“Where’s the Palestinian Martin Luther King?” Journalist and novelist Omar El Akkad has heard this question a lot lately, “the implicit accusation [being] that certain people are incapable of responding to their mistreatment with grace, with patience, with love, and that this incapacity, not any external injustice, is responsible for the misery inflicted upon them”.
But far more than loving or patient, King was eloquent. Palestine has many eloquent defenders, and El Akkad is one of them. Born in Egypt, raised in Qatar and Canada, and now a US citizen, he has reported from the Middle East, Afghanistan and Guantánamo. His new book is a response to events in Gaza after 7 October 2023. It is his voice, his bafflement, spilling out after decades of having to keep quiet for the sake of journalistic neutrality or artistic show-don’t-tell, of having to bite his tongue after readers responded to his journalism with racist doubt: “I don’t trust any story about terrorism written by a guy named Omar”.
