Palestine Tet – 65 – Sétif (Algeria) 1945; Gaza (Palestine) 2023 – Part Two

Algerians protesting against 60 years of military rule, their “Hirak”

Part 1

Part 2

1.

On November 2, 2023, almost a month after the October 7 break out from its Gaza concentration camp,  in a unanimous gesture, the Algerian Parliament voted to authorize President Abdelmadjid Tebboune to enter the Gaza-Israel war and throw his support behind Palestine. It is as close to a declaration of war against Israel as a country can get, without actually declaring war and an obvious political gesture of solidarity with Palestinians fighting the Israel onslaught into Gaza.

Two days prior, Yemen actually declared war on Israel and over the course of the next two months eliminated any doubt that it is serious about confronting the Zionist state.

The kinship Algerians feel with Palestine, in Gaza or elsewhere, is in part a result of their shared heritage that of the Arabic language and the Islamic religion. But it is more than that for both Algeria and Palestine also share the imposition of settler colonialism, in the Algerian case by French imperial ambitions, in the Palestinian case by a Zionist model imposed upon historic Palestine in the service of one or another imperialist country, first Great Britain and then the United States.

In a similar manner, the defenders of French colonialism in Algeria – those who actually participated in it – the so-called “colons”, or colonizers resemble the Zionist settlers, actually the one more or less mirror the other and visa versa 

Let’s look at a few of these similarities:

The ideological foundation of both is openly racist and class discriminatory. Both are based in somewhat different ways on the 19th century understandings of a basic inequality of humanity based on the model which seems European “civilization” and with it “whiteness” as the highest stage of development with non-whites being somewhere else down the ladder, ie, not quite human. And we know what that opens the door to

French colonial rule in Algeria was an apartheid-like system from its earliest days until the last French soldier was kicked out of Algeria in 1962.

The French pretext for its North African colonial spree that in one way or another would also bring both Morocco and Tunisia under its aegis was its “mission civilisatrice” or civilizing mission. Such a pretext was warmly welcomed by large segments of the French population who preferred to live with the illusion that French colonialism was less driven by simple greed, territorial expansion and racism than the more objectives of “civilizing” “the uncivilized”.

As such an integral element of the mission civilisatrice has always been – from the beginning in the mind-19th century – to undermine and destroy manifestations of the culture of the colonized, in the case of Algeria, this became a full scale attack and undermining of the Arabic language, one of the world’s great literary traditions, and the Islamic Religion, one of the world’s greatest, followed by more people in the world today and the reduction of the indigenous population to the role of the ‘hewers of wood and the drawers of water.”

The question addressed to the French colons (who still make up an important political stream – extreme right wing for the most part – in France). “Mission civilisatrice?” What is more barbaric than the past 1000 years of European (including French) history? A careful study of French colonialism throughout Africa, in IndoChina reveals a system secured by unmatched levels of extreme violence – nothing “civilizing” about it – be in Algeria, Cameroon, Madagascar, Vietnam just to name a few.

That the French people could come to believe in the “humanizing impact” of French colonial conquest suggests a level national self-delusion hard to match.

Ultimately Zionism’s racism springs from the same source: European racial beliefs in its own superiority and the inferiority of non-European peoples. But it has a slightly different spin to it. Zionist racism – and Zionism is and always has been profoundly racist – springs from the misuse of the Biblical notion that the Jews are God’s chosen people and as such are superior and should have rights and privileges denied others. To come to accept “the chosen-ness” of the Jews has its corollary: that others are not chosen, inferior.

The question that Zionists need to answer: who “chose you” to do “what” to “whom?

Whether it is in the name of “chosen-ness” or a “mission civilisatrice” both Zionism  French colonialism in Algeria came into being on a foundation of racism which “gave them the right” to ethnically cleanse indigenous populations, to engage in extreme highly organized violence to establish their political ascendancy. The systems that were set up were in the case of Algeria and are in the case of Israel discriminatory in the extreme so that the term “apartheid” applies to both.

Another striking similarity …

To defend its privileges and prerogatives as they were challenged over the course of the 20th century first through peaceful reform movements which promised much but delivered little, the French colons would resort to such extreme violence that they nearly brought down the French government of Charles De Gaulle against whom there were dozens of assassination attempts. But far worse was the combined violence that the French government and their fascist settler elements perpetrated against the Algerian people fighting for their national rights.

All those fine french words about “egalite” “liberte” dissolve into the fury of violence with which French colonialism tried to crush the Algerian independence movement where torture was common place and that out of a population of some eight million, a million and a half Algerians lost their lives reaching for freedom and independence.

How different is what the French did in Setif (see Part One) from what we are today witnessing by the Israeli onslaught in Gaza where civilians of all ages, men, women and children are being slaughtered like fish in a barrel, treated with indignities and torture that match the horrors of fascism? The fascist element in Israeli society, never that far beneath the surface has come roaring to the surface as it did in Chile in 1973, in German in 1933.

This is the essence of settler colonialism be it in Algeria or Israel.

True, French colonial rule, thankfully, is in history’s dust bin where it belongs while Zionism continues to the present. But its “democratic”, “progressive mask” has been ripped of in the blood soaked soil sand of Gaza. Discredited for its history of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians – Nakba One, now Nakba Two  in Gaza and everything in between – Zionism has created what is increasingly acknowledged as an apartheid system of governance that makes Israel’s claims of being “the Middle East’s only democracy” a pathetic lie.

2.

In France’s case, both economic and geopolitical considerations were at play in its cruel quest to conquer Algeria. It was part and parcel of that great European 19th century sport in which others also participated, especially Britain: gobbling up the juiciest morsels of an increasingly weakened Ottoman Empire.

The colonization of Algeria had a number of advantages for France. Geo-politically it gave France control of both sides of the Mediterranean Sea, even in those days of its waning influence, still important. An enormous country geographically, it also gave France a springboard from which it could extend its colonial control more deeply into Africa both in the Sahara and along the banks of Africa’s great Niger River. To a certain extent, this permitted France to limit the authority of its main colonial competitor of the day, Great Britain.

Zionism’s origins are similar but somewhat more complicated. European Jews increasingly subjected to anti-Semitic attacks in both Eastern and Western Europe conceived of a national homeland for the Jews. Not being a nation itself, it sought a protector, a sponsor and after some rejections (the Ottoman Empire, Germany) it found one in late 19th, early 20th century Great Britain whose interests it promised to defend and protect.

Beyond the usual ideological garbage of Britain wanting to help Jews establish a homeland were more practical geo-political concerns. For Britain controlling the Middle East and Palestine in particular a colony or “trusteeship” in Palestine had two underpinnings: giving its colony in Egypt where the Suez Canal was located a northern buffer zone as well as providing a strategic base for its growing dependency on Middle East oil. No Palestine didn’t have oil; that was found in Iraq, Iran, Kuwait (and a bit later Saudi Arabia).

Palestine gave Britain more strategic depth from which it could control the region … and not incidentally, limit the influence of France, its main strategic competitor in the region. In short Jewish colonization in Palestine which picks up after the 1917 issuance of the Balfour Doctrine,  provided Britain with a regional proxy, always a useful pawn, to maximize its influence. Once Britain’s power waned at the end of WW 2, Zionism jumped ship and offered itself as Washington’s regional proxy, which it has remained ever since.

What made both French colonial settlement in Algeria and the Zionist project in Palestine so toxic from beginning to end, so brutal, so racist is that in both cases, settlement was  essentially a struggle over land. Driven by those geo-political considerations, a foreign population dispossesses an indigenous one either in whole or in part. Both were accomplished through violent territorial conquest using not so subtle nor convincing  racist pretexts.

France’s conquest of Algeria which took a full forty years to pacify and was done with an extreme level of violence, a scorched earth policy that “took no prisoners” was one in which several hundred thousand indigenous Algerian Arabs were killed. While the indigenous population remained the majority, the most productive lands and major urban areas mostly north of the Atlas mountain range were expropriated, and in shady deals turned over to French colonizers to run and manage. The remaining Algerian population became a part of the colony’s mostly unskilled labor force with many others pushed south into the less productive regions of the Atlas Mountains and the Sahara Desert.

To some degree, the French colonization of Algeria and its (mis) treatment of the indigenous population was based in large measure on the British settler colonial model in its American colonies (and the policies of the new American government after 1776) which, over time, first expelled Native peoples from their land leading to the latter’s extermination in large measure. Here in United States, De Toqueville’s “Democracy In America” is something of a hymn to American energy and ingenuity.

Less appreciated was his study of how the early American nation ethnically cleansed native populations. Algeria’s scorched earth policies, its herding the Algerian population into what amounted to concentration camps leaned heavily on De Toqueville’s observations of the likes of Andrew Jackson’s ethnic cleansing of Eastern U.S. native peoples.

The colonization of Algeria had a number of advantages for France. Geo-politically it gave France control of both sides of the Mediterranean Sea, even in those days of its waning influence, still important. An enormous country geographically, it also gave France a springboard from which it could extend its colonial control more deeply into Africa both in the Sahara and along the banks of Africa’s great Niger River. To a certain extent, this permitted France to limit the authority of its main colonial competitor of the day, Great Britain.

Zionism has proven itself to be a useful proxy for the United States in the Middle East. Trying to avoid direct colonial, military occupation of the region’s energy resources and its position in the global economy as an important transit zone, the United States has long preferred depending upon regional proxies.

Until the Iranian Revolution of 1979, Washington had two main (and few lesser) anchors: Iran and Israel. With the overthrow of the Shah of Iran, the U.S. lost what was perhaps its most powerful and effective allies, Iran, which was Islamic but not Arab. Dependency on Israel spiked as reflected in the huge U.S. foreign aid and loans to Tel Aviv.

3.

There is more – a Part 3.

To be continued … tomorrow.