Childish drawings were used to “explain” the need for indigenous Arab and Berber Muslims to bow down or die during the French occupation of Algeria. Villages facing destruction were plastered with posters containing scribbled images of a school and a Tricolour flag, juxtaposed with a widowed mother-and-child, a bloody corpse and a house on fire. The psychological choice was easy: accept the “peace and protection of France” or suffer the lethal consequences.
If such barbaric logic sounds familiar today, it is because Israel is using it to try and “legitimise” the mass slaughter of Palestinians. More than 50,000 of them — many women and children — have been killed, and tens of thousands more maimed, over the past 17 months alone. All the evidence points to a full-blown genocide, as Israel attempts to ethnically cleanse territory it covets under the guise of “self defence”.
Turning Gaza, and increasingly the West Bank, into a near-permanent field of fire was this time precipitated by the Hamas-led incursion by armed militants into what they viewed as occupied Palestine on 7 October 2023. The Israeli military reported mainly young men breaching 119 locations, including military installations and settlements.
Almost 1,200 Israelis were killed, including unarmed civilians, as well as soldiers, police, and members of the Shin Bet security agency, many at the hands of the Israeli army. In turn, 1,609 of the Palestinian raiders — at least 409 more than the Israeli victims — were killed on sight on the day itself. Many were liquidated by high-tech Israeli weaponry which was also blamed for killing Israelis. They became victims of the so-called Hannibal Directive, the controversial procedure that condones Israelis killing their own if it prevents soldiers being kidnapped.
French soldiers marching with Algerian prisoners in 1956. The French colonial past in Algeria is a trauma that continues to shape modern France.
Atrocities in communities such as Be’eri — a kibbutz founded in 1946 — included the killing of residents, but initial Israeli claims about the rape of teenagers, and the murder of babies and a pregnant woman there were made-up. In turn, Israeli politicians and their apologists continue to use the horror of 7 October to suggest that their own murderous revenge campaigns in Gaza and on the West Bank are a reasonable consequence. They even consider that the release of Israelis who were taken captive by the Palestinians, and who are being held in unknown locations across Gaza, is somehow best achieved by reducing the blighted strip of land to rubble.
Never mind the rulings of the International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court pointing to genocide, and the arrest warrants for the most senior Israeli politicians, the carnage is unrelenting.
The asymmetrical nature of the fighting is, of course, typical of the Israel-Palestine conflict that has raged continually since 1948, when Israel was founded with the support of western powers prepared to give it all the weapons it needed to settle on land that belonged to others.
As now, the rationale was that everybody must comply with the requirements of Israeli hegemony — including land theft and the subjugation of identity — or else collective punishment would continue. In this sense, comparisons with the Algerian struggle against French colonisers are entirely appropriate, and indeed a route to try and work out what the future might hold.
The year 1830 was Algeria’s 1948, when an invasion from Europe led to Marshal Thomas-Robert Bugeaud, France’s first governor-general of Algeria, telling the Paris parliament: “Wherever there is fresh water and fertile land, there one must locate colons, without concerning oneself to whom these lands belong.” The colons — short for colonisers — in Algeria came from all over Europe, and often from very troubled backgrounds. They aimed to impose themselves on a land populated by those they considered inferior.
“As now, the rationale was that everybody must comply with the requirements of Israeli hegemony […] or else collective punishment would continue. In this sense, comparisons with the Algerian struggle against French colonisers are entirely appropriate”
Local Muslims were, at best, viewed as being useful as servants, and those that actively resisted the invaders could expect to be tortured, imprisoned without trial, and — ultimately — exterminated. Hence French forces creating the world’s first primitive gas chambers, filling caves with noxious fumes in order to asphyxiate a detested underclass, while regularly carrying out other crimes against humanity.
As in Palestine, the savagery was naturally met with resistance, as Arab and Berber Muslims formed themselves into guerrilla groups, notably the FLN, National Liberation Front. It was founded at the start of the Algerian War in 1954, prosecuting a successful struggle that resulted in independence in 1962.
France originally fought back with all its might, deploying the latest in military technology, including fighter jets to indiscriminately obliterate towns and villages. Bombers carried payloads full of Napalm — petrochemical “special barrels” according to the jargon of the time.
Again, as in Palestine, the warped rationale was that every Muslim man, woman and child in occupied Algeria was either a “human shield” or a “terrorist”. Worse still, the propaganda portrayed such Arabs and Berbers as sub-humans: sexual deviants and uneducated oafs who were not fit to play a part in civilised society, not least of all because they were brown-skinned and from the wrong monotheistic religious tradition.
The historic deceit of Africa being populated by dangerous savages also extended to the colons’ view of the Middle East. Hence Israeli officials using terms such as “human animals”, as they pulverise mosques, hospitals, schools and apartment blocks in Gaza, along with everyone in them.
A Palestinian woman holding her baby in the middle of rubble following an attack
“There was no such thing as Palestinians,” said the late Israeli Prime Minister,Golda Meir, to try and legitimise the never-ending persecution of unwanted Palestinians. As now, billions of dollars-worth of arms and aid poured into a land that Ukraine-born and American-educated Meir considered her own.
Such a mindset still dominates the thinking of Israeli leaders, as evidenced by Benjamin Netanyahu, the current prime minister and alleged war criminal. Beyond revelling in the destruction of Gaza, Netanyahu has expressed his support for American president Donald Trump’s demonic scheme to force two million Palestinians out of Gaza so that it can be turned into a Florida-style beach resort.
What men like Trump and Netanyahu need to do is note the position of a seemingly invincible France just before its capitulation to the FLN in 1962. Despite civilian kill counts mounting, and the western military-industrial complex putting weapons into the French armoury, the international community was becoming more and more disgusted.
France knew it could never integrate an Arab and Berber population it had treated abominably for decades, and it no longer had the stomach to uphold its rule through permanent conflict. Telling Algerians that they could choose between “peace and protection” or non-stop horror simply exacerbated the situation, and made the colons want to flee. They did in their hundreds of thousands — so ending 132 years of ruthless occupation.
If, as currently seems certain, the Israelis have given up on the two-state solution, and simply want Palestinian communities they abhor to be killed or disappear, they may well find that similar pressure becomes too much to bear.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Maghrebi.org. Nabila Ramdani is a French-Algerian author who works as an academic, journalist and broadcaster, mainly covering France and the Arab and Muslim World. She has regularly reported from the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Gaza and Israel. Nabila’s first book is entitled Fixing France: How to Repair a Broken Republic published by PublicAffairs and Hurst.
If you wish to pitch an opinion piece please send your article to alisa.butterwick@maghrebi.org.
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