Twleve Days that Shook the Middle East: Origins of a Genocide

Join Marwan Bishara and Mohamad Bazzi as they discuss Bishara's latest book Twelve Days That Shook the Middle East: Origins of a Genocide.

In the book, 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.

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.


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Speakers:

Dr. Marwan Bishara has been the senior political analyst at Al Jazeera English for the past two decades. He has authored three book and written for publications such as The New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, Le Monde, Newsweek, Jerusalem Post, and Al-Hayat. He was a visiting academic at St Antony’s College, Oxford, and was a lecturer of international relations at the American University of Paris. He splits his time between New York, London, Paris, and Doha.

Mohamad Bazzi is director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies and a journalism professor at New York University. He is also a columnist for the Guardian US, writing on American foreign policy and corruption under the Trump Administration. From 2009 to 2013, he served as an adjunct senior fellow for Middle East studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. Before joining the NYU faculty, Bazzi was the Middle East bureau chief at Newsday from 2003 to 2008, where he established bureaus in Baghdad and Beirut. He was the lead writer on the Iraq war and its aftermath. He also served as Newsday’s United Nations bureau chief and as a metro reporter in New York City.

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