Twelve in Twelve

I intentionally took my time on posting this review. I took my time reading this book, wanting to soak in everything I absolutely could. But to understand why I took my time with this title, I have to take you back to October 2023.

It was two weeks after October 7, 2023. I was sitting at my kitchen table one gloomy Saturday morning. I had just finished picking up the mess of breakfast I made for my toddler. He had just turned 2 in August. My husband and I were getting ready to celebrate out third wedding anniversary the following weekend. The annoying theme song of Paw Patrol echoed through my small, safe and quiet home. I watched my child play with his toys through the giant windows that encased my patio, and illuminated my living room and kitchen….And I suddenly realized how incredibly lucky I was to be living in a new country, living even further away from tragedy than I was before.

But, on my phone, through the convenience of a tiny screen, I watched mothers and fathers I had never met before hold tiny, shroud-covered bodies. I had been watching videos like that trickle onto my FYP for a few weeks. It felt like my algorithm was testing me almost, wondering which way my heart and mind would sway. This was long before TikTok was bought from China by Oracle, and content was less suppressed and filtered out. Now, in 2026, I barely see any videos of those still living in Palestine – if you can even call it living. But that particular morning, as I listened to the typical sounds of my daily life beginning fill my home, it all clicked. It all hit me like a ton of bricks. I had kept quiet on all my social medias about what had transpired on October 7, 2023. I kept quite because I knew my ignorance on the subject was so blatant, that I didn’t even know where to start when it came to research and investigation. A week after October 7th, I nose-dived into it all; and then the videos really began to flood my FYP. By that Saturday morning, I knew where I stood on it all. I couldn’t get up from the kitchen table. My iced coffee I had made after breakfast was becoming more water than coffee as I watched video after video. The tears were silent and strong as I took it all in. Images and videos that I saw in the first few months of the genocide in Gaza are seared into my memory for the rest of my life. I couldn’t understand how my child got have his normal, typical and safe Saturday morning, and those children, those babies, did not. I couldn’t fathom the feeling of going to sleep at night, waking up to a bombed-out home, and searching for my child in the rubble – only to wrap them up in a white shroud hours later, instead of his favorite dinosaur blanket. None of it made sense to me. My country of birth had saved me from a reality like that. My skin color had saved me from a reality like that.

Omar El-Akkad brings up this point numerous times throughout this book. The blessing and luck of distance keeps Western society almost indifferent to the atrocities their governments directly fund and sponsor. Our tax dollars were aiding and abetting this genocide – and still are. And regardless of which other country has been pulled into the fray (most notably Lebanon); the reality of those living on the other side of the world, scrolling through tragedy on their screens at the breakfast table, continued to go on – uninterrupted. My privilege sat across the table from me for a few weeks, mocking my tears and turmoil over families I had no connection to. And, ignorantly, I thought that my government would come out swinging with condemnation. I thought people I had strong friendships with would agree and say, “this is wrong, these are innocent lives, this should not be happening”. And then I realized those friends I thought I knew in and out, didn’t have a strong red line that couldn’t be crossed when it came to human rights. I realized that the establishment politicians I had so fervently campaigned for and supported since I began voting in 2012, didn’t have a spine. What was happening for the entire world to see was clearly genocide; and everyone just wanted to scroll past it, eager to see what the next trend was.

This book left me so speechless. Narrated by the author, we get a beautiful mixture of personal history and current events. Everything that El-Akkad writes always relates back to each other. And with a topic like Palestine, it’s impossible not to do that. In fact, everything is so interconnected politically and personally for the author, it’s the most obvious and overall theme of the book. As it should be. And it would not surprise me if one day, this particular work ended up on a banned book list.

I found this title to be so informative and eye opening. That kind of statement coming from a white woman can sound very ‘white woman with a cause’ and shallow. Although I took my time not only posting this blog, but researching the deep and blood-stained history of Palestine, this book only felt like confirmation to what I had been seeing and feeling for the last few years. In all the ways I had tried supporting Palestinian voices and accounts on TikTok, monetarily or otherwise…I no longer felt like I was going insane by trying to convey to people in my life what atrocities were really taking place. It was all written down now, published for anyone to read. However, El-Akkad doesn’t divulge the gruesome details of every day life in Palestine. He mentions scenarios of deep trauma and paints pictures you could never look away from if you were seeing them in real time. He speaks of Hind Rajab, who suffered with her family in a car in Gaza City, attempting to flee the destruction of the genocide. 355 bullets tore apart a 5 year old girl and her family. Rescue came, and was fired upon all the same. Macklemore wrote a song in her memory, simultaneously commemorating the students across US college campuses that protested and opposed their institutions financial ties to Israel.

El-Akkad also speaks to his own experiences being Muslim, migrating, and living in places like the USA, where there is stark prejudice and bigotry to anyone who is not white. He calls out the vapid and post-9/11 propagandized thinking that makes his mere existence seem like a threat to those around him. He spends a good portion of his life almost advertising the sentiment, “I’m not a danger to you”. But is almost always singled out for pre-boarding checks and TSA scrutiny. It is that precedent that has morphed so much of our world into what it is today. We fear certain things, certain people because of what happened on a beautifully clear Tuesday morning, 25 years ago. And our world was forever changed.

It’s no wonder that our world has changed in the ways that it has. Politics changed, world views changed…education changed. Peoples morals and beliefs obviously shifted along side all of those changes. And within all of those changes, a large portion of the American people found safety and comfortability. We are able to return to our safety bubbles after looking at our screens all day. We are free to “return to normal”, El-Akkad would argue. I would agree. Aside from the obvious turmoil and sadness I felt every time I scrolled past another refugee video, asking for aide, for a like, a comment, a repost; I could always put my phone down. They never could. They never can. It’s the American privilege of distance. This is another point that is constantly brought up throughout the book. This point is what allows us to say “why should I care?” And that’s the ever-resounding question, isn’t it? Why should any of us care about what happening in a country so far away from us; to people who don’t look a thing like us? What matters most is that it isn’t us, right? It could never be us – until it is. The poem, “First They Came” by Pastor Martin Niemoller comes to mind in this moment in time – and while I read the book. It’s something so poignant and prominent to current events. It ties in perfectly to a quote that stuck with me after reading this book: “No, there is no terrible thing coming for you in some distant future. But know that a terrible thing is happening to you now. You are being asked to kill off a part of you that would otherwise scream in opposition to injustice. You are being asked to dismantle the machinery of a functioning conscience. Who cares if diplomatic expediency prefers you shrug away the sight of dismembered children? Who cares ireat distance from the blood-stained middle allows obliviousness? Forget pitty. Forget even the dea if you must, but at least fight against the theft of your soul.” (Chapter 5).

This lead me into deeper thinking of what I was willing to allow for the sake of my comfort, and my comfortable home. It wasn’t happening to me, currently, outside my front door. So why was I crying at my breakfast table on a Saturday morning? Why was I letting my coffee melt and mix with the ice, as if my world was freezing to a standstill….right along with the families on my screen? Because I had found my red line. The big, gawking and perverbial red line that everyone always talks about in politics, their morals, their boundaries….I had found mine. So many who were watching the same videos as me on a daily basis, had found theirs too. And at the same time, so many others hadn’t. And I didn’t understand why. Were others happy being too comfortable…even if their comfort put people within their immediate orbit in more danger than they realized? Possibly. Were others comfortable and confident that the great and terrible thing was so far off in the future that they wouldn’t be around to witness it? I’m not sure, because it was already happening on their screens. A popular saying that started to flaot around was “Gaza was the testing ground”. And in a lot of ways, we can confirm that to be true. We see it in the cruelty in the current administrations tactics with ICE raids. We see it in the harmful and restrictive legistlation on health care and education. We even see it in FCC attacks against late-night comedians. First, they came… and they kept coming and they kept coming….until everyone was rounded up. But because it is not “us”, we do not fight against it. We do not stand ten toes down on our red line. We let it slide, much like the Biden administration did when IDF forces advanced on Rafah, the southern most city in the Gaza Strip, where thousands of refugees waited to hopefully cross the border in Egypt. Rafah has been flattened.

My red line has not waivered since late October 2023. And that has caused devision in a lot of my relationships and friendships. It spoke volumes to me, that people who professed to be supoprters of women’s rights, educational and health care rights, the Black Lives Matter movement – really hot-ticket Democratic campaign talking points – couldn’t stop for one second and have a concise conversation about what was unfolding before our eyes. Those relationships will never be repaired. As far as I’m concerned now, those are people who could never actually stand on business and stand behind their morals. This book only confirmed for me that my anger and sadness on that Saturday morning, and even today, is and was justified. El-Akkad writes: “there’s no such thing as someone else’s children”. As I mother of two small children, I couldn’t agree with that sentiment more. There is no way to be apethetic to this genocide. And I will keep calling it that, because that is what it is. It is not a conflict or a war; there would need ot be equal or more powerful weaponry on both sides for that to be true. Hospitals wouldn’t be blatantly targeted. Schools wouldn’t be bombed out. Homes wouldn’t be ransacked by IDF soldiers and people’s personal belongings paraded around like trophies after a kill….babies wouldn’t be abandonded in incubators to parish in NICUs. The world is filled with atorcities. Day in and day out out FYPs are filtered out for us to continue on barely noticing them. But this will not keep us safe from the reality that we will not be excempt from something similar to this in the future; merely because of our distance from the origin site. By allowing all that we are allowing now, especially through social media, we are already setting ourselves up for the inevitable. We have done that hard part; we’ve welcomed in the willful ignorance.

And, as El-Akkad said, one day, when it is all over; when an appropriate amount of time has passed and we can acknowledge the political deviciveness as “mistakes” and “mishaps in leadership”, people will come out of the woodwork. They will condemn. They will disavow and shame…they will distance themselves yet again from that reality. And they will say, with their full chest, that they were always against this. That they couldn’t stomach to videos, and they donated, and they protested, and they tauhgt their children about it. But by that time, I am confident in saying, it will be too late. And it will absolutely not be enough.

This title, like so many before it, will stick with me for a very long time. It will sit with me in Giovanni’s room, while I contemplate everything being about tuburculosis and how the memories of my strained relationship with my own mother, would also make me cry in a grocery store. Watching Gazan’s flee for their lives and burry their loved ones has forever altered my brain chemistry. Regardless of how many social escapes I have, or however many advantages of ditance I gain; I am not the same person I was before October 2023. A lot of people can say that about themselves. I am happy that I was able to add this book to my reading list this year. I expected it to be longer, full of more historical context. But how it ultimately was, was perfect. It did not need to be 20+ hours of listening time. It didn’t need to be 50+ chapters. Omar El-Akkad said everything he needed to say, and he said it perfectly. I will be recommending this book to anyone who will listen. And I hope you’ll find it wherever you get your audiobooks, or pick up a physical copy at your local bookstore. I can’t thank you enough for being patient with me in my posting of this one. I hope you take my recommendation of this book to heart.

For the rest of this month, we will be celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month. Our next title, Chilean Poet, is a bit of a longer read and a more lighthearted read for the month. I hope you’ll join me for that title too.

Thanks for reading along.