has been like in Gaza’s hospitals since the IDF began its siege. This is less odd, though, when you realise that many of Gaza’s doctors have been either killed or imprisoned, along with its journalists.
As of January, 2025, the Israeli Defence Forces have killed over 1,000 doctors and nurses since they began bombing Gaza in October, 2023. 166 journalists have also been killed. That last figure is inclusive of journalists in Palestine, Israel, and Lebanon, though 150 of these journalists were killed in Gaza, by the IDF. Journalists being killed in the line of duty is by no means new, but this conflict has been the deadliest on record for journalists — shocking, even by Palestinian standards, where the IDF has been killing journalists for decades with impunity.To put these numbers context, as of October, 2024, after two-and-a-half years of war in Ukraine — a country with a prewar population of 40 million, roughly 17 times greater than Gaza’s — 18 journalists were killed in the line of duty. Israel has also imprisoned many journalists, and it ranks just behind China as the country with most journalists imprisoned.
A similar kind of clarity — albeit streaked with a searing anger — pervades the writing in One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This , Omar El Akkad’s stunning new book-length rebuke to the West’s complicity in Israel’s brutal war on Gaza. El Akkad, a writer and former reporter — who is deeply perceptive of the media’s important, often malign role in shaping public opinion — lambastes the West’s hypocritical and selective moral outrage.
When Israel first began its bombing campaign on Gaza, El Akkad was shocked by the silence of his fellow reporters. Particularly, he writes, given how opposed they’d been to Russia’s bombing and invasion of Ukraine. When Russia detained Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and put him through a sham trial, everyone was indignant. Those same colleagues were noticeably quiet and seemingly unwilling to extend these same sympathies to Palestinian journalists who were murdered, often along with their families.
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is El Akkad’s third book. The author of two critically acclaimed novels, American War (2017) and What Strange Paradise (2021), El Akkad’s latest work charts not only his changing opinions about the West’s hypocrisy, but a recounting of the personal and professional experiences that led him towards this fracture, or, ‘breaking away from the notion that the polite, Western liberal ever stood for anything at all.’
Born in Egypt in 1982 during a time of heightened political instability, El Akkad’s family fled after his father was harassed by some soldiers at a military checkpoint. The sheer randomness of his father’s near miss with detention, plus the dumb luck of his subsequent release (a passerby knew his father and one of the soldiers), formed El Akkad’s understanding of the frightening nature of power — its arbitrary cruelty, the precariousness it forces upon the very civilians whose lives and futures must be sacrificed to maintain it. ‘We are all,’ he reminds us, ‘governed by chance.’
After a few years in Qatar — where the young El Akkad attends the American International School, and, along with his classmates, is encouraged by a teacher to write letters of appreciation to the American soldiers on the nearby base as they prepare to join the First Gulf War — the family settle in Canada. The usual racism the family had to endure worsened after September 11. Ever optimistic about the West and the freedoms it offers, El Akkad chooses to overlook the racism. Even years later, during his years reporting for the The Globe and Mail — during which time he reported on the extrajudicial court proceedings of ‘detainees’ in Guantanamo Bay, or saw the havoc wreaked by the US in Afghanistan — he still managed, bizarrely, to retain faith in what the West had been preaching. Compared with the authoritarian world from which his family had fled, the West, as unequal as it was, guaranteed certain freedoms, he thought.
Then, October 7 happened and everything changed for him. ‘It was a bloodbath,’ he writes of Hamas’ attack, 'orchestrated by exactly the kind of entity that thrives in the absence of anything resembling a future.’ Israel’s subsequent response has been one of the deadliest military campaigns in recent history, killing over 46,000 Palestinians (including 17,000 children). Another 10,000 people are believed to be underneath the rubble. Israel has decimated Gaza, reducing the tiny strip of land, home to 6 cities and 2.2 million Palestinians, to one long, bleak landscape. It has destroyed or partially destroyed 92% of all homes, 88% of all schools, 68% of roads, and 60% of all buildings. One out of every two hospitals remain partially functioning.
Israel and its allies cited ‘Israel’s right to defend itself,’ a phrase which seemingly provides limitless self-justifying moral cover for the various war crimes of which Israel has been accused. In their version of events, Israel is always defending itself and had no other option but to respond in the way that it did — as though October 7 were the beginning of this war, and not just the most recent iteration of an 80-year conflict between two wildly unequal sides.
The Nakba, Israel’s home demolitions, land confiscations, expansion of settlements, the pogroms carried out by settlers against Palestinian villages, or the 5,000 Palestinians languishing in ‘administrative detention’ in Israeli jails prior to October 2023 (10,500 as of January 2025) — none of this is usually cited as having any meaningful bearing on the conflict. ‘The starting point of history,’ El Akkad writes, ‘can always be shifted, such that one side is always instigating, the other always justified in response.’ Any country, or regional actor that disagrees — or even the International Criminal Court, for that matter — becomes a threat. For the West, as El Akkad points out, bombing Yemen — one of the poorest countries in the world — in order to keep a shipping lane open is more urgent than restraining an ally committed to slaughtering tens of thousands of innocent civilians.
In Israel’s and the West’s version of reality, the Palestinians become the problem, the aggressor, the ones who refuse to be a partner to peace. Even the thousands of children who have been murdered as a direct result of Israel’s collective punishment — many of whom were born after Hamas came to power, El Akkad notes, let alone ever voted for them — were, in a sense, born guilty, if your society has so dehumanised them that it considers them simply the ‘explosives of the future,’ as one headline in The Times of Israel put it.
Everyone, El Akkad writes, should be horrified by the slaughter of children, wherever it happens. While Israel has by no means set a precedent for the mass murder of children, what they have done — and will likely get away with — should serve as a brutal warning to us of how allegedly democratic states, backed by super powers, act once they have successfully dehumanised a group of people. ‘There’s no such thing as someone else’s children,’ El Akkad writes. While it may be other people’s children today, whose children will be sacrificed next?
While protests began picking up as Israel escalated its bombing campaign, El Akkad highlights the tendency for people to get upset over slogans and argue about how words like ‘genocide’, ‘apartheid’ or ‘occupation’ make them feel. Slogans, not bombs, make people feel uncomfortable in America. Sophistry and syllogisms paint all anti-war protesters as antisemitic terrorist sympathisers virulently opposed to Israel’s right to exist. These are hackneyed but maddeningly effective strategies, deployed to silence or punish those who break rank. El Akkad applauds the pro-Palestinian writers and organisations who have spoken up and saw their names removed from panels or websites.
El Akkad is scathing towards Biden and the Democrats, whose unconditional support of Israel ran contrary to their palaver about wanting peace. After months of arguing that Republicans would only inflame tensions in the Middle East further, Democrats managed to distill their pitch to voters down to a precarious promise that they’d be ‘less monstrous than the monsters.’ He (rightly) predicted that many progressive voters would feel that they could not reward the Democrats for their complete lack of political will in reining Israel in, or for their failure to grasp that ‘for an even remotely functioning conscience, there exists a point beyond which relative harm can no longer offset absolute evil.’
El Akkad remains optimistic about the potential for collective actions such as the BDS (boycotts, divestment, and sanctions) movement and the awareness it generates. ‘One builds the muscle by walking away from the most minor things,’ he reminds us. ‘[T]rivial consumables, the cultural work of monsters, the myriad material fruits grown on stolen ground—and realized in the doing of these things that there is a wide spectrum of resistance.’
Resistance demands practice. By sacrificing something minor, one realises how straightforward it can be to sacrifice some of the other things that fall below one’s ‘moral threshold.’ Plus, it works. As of 2025, the majority of US states have enacted anti-BDS laws which punish organisations for boycotting Israeli goods or services — a clear indication that they fear the economic implications of people collectively exercising their right to ethical consumption.
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is an exceptionally powerful book whose central message is likely to become enduringly relevant as more and more people begin questioning their understanding of ‘the West, the rules-based order, the shell of modern liberalism and the capitalistic thing it serves.’ I hope that as people read it they feel energised and radicalised by the clarity of its politics. I am certain, when enough time has passed and it no longer becomes socially acceptable to advocate for the slaughter of tens of thousands of people, that the truth contained in the title of El Akkad’s book will bear itself out for everyone to see.