Cover art for the book Twelve Days That Shook the Middle East: Origins of a Genocide by Dr. Marwan Bishara

In the final pages of his new book, journalist and political analyst Dr. Marwan Bishara writes: “Israel has not learned the most important lesson. No foreign power, large or small, has ever won a colonial war in the past century.” It is this understanding that informs the previous three hundred or so pages of Twelve Days That Shook the Middle East: Origins of a Genocide; three hundred pages describing the horrors unleashed on the Palestinian people in the first days of the ongoing genocidal war waged by Israel against those whose land it occupies. The narrative Bishara relays is not a hopeful one, but nor is it one defined solely by despair. Desperation perhaps, and certainly way too much death and destruction, but also a determination that represents the decades of the Palestinian struggle against colonial occupation and unwarranted repression.

The book opens with a discussion of the talks which resulted in the Oslo agreements; talks held without any representatives of the Palestiniain Liberation Organization (PLO) present and therefore talks determined to confirm Israel’s occupation. The chapter continues, providing a brief summary of the history of Washington and Tel Aviv’s attempts to eliminate the concept of Palestine from the world before October 7, 2023 up to and including the Abraham Accords, which would have led to normalization between Israel and the wealthiest Arab nations, while simultaneously diminishing the Palestinians from a world all too willing to erase them. The next chapter describes the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel by the Palestinian resistance forces in Gaza. Descriptions of the planning, the attacks and the chaos in its aftermath are interspersed with a discussion (which continues throughout the text) of Israel’s lies, mistakes and misrepresentations of the fighting on the ground and the nature of those it was fighting.

In the chapters that follow, the reader finds a narrative more honest than that found in most US meida—a narrative that describes the slaughter and its genocidal intent that indicts Israel, the United States, Europe and indeed most of the world’s governments. It also describes the upsurge of popular protest against the genocide and in support of the Palestinian fight against US imperialism and Israel’s colonial occupation. It is Bishara’s intention to prove that the goal of Tel Aviv and Washington’s military onslaught in the wake of October 7, 2023 was not an angry response to the attack and Israel’s embarrassment, but a plan that was a long time in the making just waiting for the right moment to be unleashed. As he writes in his conclusion, “The genocide unfolding is the logical conclusion of a long and deliberate process. The evidence, as this book shows, was hiden in plain sight….” The never-ending resupply of weapons and other materials, the veto of ceasefire resolutions at the United Nations, the repetition of Israeli lies regarding its massacres and starvation, and the punishment of those who opposed the genocide by Washington reminds the reader of Washington’s collaboration, encouragement and consequent culpability. It’s a culpability that can only be genuinely resolved with the convictions of those involved for war crimes and crimes against humanity, from Biden to Blinken to Trump.

I am writing this review a week before the third anniversary of the October 7^th attack. That date is also the publication date for this book. Knowing that the western mainstream media will join (if not lead) the Israeli orchestrated displays marking the deaths that day while diminishing or even ignoring the slaughter perpetrated by Israel in the years that followed, the importance of this text cannot be emphasized enough. In the historical moment we are in—a moment where an indicted and unrepentant war criminal addresses the United Nations about moralith and diplomats do nothing while a world leader threatens the total annihilation of a nation and its people—any words published that provide a more honest and truthful account of the ongoing attempt to destroy a people in fact and in their concept of a nation are important. Indeed, any words published which reveal the lies the genocide is based on and the lies denying its actual truths are a minimum requirement for any hope at stopping the imperial juggernaut of death, destruction and wretchedness those engineering the genocide have created. Bishara’s work demands a listen; even more importantly, it demands action.