The Most Dangerous Book of 2025

A new book on the current state of Gaza forgets one tiny thing: the people who were raped, burned, and butchered on October 7 by Hamas.

There’s nothing quite like a man with no direct ties to Gaza writing a memoir about Gaza.

That’s not a joke. I’m talking about one of the most acclaimed books of 2025.

Omar El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is a searing indictment of Western hypocrisy towards Israel and Palestine. It’s also a masterclass in distortions written by an Egyptian-Canadian journalist living in Portland, who has never lived in Gaza, isn’t Palestinian, and has no family there. It is, quite literally, a memoir of someone else’s war.

And no, that irony is never addressed.

I came to this book in good faith—via my library’s audiobook app—ready to be challenged. The Israel-Hamas war is brutal and heartbreaking. It deserves honest, uncomfortable, and critical analysis in all its complexity. I hoped this would be that. What you get instead is a memoir manifesto that uses Gaza as a backdrop for the author’s views on Western power structures without ever featuring a single Gazan. Instead, the book centers the author as its moral compass and erases the very people it claims to defend.