Twelve Days That Shook the Middle East

It took only twelve days for Israel and the US to use the events of October 7th, 2023, to manufacture the case for genocide in Gaza and regional war in the Middle East. With rigor and fury, Marwan Bishara tells that story.

Written in the crucible of 2025, as Gaza burned, as history was being rewritten in real time, and as silence became complicity, Twelve Days That Shook the Middle East is part testimony, part analysis, and part indictment. It is a record of truth-telling in an age dominated by euphemism and selective memory.

Scholar and Al Jazeera political analyst Marwan Bishara offers a clear-eyed account of what happened, why it happened, and why it matters. Not only for the Middle East, but for the integrity of international law, universal values and global politics. He does not claim to be an impartial observer, but draws instead from three intertwined realities and perspectives, Palestinian, Israeli, and American, to reveal how deeply disturbing, entangled and co-dependent these narratives have become.

Bishara argues that this conflict has been an asymmetric, anti-colonial struggle between domination and resistance, between radically opposed visions of justice. He explains how the war has been shaped by profound delusions on all sides: Netanyahu and Biden’s delusions of power, moral exceptionalism, and invincibility, and Sinwar’s delusion of winning through gambling peoples’ lives away on shock and awe. What followed October 7th was an imperial overreaction: not accidental, but deliberate; not incidental, but calculated. The genocide was not a misstep, it was a blueprint unfolding before the world’s eyes.

Although he covers the entire war, Dr 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 demonization, 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.