Scholars of Algerian history rule say they see a lot of parallels with Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territory.
Thousands of protesters gathered in a town under colonial rule in the 1940s. 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 wiped out.
That was not Palestine, but Setif, Algeria. And it was not Israel’s occupation, but France’s.
“Setif revealed the hypocrisy of the liberation of Europe as it maintained a settler colony,” said Muriam Hala Davis, a historian of Algeria at the University of California in Santa Cruz, referring to the incident that came as Europe celebrated the defeat of Nazi Germany.
Several scholars believe Israel’s violent occupation of Palestinian lands has sharp parallels with France’s 132-year colonisation of Algeria, which ended in 1962 after an eight-year war for independence.
France displaced Algerians, confined them to small spaces that could not sustain human life and armed French settlers against them.
“[In both contexts], we can talk about the disregard and dehumanisation of Arab life … either as part of Islamophobia or anti-Arab sentiment,” Davis said.
Israel’s dehumanisation of Palestinians is essential to justify its occupation and repression – both to its own citizens and to its Western allies, scholars told media.
Rights groups say Palestinians are portrayed as a security and demographic threat to Jewish Israelis, necessitating violent raids, a blockade on Gaza since 2007 and a separation wall that fragments and reduces freedom of movement in the occupied West Bank.
“There is certainly a continuum that has some deep resonances,” Davis said.
Over the past 17 years, Israel has launched five wars on Gaza to “mow the lawn”, a phrase Israel uses to refer to its goal of degrading Hamas’s military capabilities by fighting periodic wars.
Echoes of the past
Palestinian civilians have been the biggest casualties of each conflict.
The West Bank has not been spared either. Israel killed thousands of civilians during two Intifadas (uprisings) in 1987 and 2000 against Israel’s ever-deepening occupation.
Over the past eight months, Israel has responded by killing more than 36,000 Palestinians, displacing more than 80 percent of Gaza’s 2.3 million people and reducing most of the enclave to rubble.
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.
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 attack on Philippeville is on a long list of brutal attacks and incidents that unfolded during Algeria’s war for independence.
Israel’s current practice of trying to confine millions of Palestinians to “safe zones” in Gaza also echoes the eviction of hundreds of thousands of Algerians from their villages during the war, said Terrance Peterson, a scholar on the Algerian war at the University of Florida.
France bombed villages and relocated their inhabitants to “regroupement centres”, which were camps surrounded by barbed wire where people died from malnutrition and disease.
But unlike Gaza, Peterson told media, these areas were never bombed or attacked.
“I think the logic is the same in that [Israel and France] wanted to separate and isolate the civilian population into ‘safe zones’ in order to survey them and separate them from the insurgents,” he said.
“That means there were forbidden zones and anyone in those forbidden zones would be killed.”
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
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