One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, by Omar El Akkad Canongate, 187 pp, £16, ISBN: 978-1837264186

A Different Kind of Power, by Jacinda Ardern Macmillan, 352 pp, £25, ISBN: 978-1035045402

Hope in Action: a Memoir About the Courage to Lead, by Sanna Marin Macmillan, 256 pp, £25, ISBN: 978-1035060979

Winner of the 2025 US National Book Award for non-fiction, an honour granted by other writers for outstanding literary works, Omar El Akkad’s book has as its full title: 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 aways been against this. This statement sets the tone for his fierce indictment of the cruelty and hypocrisy shown by the Western world toward people it doesn’t like. It focuses particularly on Gaza, but also takes in his experiences in Afghanistan and Guantánamo and addresses Western attitudes to Muslims in the aftermath of 9/11 and recent US politics. It is part autobiography, part observation and part reflection.

Born in Cairo into the repressive political atmosphere following the assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1981, El Akkad migrated with his family to Qatar, where he dreamed of the freedom of the West as the obverse of the status quo in the Middle East. When he was eighteen, his family moved again, this time to Montreal, where he attended high school, followed by a university degree at Queen’s University, Kingston, and was subsequently employed for ten years as a staff reporter with the Toronto-based Globe and Mail. He writes of the exile’s experience of ‘departure after departure’ and the sense of being an outsider as a foreigner and a Muslim in Canada and, latterly, the US. For years he retained a belief in Western freedoms, the rule of law, freedom of speech and the freedom ‘to be left alone’, despite all the evidence to the contrary in the West’s repressive behaviour during the ‘War on Terror’. But for him, the final straw was the slaughter in Gaza from the autumn of 2023, the total destruction of its infrastructure and the deliberate withholding of aid, resulting in famine and disease. It was this, coupled with the Western governments’ failure to respond, which destroyed any remaining faith he had in the West as a bastion of freedom.

As a foreign journalist, an occupation that El Akkad describes as being ‘a tourist in someone else’s misery … [with] the privilege of leaving’, he covered stories in Afghanistan (2007), Guantánamo (2008) and Egypt (2010), as well as the Republican convention in 2015 that selected Trump to run for his first term as president. But most of his focus is on Gaza. Shocking images of suffering clearly haunt him and several are reproduced in his narrative. He critiques the gap between the claims of what journalism is meant to be, a means of speaking truth to power, and how it mostly functions to defend the status quo. He denounces the notion of reporter as impartial referee or scorekeeper, as if each side was morally equal, finding a middle ground between opposing views. When the act they are reporting is morally repugnant, civilians targeted, hospitals deliberately bombed, a child torn to shreds by shrapnel, that middle ground is unacceptable. One shouldn’t seek for even-handed, nuanced discussion of genocide. El Akkad cites the terrible death toll of Palestinian journalists in the war, at least 108 by July 2024, with very little outcry in the West. He denounces the euphemistic misuse of language, the employment of the passive voice, in headlines such as The Guardian’s ‘Palestinian journalist hit in head by bullet during raid on terror suspect’s home’, as if no one actually fired the bullet, or the ‘derangement of language’ to sanitise violence, such as ‘enhanced interrogation’ to mask torture, or ‘collateral damage’ to denote killing. Western liberals, he claims, despite protestations of siding with the underdog, quail at putting such sentiments into action, often sharing colonial attitudes to the Middle East, relieved to know that the violence unfolding there will be visited on someone far away.

The 9/11 attacks unleashed a wave of fear and hostility in the West that has still not dissipated, the term ‘terrorism’ as a societal designation being applied almost exclusively to Brown people. That fear has brought forth a degree of toleration of the violence done to the peoples of Iraq, Afghanistan and now Gaza. El Akkad gives voice to the fact, evident to many onlookers, that the perpetrators of brutality against the Palestinians clearly don’t see their victims as fully human, quoting a post by an Israeli newspaper entitled ‘When Genocide is Permissible’, and Israel’s then defence minister, Yoav Gallant, claiming that his country was fighting ‘human animals’. This, El Akkad asserts, is ‘not a statement of belief so much as permission’.

There is also the spectacle of Western powers resisting calls for Israel to be charged with genocide for its actions at the International Court of Justice and repeatedly opposing UN demands for a ceasefire in Gaza, the German government even permitting its police force, in the name of fighting antisemitism, to arrest Jewish protesters calling for a ceasefire.

All the same, El Akkad sees some signs of hope in small acts of solidarity, such as the American authors who refused their awards in protest against PEN America’s failure to address the mass killing of Palestinian writers, or employees risking sanction by speaking out, such as the New York University nurse Hesen Jabr, denouncing the genocide in Gaza at the cost of her job.

This is a deeply ethical essay, calling upon the world to rediscover some kind of international moral compass. It’s not an easy read but is powerfully written and timely, making compelling arguments. One could be tempted to despair in the face of the suffering he describes, and at times El Akkad seems to come close to it. It’s worth adding that his book was published early in 2025, before the worst excesses of the present Trump regime. What followed has been a year marred by still more cruelty and the gross misuse of power.

****

The two other books reviewed here are very different. The point in juxtaposing El Akkad’s work and the memoirs of these two former prime ministers is that some day the world will recoil from the vileness of the past few years and we should be ready with better policies and world views to replace them. We already have examples set by these leaders, whose political outlooks are the polar opposite to the hate-filled dogmas of the radical right.

There are significant parallels between Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand’s prime minister from 2017 to 2023, and Sanna Marin, prime minister of Finland between 2019 and 2023. They were both young women offering a fresh approach to politics. In 2017, when Ardern was elected prime minister at the age of thirty-seven, she was the world’s youngest female head of government. In December 2019, when Marin came to lead Finland, she was thirty-four, making her the youngest. They represented a new style of social democratic leader, popular with the public, left-leaning and totally dedicated to reform. Neither came with the sense of entitlement of so many of our present and past leaders. Ardern, the daughter of a detective constable, witnessed poverty in the run-down forestry town of Marupara, where she spent some of her childhood, and writes that it was this understanding that made her political. Marin, daughter of a single mother, whose alcoholic father had left them when she was two, experienced relative deprivation while growing up in the small town of Pirkkala. Later, each was mother to a small child while prime minister, Ardern discovering she was pregnant just prior to taking office; each juggled political leadership and child-rearing with the help of supportive partners and others around them. Perhaps more important are the similarities in their policies – focusing on egalitarianism, social inclusion, the rights of women, children and minorities and protecting the environment. And both managed to steer their country very effectively through the Covid-19 pandemic and other crises.

Despite their location at opposite ends of the planet, there are some comparisons between the New Zealand and Finnish systems. They each have a history of socially directed policies: New Zealand has enjoyed advantages such as free healthcare and social housing since 1938. Finland has benefited from the Nordic Welfare Model, which, as Marin acknowledges, provided her and many children like her with access to Finland’s outstanding education system and social services. Women’s suffrage was introduced early in each country, in 1893 in New Zealand and in 1906 in Finland.

Both these future prime ministers developed an interest in politics at an early age. In Ardern’s case, there was a family involvement in the Labour Party, her grandmother and an aunt being members. She participated in Harry Duynhoven’s campaign in New Plymouth in 1999, when she was nineteen, in an election that saw Labour returned to office under the leadership of Helen Clark. While serving as an intern in parliament in Wellington in 2001, she fell in love with politics, recognising the potential role of an MP in making people’s lives better. After working as a parliamentary researcher in New Zealand and Britain, she became an MP in 2008, holding a variety of portfolios, although Labour was by then once more in opposition. Then in March 2017 she was appointed deputy leader and five months later, when party leader Andrew Little resigned seven weeks before a general election, she succeeded to the post and managed to turn around flagging electoral support to win sufficient votes to make the party a credible government in coalition. On coming to office, Labour released a one-hundred-day plan, outlining a range of reforms, including extending paid parental leave, investment in public housing, boosting student allowances, increasing the minimum wage, forming an independent climate commission, requiring landlords to meet housing standards and launching a programme to tackle child poverty. Raised as a Mormon, Ardern later broke with her faith as a result of her differences with its teachings on social issues such as LGBTQ rights and abortion.

Perhaps the most famous image of Ardern is the photograph taken in the immediate aftermath of the attack on two mosques in Christchurch on March 15th, 2019, in which fifty people were killed and forty injured. Tragically, such atrocities are becoming increasingly common but a striking feature was Ardern’s leadership of the response. She immediately went on television to denounce the outrage. Recognising that many of those affected by the violence would be from refugee and migrant communities, she asserted that ‘New Zealand is their home. They are us.’ She led the wave of support for the country’s Muslims, attending the community centre and the crisis centre in Christchurch, visiting the wounded in hospital and breaking the news to the families that there would be a delay in returning their dead for burial, owing to the police investigation. She insisted that the man who had carried out the shootings not be named publicly to deny him any notoriety he might have sought by his action. She recalls that when President Trump phoned to offer his condolences, he queried her use of the word ‘terrorist’, presumably because the perpetrator was a white supremacist. When he asked whether there was anything America could do, she responded: ‘You can show sympathy and love for all Muslim communities.’ Within a month of the shootings, New Zealand’s parliament almost unanimously (with one dissentient) banned military-style automatic weapons of the type used in the Christchurch killings, creating an amnesty and buyback programme for guns. By the end of the year 56,000 weapons had been handed in to the police and destroyed. The attacker had live-streamed his actions, which had been widely shared on YouTube, Facebook and other social media for twenty-four hours before being taken down. Knowing that if she simply accepted an apology from the social media companies nothing was likely to change, she contacted Angela Merkel, Emmanuel Macron and Justin Trudeau and together they launched the Christchurch Call to Action, a commitment to eliminate terrorist and violent extremist content online. Her conclusion is that ‘every crisis asks clearly and unequivocally for action to be taken’.

Just under a year later, New Zealand faced into the Covid pandemic. No one knew the full parameters of the disease and Ardern and her government had nevertheless to take huge decisions that would affect everyone’s lives. In retrospect, the country’s rapid and decisive response has been acknowledged a huge success, slowing the spread of the disease until the population had a chance to be vaccinated and saving an estimated 20,000 lives. In a recent BBC Radio 4 interview, Ardern remarked that she would prefer to have done too much than too little in response to the crisis. To this day, she remains the most popular politician in New Zealand, admired for her reforms and her empathy.

****

On December 8th, 2019, following the resignation of her predecessor, Annti Rinne, Sanna Marin was selected by the Finnish Social Democratic Party to succeed him. By then she had worked her way up the party ranks and her ability to perform in stressful situations had been noted. She was vice-chair of the Social Democratic Youth Organisation by 2010, where she advocated for human rights, equality, climate and energy policy. Elected chair of the city council of Tampere in 2012, she was appointed first vice prime minister in 2015 and minister for transport and communications in 2019. From early on she had been obsessed with politics and convinced she wanted to bring a fresh approach to a rather tired party. Just five months after becoming a minister, she took over as prime minister at the head of a coalition of five parties, all of whose leaders were women.

Like Ardern’s, Marin’s premiership was severely tested by global crises. Within just over three months of taking office, the Covid 19 pandemic hit, demanding that the government take unprecedented measures to safeguard the population. But while the disease threatened, there was very little knowledge of how to deal with it. An Emergency Powers Act was invoked for the first time since World War II yet even then the requisite legislation didn’t exist to address some restrictions that needed to be introduced. As Marin recalls: ‘We were building the ship while we rowed it.’ But by remaining open to updating their strategy when faced with new information, Finland coped remarkably well. Marin suggests that an equal society is more resilient in crises and points out the country’s strengths in the deep trust people feel that they will be taken care of and their willingness to cooperate for the general good.

Another major issue of Marin’s tenure was Finland’s relationship with NATO. Until 2022, along with Sweden, the country had maintained a policy of military nonalignment in order not to antagonise its eastern neighbour, Russia. However, with the invasion of Ukraine in February of that year, its leaders realised that the old strategy was no longer successful. In Marin’s words: ‘It wasn’t safe not to join.’ In face of the new security situation Finnish public opinion shifted very rapidly toward membership of NATO and support for Ukraine. Nevertheless, it wasn’t easy to achieve consensus among the governing coalition and it was essential that Finland coordinate its accession with Sweden’s, so that no Scandinavian country be left out of NATO. Marin made over thirty visits to foreign countries in the course of 2022, to canvass support for her country’s application, bringing her close to collapse from exhaustion.

One of Marin’s strengths is her ability to negotiate – she relates that during the Covid crisis the five women leaders of government consulted almost every week, and sometimes every day, to discuss issues. She was extremely effective at negotiating Finland’s case during the EU’s Multiannual Financial Framework in 2020. She stresses the need for policy to be values-driven – this, she claims, is the purpose of writing her book. ‘In the most complex of situations,’ she asserts in relation to her insistence that the ten mothers and thirty children who ended up in the al-Hol refugee camp in Syria be repatriated, ‘you should always lean on your values.’ And despite all the challenges, the government she led implemented a great swathe of social reforms, relating to gender and children’s rights, the rights of minorities and human rights in general. It is no accident that Finland has topped Gallup’s World Happiness Report listings since 2015.

Both Ardern and Marin refer to suffering from imposter syndrome, although each did an outstanding job in office. Despite this, however, they had to navigate constant put-downs. Both memoirs refer to a meeting between them in Auckland in November 2022, when a reporter asked: ‘Are you meeting because you are similar in age and got a lot of, hmmm, common stuff?’ Marin replied that they were meeting because they were prime ministers, while Ardern questioned whether anyone had asked Barack Obama and John Key (New Zealand prime minister from 2008 to 2016) if they met because they were of similar age. More seriously, both were subjected to sexual harassment, Marin commenting that she had been threatened with rape and other forms of sexual violence so often that she couldn’t keep track. She emphasises the need to address misogyny as a political issue.

Ardern and Marin sought to open up the role of prime minister, making it more accessible to the press and public, but each encountered the occasional banana skin. In December 2022, David Seymour, leader of ACT, a right-wing libertarian party, who had opposed Ardern throughout her term of office, attacked her government’s plan to ban hate speech. After defending herself, she sat down and turning to her colleague, Grant Robertson, remarked that Seymour was an ‘arrogant prick’. Unfortunately, the microphone was still on and the media picked up her comment and made a story of it. In the end, Ardern apologised to Seymour and the apology was accepted. A written transcript of the parliamentary record was auctioned for over NZ$100, with the proceeds going to the Prostate Cancer Foundation.

Marin was hounded by the Finnish press, notoriously over an occasion when filmed dancing and singing at a friend’s house one summer evening. The video was uploaded onto an Instagram account, from which it was leaked to the press. No laws had been broken and there had not been much drink taken, but the media made a scandal of the story, alleging that Marin had been taking drugs and dancing provocatively. WhatsApp groups circulated a photograph of a naked woman in a man’s apartment, alleging it was Marin. The accusations became so extreme that she was forced to take a drug test to clear her name. It was attacks such as these which, coupled with her party narrowly losing the prime position in government in the 2023 elections, contributed to her decision to step down from party leadership later that year.

In an interview on her way to Government House for her inauguration in 2017, Jacinda Ardern was asked about her aims for her government. Her response was ‘I want this government to feel different. I want people to feel that it’s open, that it’s listening and that it’s going to bring kindness back.’ These are the virtues that distinguish the approaches of both these prime ministers from the punitive, greedy, hate-filled vices which dominate so much of contemporary politics. It is these virtues, if anything, that might still save us politically.