Afrasianet - Mohammed Al Shaqa - The book "Twelve Days That Shook the Middle East" by Palestinian writer and academic Marwan Bishara was published by Haymarket Press, in 424 pages, with a subtitle "The Roots of Genocide".
The book deals with the historical and political backgrounds of the events of October 7, 2023, and links them to the course of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict over decades, leading to the war on Gaza and its regional repercussions.
Bishara begins his book with the testimonies of reporters who have covered wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, the Balkans and Ukraine, and quotes his colleagues at Al Jazeera as saying that they have never seen the same destruction as they did in Gaza.
He draws on an Associated Press report comparing the scale of destruction in the Gaza Strip two months after the war broke out to the cities of Aleppo and Mariupol, and on a study he attributes to Brown University that examines the number of journalists killed in Gaza compared to previous wars. He adds to these sources his observations as a follower of the war since The beginning.
The author examines a metaphor used by Benjamin Netanyahu weeks after the October 7 attack to justify Israeli military operations, recalling the "Carthage" operation carried out by British forces in Copenhagen during World War II, during which a school was hit, killing 86 children.
Bishara discusses the significance of the comparison between Nazi Germany and Gaza, which he describes as the largest open prison in the world.
He also stops at videos posted by Israeli soldiers showing killings and looting of homes, in which he sees a shift from the image previously associated with the Israeli soldier in the quote "shoots and cries", summarizing this transformation with the phrase "cruelty has become a parade."
In the first chapter, he returns to Gaza in 1994, during the days of Oslo, when it was rumored in official circles that Palestine would be "Singapore on the Mediterranean."
The organization's ambassador in Washington told him in Arabic half-jokingly, half-serious, and Shafiq al-Hout, who resigned from the executive committee, told a British journalist that Arafat had left Washington amid a group of hypocrites who would build him Hong Kong and Singapore on the sands of Gaza and the hills of the West Bank.
The reality was different: a few settlements with their gardens and swimming pools on Gaza's most fertile land, and more than a million impoverished Palestinians in the world's most overcrowded camps.
He says in one sentence: "Call this peace!" He argues that biased American mediation gave Israel a free hand in expansion until the Palestinians ended up in isolated pockets that resembled the Bantustans of South Africa, and this is the meaning of the title of the first section:
The Beautiful Lie and the Ugly Truth. From here we arrive on the morning of the seventh of October.
In the third chapter, the southern front collapses before noon, and Israeli intelligence misinterprets the signals. He writes cautiously that this may have been what Hamas had hoped for, but it was not what it expected, and so easily.
He puts the event in context: a non-state actor dealt Israel a blow that regular Arab armies have not been able to do since the October 1973 war, when the Egyptians crossed the canal and bypassed it The Bar-Lev Line. Five months ago, former Chief of Staff Aviv Kochavi said that the army brigades were now operating with an intelligence apparatus similar to the movie "The Matrix," and then described what happened as a humiliation that Israelis had never known before.
As for the twelve days, he explains them in the introduction: it is the distance between Netanyahu's war speech on October 7 and Biden's speech from the Oval Office on October 19.
In these days, the destination of Israel and the United States was determined, and the language of justification was formed before the war spread to Lebanon, Iran, and Syria.
The number has no symbolic significance, and the book is an investigation into the roots, while the diary is written by others. He has divided his material into seven sections, from occupation and apartheid to the three "12-day" wars in Lebanon, Syria, and Iran, and along the way he has gone through the Israeli response, Washington's role, and the cost of humanitarian war.
Bishara describes Hamas's October 7 attack as brutal, and then stops further at Israel's response, which he sees as out of proportion. By March 2024, he reports, 90 percent of Gaza's population had been displaced, more than 92 percent of its homes had been damaged or destroyed, and entire neighborhoods had been razed to the ground, along with schools, bakeries, clinics, and the entire civilian structure.
He writes that Netanyahu rejected the compromise offered to him, insisting on a long war that would end in a decisive victory over Hamas, and with Gaza uninhabitable. In his description, Gaza was not a battlefield, but an area of extermination, reduced to ashes and the world watched.
The Gospel of Events is arranged in a continuous timeline, so that the reader sees the connection between yesterday and today, and reads the 7th of October as the result of a long process that culminated.
The introduction describes what happened next as the result of a premeditated plan, and is supported by well-known evidence: the decisions of the International Court of Justice, the report of the UN Commission of Inquiry, the memoranda of the International Criminal Court, and the words of a senior European official about starvation by arms.
Marwan Bishara writes from the Palestinian Conflict Monitor website, based on testimonies and documents that allow the reader to refer to their sources in the book's footnotes. He also draws on statements by Israeli officials and journalists, including Raviv. Drucker offers multiple perspectives on understanding the war.
In the final sections, he examines the repercussions of the Gaza war on the fronts of Lebanon, Iran, and Syria, linking them to the regional transformations that followed October 7.
In his introduction, he focuses on two opposing perceptions: Israel's and the United States' confidence in their military ability to resolve the conflict, and Hamas's bet on sacrifice as a means to achieve its goals.
By recalling past historical experiences, Bishara concludes that military superiority does not guarantee the resolution of protracted conflicts, especially when they are related to issues of land, identity, and self-determination.
The importance of the book is evident in its attempt to link the facts of the war to its historical and political context, and in its approach to the English-speaking reader, as it addresses the reader who does not receive the novel from this location, and does not only order the days of the first war, but traces its roots from Oslo to the wars of the region, providing documentary and analytical material that helps the reader understand the roots of the war and its repercussions.
For constructive reading, some of the spaces seem to deserve more expansion. The last sections bring together the fronts of Lebanon, Iran, and Syria in a single transformation, each with its own history and reasons, and Syria bears from the reasons for its collapse years before October, and a reader wishes to devote more space to it.
What the introduction proposes about the pre-plan is a judgment of intentions, and its value doubles as the book is supported by documents and statements that are tracked by the chapters, and followed by the reader himself, and perhaps this is what makes the book the beginning of a discussion more than a final word.
Twelve Days That Shook the Middle East provides a documentary and analytical reading of the events of October 7 and the war that followed, placing them in a historical context that extends from the Oslo Accords to recent regional transformations.
Its importance lies not only in restoring the facts, but also in trying to link them and reveal the political trajectories that contributed to shaping them.
While some of the author's conclusions raise questions that deserve further discussion and documentation, the book opens up room for repetition Consider the roots and repercussions of the conflict, and the future of a region that is still experiencing the effects of this war.
Mohammed Al Shaqa - Yemeni writer
