AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman.

Twelve Days That Shook the Middle East: Origins of a Genocide. That’s the title of a new book by the Al Jazeera senior political analyst Marwan Bishara. In the opening pages, he writes, “Twelve days were enough. It took no more than twelve days, from Netanyahu’s October 7 war speech to Biden’s October 19 rare Oval Office speech, to expose the anatomy of Israel’s war, its intent, its strategy, and the method of its madness. The genocide was not a slip; it was the result of a predetermined strategy for which there existed a blueprint, if not a premeditated decision. … Hamas had set the process in motion on October 7, it lost control of that process the very same day.”

Marwan Bishara has been with Al Jazeera for more than 20 years, has written three books and written for many publications, joining us now from Paris, France.

Marwan, congratulations on your book. Thank you for joining us. If you can talk about that quote and say — you say Hamas set the process in motion October 7th and immediately lost control of that process. What do you mean?

MARWAN BISHARA: Yes, absolutely. Clearly, the attack of October 7 was the trigger for what came after. And my argument is that we know about what came after, basically the past two or three years, from those very first 12 days after October 7. And it started with ideology. You know, genocides don’t start with bombs; they start with ideology. And in this case, the ideology has been decades in the making — a century, I would even say, in the making, in the sense of the establishment of a racist, supremacist system, regime, that had been in control of Palestinians and Palestinian life and destiny for the past 80 years, occupying them and dispossessing them and discriminating against them. This has been going on for many decades. So, that was ready, intact on the eve of October 7, October 8.

And then there was the dehumanization. Immediately after October 7, October 8, 9, 10, we saw this extraordinary campaign of dehumanization of the Palestinians as animals, Nazi-like. You cannot deal with them. They don’t understand. They are — they are primitive. They only understand the language of force and violence, and so on and so forth.

After that immediately came the hyperbole, the exaggeration of what exactly happened October 7. October 7 was bloody, and it was horrific. And your earlier guest testified to the fact that this was not easy for hundreds of Israeli civilians. But Netanyahu and his government had to go overboard, to exaggerate, to lie, to deceive about what exactly happened, and their role in it, as well, invoking the so-called Hannibal doctrine, where they themselves joined the bombing of those involved in the conflict during October 7.

AMY GOODMAN: Marwan, explain the Hannibal doctrine.

MARWAN BISHARA: So, the Hannibal doctrine was something that was invoked in the early 1980s by the Israeli military, saying we cannot afford to have Israeli soldiers being captured, because then we’re going to have to negotiate their release, and that will cost us Palestinian — or, in that case, Lebanese — prisoners in Israeli jails. So, because they did not want to release Palestinian or Lebanese prisoners, they decided that if any one Israeli soldier — later on, civilian — is captured by any kidnappers, that the Israeli military then will take extraordinary measure to kill the operation, including, if it need be, to kill the soldier, the Israeli soldier, or the Israeli civilian.

So, on October 7, immediately after the war — after the operation started, in the early hours of the morning of October 7, apparently, the Israeli military invoked the Hannibal doctrine. And Israeli aircrafts, jets, you know, bombers, and tanks started carrying attacks against suspected conflict zones, whether it’s kibbutz or settlements, or whether it is convoys going back to Gaza. So, the invocation of that, of that controversial military order, clearly led to the death of perhaps hundreds of Israeli civilians and many, as well, among the Palestinians, whether it’s Hamas or any of those Palestinians who came into Gaza.

All of that, you know, taking that in consideration, what happened soon after that is the worst part of it, right? The establishment of a war cabinet, the declaration of war, the deployment of 100,000 soldiers on the border with Gaza, the recall of 350,000 reservists from the Israeli army, and setting up a strategy under the rubric of lethality, which has been developed over many years of wars in Gaza. And lethality is the one that involved mass destruction, not discriminant destruction, that involved the use of the so-called Lavender system, Gospel system, “Where’s My Daddy — Your Daddy?” system, and so on and so forth, that would actually lead to massive devastation of Gaza.

And that’s where the intention came. They’ve said it in press conferences, in war rooms. They’ve said it in public, in declarations, ministers and opposition leaders, about why there is no innocents in Gaza and why “we’re going to have to bomb all of them.” Some of them spoke about nuking them. Some of them spoke about “Nothing is going to be left standing in Gaza. We’re going to turn it into a deserted strip.” And all of these things were then repeated by the soldiers, not only as slogans, but even as songs — right? — repeated by the soldiers. So, the orders went down the hierarchy, from the government ministers to the army, and was implemented by the generals, who boasted of bombing Gaza back to the Stone Age. And they certainly tried to do that.

AMY GOODMAN: If you can talk about what is the power that the U.S. has over Israel? You know, many said, for example, with the Iran war, that Israel brought the U.S. into it. But do you see it in that way? And what about Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law, just visiting with the Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, also meeting directly with Hamas, but not meeting with the head of the PA, the Palestinian Authority? And if you can talk about where all of this stands right now? As people stood with a moment of silence on this October 7th, people at the music festival, Israelis mourning the dead, they could hear the boom of Israeli airstrikes continuing in Gaza. Talk about the Board of Peace. Talk about the Palestinian government that was set up in exile in Cairo, still not allowed to come into Gaza by Israel.

MARWAN BISHARA: So, let’s start with the most relevant to the issue at hand, which is the Biden administration first, right? Because nowadays, anywhere you look, in The Atlantic, where you are, The Atlantic magazine, or The New Yorker or The New York Times, or even, you know, hosted by our brilliant or your brilliant anchor, Jon Stewart, you have these former Biden administration officials trying to whitewash their record. They lie, they deceive, and they continue to claim no responsibility for the genocide that actually took place in Gaza over the past three years.

But they are directly responsible. Not only they aided and abetted; they were part of the operation taking place in Gaza the past two years, part of the war. They were in the war cabinet meetings. President Biden himself attended the war cabinet meetings on October 18, back in 2023. Lloyd Austin, the secretary of defense, attended war meetings. Secretary Blinken attended war meetings.

So, when you watch people like Jake Sullivan, the former national security adviser, sitting on Jon Stewart’s show, talking about how they tried their best to have a ceasefire, and they really put pressure on the Israeli government, and they succeeded, you know, 15 months later, it’s all humbug. It’s all BS. They were part and parcel.

The banality of evil wasn’t in Israel; it was in Washington, because the kind of support that Washington provided to Israel — diplomatic support, financial support, military support — they were talking about “We were trying to help the Palestinians,” while actually giving Israel the arms to shoot the Palestinians, before sending them the Band-Aids to take care of their injuries.

So, Washington, in that sense, in the sense of the Biden administration and its officials, were part and parcel, were complicit, were cooperating, coordinating the war effort that actually was a genocidal war in Gaza. We really must underline that, because we are seeing history rewritten as we speak. In the U.S. publications, as I remember it, after the 2003 war, when many of the then the Bush administration tried to whitewash their crimes, and the journalists who supported that war, just like those who supported the war in Gaza are now trying to whitewash the record.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted — 

MARWAN BISHARA: It’s very important to underscore — yes.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to the former top State Department official under President Biden admitting a genocide has taken place in Gaza. Wendy Sherman served as deputy secretary of state until her retirement in July 2023. She spoke on a Bloomberg podcast.

WENDY SHERMAN: I think that it is critical that Israel remain an ally of the United States and that we protect the right of a Jewish state. But I also believe that the prime minister has led us down a road — and we have been part of it — that has, in essence, created a genocide in Gaza.

AMY GOODMAN: And then there’s former State Department spokesperson Matt Miller, who spent more than a year as the face of the Biden administration’s foreign policy and repeatedly defended Israel against allegations of war crimes and genocide in Gaza. He later admitted on a podcast interview with Sky News that, yes, Israel committed war crimes.

MATTHEW MILLER: I don’t think it’s a genocide, but I think the — I think it is, without a doubt, true that Israel has committed war crimes.

MARK STONE: You wouldn’t have said that at the podium.

MATTHEW MILLER: Yeah, look, because I — I mean, when you’re at the podium, you’re not expressing your personal opinion. You’re expressing the conclusions of the United States government.

AMY GOODMAN: And then you have Brett McGurk, who’s just come out with his new book. It’s called Brink. The headline in The New York Times, “'Ready to Blow His Stack': How Biden Nearly Cut Off Netanyahu Over Gaza,” and that’s talking about what McGurk is saying in his book. Marwan Bishara, take it — 

MARWAN BISHARA: Yes, absolutely.

AMY GOODMAN: Take it through to the Trump administration now.

MARWAN BISHARA: Yes, there’s no doubt that, even according to McGurk and Sullivan, that they paved the way for the Trump administration to take over the war effort, that they paved the way in the worst possible manner for the Trump administration then to take it on and to do whatever it wants, including the weaponization of hunger and the weaponization of the food aid to the Palestinian people. I mean, we sunk into a whole new abyss with the Trump administration.

During the Biden administration, the United States was basically complicit in genocide. During the Trump administration, on the very first few days when it took over, they started talking about ethnically cleansing Gaza, out in the open. President Trump spoke of ethnically cleansing Gaza, the entire Gaza Strip, in order to have a beachside property called Trumpland or whatever, or called, you know, the New Riviera in the East. So, the cynicism that the Trump administration built in its first year with the Gaza issue, taking up the mantle from the Biden administration, that was really, you know, just so depressing to watch, in the sense that from one administration to another administration, we see complicity with genocide.

We see the United States aiding an Israeli government, protecting an Israeli government, and instead of having them stand up for the responsibility for the war crimes, they attack the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice, which is unprecedented for an American president, for the United States, to be so hostile to international law, international legality, international institutions, the United Nations, even the United Nations, you know, relief agency, like UNRWA, and so on and so forth, that were indispensable for the people in Gaza when the policy was to starve them, to bomb their bakeries and schools and universities, to turn their schoolyards into graveyards. You at least needed something like UNRWA. But, no, UNRWA has to be demonized. UNRWA has to be cut down to size. UNRWA has to be blocked and to be, again, demonized by not only Israel, but also by the United States.

So, the Trump administration did everything possible in order to achieve some sort of a Israeli victory and a Hamas surrender, and forced the United Nations Security Council to adopt a resolution which, to my mind, Amy, is illegal. And I say that not being a legal scholar, but certainly being a student of history. The United Nations Security Council, under pressure from the Trump administration, and because the genocide was going on and they had to do something, they adopted a resolution that recognized the Board of Peace, without this Board of Peace ever being defined, without knowing zero about what is this Board of Peace. So, they adopted the resolution, and this allowed the Trump administration then to go on and to define this Board of Peace as it wishes, including appointing President Trump as a, you know, life member that heads it, and Netanyahu, of course, and Putin as members of the Board of Peace. So, you can imagine the surrealism — right? — behind this kind of an effort in order to turn a two-year genocide into a mockery of international law.

AMY GOODMAN: Marwan Bishara, there is so much to talk about and so little time, and we want to get directly on the ground to Gaza. So I want to thank you for being with us, Al Jazeera’s senior political analyst, author of the new book Twelve Days That Shook the Middle East: Origins of a Genocide.

Coming up, we go to Gaza City to speak with journalist Akram al-Satarri. Stay with us.

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AMY GOODMAN: “Khatar,” “Danger,” by the Palestinian oud musician Huda Asfour, performing in our Democracy Now! studio.