Two Wars of Independence - Algeria and Palestine - teleSURenglish (2024)

There are many precedents to the genocidal colonial war by the Zionist regime currently underway against the Palestinian people. The brutal Zionist massacre of over 20,000 civilians is a desperate reaction to the transformative power of the bold Palestinian military offensive on October 7th against elite units of the Israeli occupying army.

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Its impact has been similar to that of the Battle of Annual in 1921 in the Rif region, now part of Morocco. In the Battle of Annual, lasting several weeks, rebel forces against Spanish colonial rule, led by Abd el-Krim el-Khattabi, destroyed an army of over twelve thousand Spanish troops.

Historian Youssef Girard has noted, “For Spain, Annual was one of its most serious defeats in history. Spanish troops had not only suffered a defeat but had lost face to an enemy judged technically and racially inferior. In a world marked by racist and ethnocentric prejudices, Annual was a symbol: it was the victory of people of color over a white nation; it was the erasure of the Cross by the Crescent; it was the revenge of the East on the West.”

The parallels with the impact of the Palestinian militias’ offensive this past October against Zionist occupation forces are clear.

Aside from its historical significance, the Battle of Annual was another example of how a militarily inferior force can overcome a much more powerful enemy through asymmetric warfare and guerrilla warfare.

In the end, to defeat the guerrilla force of Abd el-Krim, it was necessary to deploy the armies and air forces of Spain and France together with over 250,000 troops.

During his visit to Cairo in 1959, Che Guevara met with Abd el-Krim el-Khattabi, as he had learned from the struggle of Abd el-Krim through the former Spanish general Alberto Bayo, who taught tactics to Cuban guerrillas in Mexico.

Bayo considered Che his “best student” and in his classes taught “how a guerrilla should act to break a siege, based on the times that Abd el-Krim’s Moroccans, in the Rif War, broke the Spanish sieges.”

Che with Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser

Che’s meeting with Abd el-Krim el-Khattabi is another of the many continuities between the anti-imperialist struggles of the world’s peoples, still intensely present today in Palestine but also, for example, in the territory of the Sahrawi people.

Che’s visit to Cairo in 1959 was part of the diplomatic efforts of revolutionary Cuba at that time to establish relations with the new independent African nations.

Che returned to the continent several times between 1963 and 1965 to meet with leaders of anti-colonial struggles such as Agostinho Neto of Angola and Amilcar Cabral of Guinea, and to visit, among other countries, Ghana, Mali, and again, Egypt and Algeria.

In Algeria in 1965, he delivered his famous speech at the Afro-Asian Economic Seminar of Solidarity, calling for greater integration of socialist countries into the struggles for independence.It’s easy to forget that the struggle for independence in Algeria was marked by a brutal genocidal policy by the French authorities and settlers.

In 1945, the French killed up to 45,000 Algerian civilians between the months of May and June, in retaliation for attacks by the local population of Setif, Guelma, and Kherrata after the killing by colonial security forces of a child carrying an Algerian flag in a march.

Now, in the most recent Zionist genocidal episode, almost three months after the endless massacres of Palestinian families, it is estimated that nearly 30,000 civilians, including girls, boys, women, and men of all ages, have been killed or are missing under the rubble left by the bombings.

So, the brutality of Zionist occupying forces in Palestine follows the same sad*stic pattern as the brutality of French occupying forces in Algeria.

A French soldier with hundreds of massacred civilians in Setif

The full-fledged start of the Algerian War of Independence was in November 1954, nine years after the Setif massacres. The war lasted eight years, going through various stages with a progressive increase in the levels of violence by the National Liberation Front, the largest and most effective armed organization among several groups fighting among themselves to lead the independence movement.

In 1956, the French National Assembly, even with the support of the French Communist Party, approved what they called “special powers” to intensify colonial repression through the use of torture (which had already been a long-standing routine practice) and other extreme measures against the civilian population of Algeria.

In that year, the number of regular French troops reached 400,000, plus 170,000 Algerian troops, later increased by around 180,000 members of the so-called Harkis, irregular militias of Algerian volunteers under the command of the French military.

It is estimated that in the Algerian War of Independence, French forces killed more than a million Algerian women and men, destroyed 8,000 villages and regions, and displaced two million Algerians from rural areas to concentration camps.

Despite the intensity of the military conflict, French authorities never admitted that the conflict was a war but rather an anti-terrorist police action.

The war caused a deep psychosis in public life in France, which could not reconcile the open contradiction between its hollow rhetoric of democracy, freedom, equality, and brotherhood and the reality of its genocidal racism in its colonies.

A graffiti on a bridge over the Seine River in 1961: “Here we drowned Algerians.”

Perhaps the most grotesque symbolic incident of that reality was the massacre on the streets of Paris of hundreds of Algerians who participated in a peaceful demonstration for the independence of their country in 1961.

The Paris police attacked the demonstrators with lethal violence. Out of a total of about 300 killed, more than 100 were thrown into the Seine River. There was media silence and total impunity.

It took fifty years before then-President Francois Hollande could admit the fact in 2012. The Algerian War of Independence ended in 1962 when the Evian Agreements were approved by the French National Assembly and by a referendum of the Algerian population.

It is estimated that more than 900,000 French settlers who rejected the new independent state moved to France.

The parallels between the Algerian War of Independence and the Palestinian War of Independence are many, from the hateful racism toward the native people in their own lands to the unlimited brutal genocidal violence applied to destroy their capacity to resist.

French authorities took decades to admit the reality of the war in Algeria. Similarly, Israeli Zionist authorities, despite openly expressing a desire to expel the Palestinian population from their occupied lands, label their genocidal ethnic cleansing war as an anti-terrorist operation.

The French armed forces could never defeat the Algerian resistance just as now the Israeli armed forces, the best-equipped in the region, have failed to overthrow the Palestinian militias.

Like the French colonial authorities in Algeria, the Israeli Zionist authorities in Palestine routinely apply all kinds of torture, forced disappearance, displacement of families, and arbitrary detention.

In the same way that the news covered up these atrocities committed by French forces during the war in Algeria, Western media now minimize or completely omit the daily slaughter of children and the elderly, the destruction by Israeli forces of hospitals and ambulances, the murder, detention and mistreatment of medical personnel, the deliberate murder of over 100 journalists and the massive scale of bombing that has destroyed more than 70 percent of the residential homes of the civilian population in Gaza.

Victims of Israeli bombings in Gaza are being buried in mass graves

At a recent international conference in Iran on Palestine, Nicaragua’s Chancellor, Comrade Denis Moncada Colindres, observed:

“With the systematic massive destruction of homes and other civilian infrastructures, the Government of Israel is attempting to force the Palestinian brothers not to return, not to go back to their destroyed homes, to occupy the territory of Gaza and the West Bank to prevent the realization of the Palestinian State.

The Palestinian people are victims of unimaginable atrocities that shock, dismay, and outrage the peoples of this planet. The atrocities committed by the Government of Israel against the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank, against innocent children and defenseless women, are condemnable, and Nicaragua strongly denounces and condemns it.

The Government of Israel is turning itself into a state incompatible with the community of states that make up the United Nations.”

However, it has become clear that the International Criminal Court, a puppet entity of Western powers, has done nothing to defend the Palestinian population despite multiple lawsuits filed against the Zionist government of Benjamin Netanyahu.

Now, the government of the brotherly people of South Africa has filed a strong lawsuit at the International Court of Justice based on the provisions of the Genocide Convention.

It remains to be seen if this important step to invoke international humanitarian law can halt the extermination aggression against the Palestinian population by Israeli authorities.

Fierce rear-guard action is expected from the United States and its satellite states to obstruct the legal process against Israeli authorities and thus allow the Zionist regime to complete its project of ethnic cleansing in Palestine.

The support of Western governments for the genocide of the Palestinian people follows the logic of European colonialism throughout the majority of the world for centuries, which was the precursor to genocidal Nazism in Europe itself.

So, it is natural for the United States and its European allies to promote fascism and racism, as they have done in the case of the Nazi regime in Ukraine.

From 2014 to the present, Western governments have supported Ukrainian authorities in attacking what was their own Russian ethnic population in the Donbass region. In the case of Donbass, the Russian Federation has acted to defend its population and reintegrate the region into Russian territory.

In the case of Palestine, the historical tide also goes against Israeli authorities and their Western patrons in the same way it went against the French colonial regime in Algeria. Sooner or later, there will have to be a peace agreement leading to an independent Palestinian state, just as the Evian Accords of 1962 made possible the independence of Algeria.

Undoubtedly, the process toward this inevitable outcome will be marked by more violence, suffering, temporary setbacks and situational advances, prevarications, and disappointments. But Palestinian independence will come because, as our Commander Daniel and Comrade Rosario wrote in their greetings to the peoples and governments:

“The other world, the new one, the world of the peoples, the world free of imperialisms, colonialisms, and fascisms, the shining sun of that new day of solidarity cooperation has already been born, and the holy blood of millions of martyrs and heroes accompanies us, illuminating and fertilizing new horizons.”

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