Yossi Schwartz ISL (RCIT section in Israel/Occupied Palestine), 15.06.2024
There is a lot of similarity between the Zionist state war on Gaza and the Algerian War of Independence. More than one historian has noticed this similarity.
“A brutal attack by militants “mercilessly slaughtering” civilians in their homes co-occurred with attacks against military targets of an occupying power. These attacks resulted in an overwhelming military retaliation that killed so many people; one soldier wrote, “They had to be buried with bulldozers. While this sounds like coverage of October 7 and the current Gaza War, these are descriptions of the 1955 “Philippeville massacre” in Algeria. That event marked a significant turning point in the Algerian War of Independence against 125 years of French occupation. It led to seven more years of brutality that killed up to one million Algerians and threatened civil war in France.” [i]
The Zionist propaganda relates to the event of October 7th as this was the beginning of the Zionist-Palestinian conflict. It began in the 1880s when the first wave of the Zionist settler colonialists arrived from Russia.
Understanding the historical context in which events occur is essential. Confusing specific actions, such as the Philippeville massacre or Hamas’s 7 October attacks, with the overall goals of an insurgency risks mistaking means for ends, resulting in a fundamental misunderstanding of the overall situation.
The context of the Zionist war on the people of Gaza is the decline of American imperialism and the rise of Eastern imperialism. The local servants of the US are Egypt under the dictator Al Sisi and the kingdoms of Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Iran is closer to Russian and Chinese imperialism, and it is a regional power with allies like Hezbollah. The Houthis, Hamas, and the Islamic Jihad. Israel, which is the front line of Western imperialism that has supported it with many milliards of dollars and the most advanced weapons, is threatened by Iran because the Zionists know that Israel has to show that it is the stronger state in the region; otherwise, the Western imperialists will stop seeing her as a strategic asset and begin seeing her as a liability. For the American imperialists, Israel must smash any Palestinian resistance to the Zionist occupation, ethnic cleansing, massacres, and destruction. In addition, Netanyahu needs to keep the war going so he will not be imprisoned for his corruption. Biden understands that Israel has lost the war with the Palestinian resistance, and he tries to save Israel by diplomatic means and lies. It is a presidential election year, and many Americans oppose his unconditional support for Israel, and many see through his and Antony J. Blinken’s lies. The last one is that Israel wants a permanent ceasefire.
The shocking death toll, displacement, destruction, and inhumane treatment, including torture of detainees in Gaza and rape of women, form chilling parallels between current Israeli military operations and the French in Algeria. Like the Algerians, displaced Palestinians in Gaza currently face starvation and receive woefully insufficient humanitarian assistance and medical care.
“Thousands of protesters gathered in a town under colonial rule. They raised national flags and placards and called for self-determination. The authorities tried to confiscate the flags, triggering a riot that killed several officers and settlers. The colonial army, its settler militias, and police responded by bombing villages and homes where “rebels” were ostensibly hiding. Thousands were killed, and entire families were wiped out”[ii].
No, this did not happen in Gaza or the West Bank but in Algeria.
“Israel’s military conduct has drawn comparisons with France’s operations against the National Liberation Front, an armed group better known by its French acronym, FLN.Like Hamas, the FLN carried out a surprise operation on the settler town of Philippeville in August 1955, attacking settlers and military installations and killing more than 120 people.”[iii]
France bombed villages and relocated their inhabitants to “regroupement centers”, which were camps surrounded by barbed wire where people died from malnutrition and disease. Still, unlike Gaza, these areas were never bombed or attacked. The French government justified its cruelty by the claim that the FLN raped white women and killed babies.
“Israel and France both tried to brand their enemies as rapists, according to Sara Rahnama, a scholar of the gendered history of the French-Algerian war. In November and December, … the response to mass protests [for a ceasefire in Gaza] was that Hamas intentionally used rape as a weapon of war, and that is a marker of how depraved they are and how necessary this struggle is for the values of Western civilization,” Rahnama said.”[iv]
Similar to Israel, the French authorities responded by arming settlers and coordinating attacks on several Algerian villages that killed about 12,000 people, mostly civilians. The French ultimately accepted Algerian independence in 1962, five years after the French “victory” in the Battle of Algiers, seven years after the Philippeville massacre, 18 years after Algerian demands for federal autonomy, and 132 years after Algerian nationalists first used armed resistance against French occupation. Because of the cruelty of the French army and the European settler colonialists. When finally, the Algerians won, the Colons escaped back to Europe,
Israel will be smashed. It is only a question of time and not a very long time. It will be smashed either by a mechanical process or a total defeat in a war. Or by a revolutionary process as part of the Arab revolution. In the first way, the Zionists will try to escape to other states. In a revolutionary way, the Israelis as a minority will have religious and cultural rights in a Palestinian state ruled by the working class in alliance with the Falhain from the river to the sea.
Down with the settler-colonialist Zionist state!
For Palestine red and free from the river to the sea!
Endnotes:
[i] Sean Tomlinson https://responsiblestatecraft.org/france-algeria-war-gaza/
[ii] https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2024/6/9/israels-occupation-of-palestine-echoes-frances-colonisation-of-algeria
[iii] Ibid
[iv] Ibid