On October 24, 2023, two and a half weeks after Hamas’ attack on Israel, Gaza’s Health Ministry reported a grim new record: Israel’s bombardment of the Strip had killed 704 Palestinians in the previous 24 hours alone. The next day, Egyptian-Canadian writer Omar El Akkad posted a now famous sentence on X: “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.”

That razor-sharp turn of phrase, which has since been viewed more than 10 million times, stayed with El Akkad all the way to February 2025, when it became the title of his third book.

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Faced with the existential threat that Israel’s war on Gaza poses to their self-image, one might expect Western liberals to reckon with El Akkad’s core argument. And yet, outside of the ideological pro-Israel factions who cling to dogma over truth, the self-styled progressive is more likely to acknowledge past injustice only once nothing can be done to change it — when the most they can muster is a weary shrug: “It is what it is,” or, “We had no choice.”

“One remarkable difference between the modern Western conservative and their liberal counterpart,” he writes, “is that the former will gleefully sign their name on the side of the bomb while the latter will just sheepishly initial it.”