Twelve Days That Shook the Middle East: Origins of a Genocide

A damning account of how Israel and the US manufactured the case for genocide in Gaza and a devastating regional war in the Middle East, from Tel Aviv to Tehran. In Twelve Days That Shook the Middle East, scholar and Al Jazeera senior political analyst Marwan Bishara offers a clear-eyed account of what happened after October 7, 2023, why it happened, and why it matters. Bishara argues that this conflict has always been an asymmetric, anticolonial struggle. The genocide was not a misstep; it was a blueprint unfolding before the world’s eyes. Although he covers the entire war, Bishara contends that the first twelve days were enough to expose the core logic of the conflict, to understand the strategic design behind it, and to bear witness to how modern warfare, wrapped in the language of “security,” “self-defense,” and “civilization,” becomes a weapon of dehumanization and destruction. What followed those twelve days—mass killing, mass displacement, famine, and the collapse of humanitarian possibility—was not the fog of war. It was the eerily cold execution of a premeditated strategy.