Is "One Day" upon us?

Join us Live today as we discuss what it means to tell the truth about Gaza with scholar of genocide Omer Bartov

Aug 07, 2025

Today, Thursday, August 7, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, we’ll speak with historian Omer Bartov. Watch on desktop at The Ink or join from a phone or tablet with the Substack app. To ask questions or comment, become a supporting subscriber today.

Here at The Ink, our Book Club spent June discussing journalist and novelist Omar El Akkad’s harrowing One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, a book that asks the toughest questions about the coping mechanisms that have long kept Westerners complicit about violence elsewhere and puts readers on notice that on Gaza, as with so many of history’s horrors, eventually the consensus will change and the lasting moral damage will become evident.

And that day does finally appear to be coming. As Anand wrote last week:

You can now watch the blob of conventional thinking re-forming itself, and reforming itself, shifting shape, pronouncing on What Must Be Said because now it can be said.
Of course, as always, none of the clean-shaven people with nice suits and nice jobs and nice affiliations who are now saying what the students said long ago are giving their moral advance team any credit. We are living through the turning in ideas vividly distilled in and foreshadowed by Omar El Akkad’s shattering book One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.

The international consensus is shifting, even as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is reportedly planning a full-scale occupation of Gaza and Donald Trump throws up his hands at the prospect of doing anything about it. Human rights organizations within Israel have begun to use the word “genocide.” Over the past few weeks, Canada, France, and the U.K. have finally moved to recognize Palestinian statehood. And today, European Commission Executive Vice President Teresa Ribera said of Israeli military operations within Gaza, “If it is not genocide, it looks very much like the definition used to express its meaning.”

To talk about what it means to recognize the truth, and what the impact of that recognition might be in the context of today’s politics, please join us today at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, when we speak with historian Omer Bartov, Dean’s Professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University. Bartov — one of the preeminent scholars of the Nazi period and an expert on genocide and the political indoctrination that makes it possible — has emerged as an essential critical voice on what’s happening in Gaza and what it means to tell the truth about it.

In advance of our conversation, we invite you to read our previous coverage of Gaza and the transformative political impact the conflict and the reaction to it have had around the world.