Thousands of protesters gathered in a city under colonial rule in the 1940s. They waved national flags and signs and called for self-determination.
Authorities attempted to confiscate the flags, sparking a riot that killed several officers and settlers.
The colonial army, its settler militias and the police responded by bombing the villages and houses where the “rebels” were ostensibly hiding.
Thousands of people were killed and entire families wiped out.
Echoes of the past
It was not Palestine, but Setif, Algeria. And it was not the occupation of Israel, but that of France.
“Sétif exposed the hypocrisy of liberating Europe by maintaining a settler colony,” said Muriam Hala Davis, a historian of Algeria at the University of California, Santa Cruz, referring to the incident. as Europe celebrated the defeat of Nazi Germany. .
Several scholars believe that Israel’s violent occupation of Palestinian lands has striking parallels with France’s 132-year colonization of Algeria, which ended in 1962 after an eight-year war of independence.
France displaced the Algerians, confined them to small spaces that could not accommodate human life, and armed French settlers against them.
Israel has done the same since the Nakba in 1948, when Zionist militias ethnically cleansed at least 750,000 Palestinians to establish Israel on the ruins of their homes and history.
It occupied more land in the 1967 war, subjecting Palestinians to military rule ever since and expanding its settlements on their land, which is illegal under international law.
“(In both contexts) we can talk about the contempt and dehumanization of Arab life…either as part of Islamophobia or as part of anti-Arab sentiment,” Davis said.
Israel’s dehumanization of Palestinians is key to justifying its occupation and repression – both to its own citizens and to its Western allies, academics told Tel Aviv Tribune.
Rights groups say Palestinians are portrayed as a security and demographic threat to Israeli Jews, necessitating violent raids, a blockade of 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 deep resonances,” Davis said.
Over the past 17 years, Israel has launched five wars against Gaza to “mow the lawn,” Israel’s term for its goal of degrading Hamas’s military capabilities through periodic wars.
Palestinian civilians have been the greatest victims of every conflict.
The West Bank was not spared either. Israel killed thousands of civilians during two intifadas (uprisings) in 1987 and 2000 against the deepening Israeli occupation.
Both Intifadas began largely nonviolently, but Israel responded by killing hundreds of Palestinian civilians.
Philippeville to Gaza
Israel’s latest war against Gaza began after Hamas-led attacks on Israeli communities and military outposts on October 7, in which 1,139 people were killed and 250 captured.
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 residents 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 colonial town of Philippeville in August 1955, attacking settlers and military installations and killing more than 120 people.
Like Israel, French authorities responded by arming settlers and coordinating attacks on several Algerian villages that killed around 12,000 people, mostly civilians.
The Philippeville attack is part of a long list of brutal attacks and incidents that took place during the Algerian War of Independence.
Israel’s current practice of attempting to confine millions of Palestinians to “safe zones” in Gaza also echoes the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Algerians from their villages during the war, said Terrance Peterson, specialist in the Algerian War at the University of Florida.
France bombed villages and transferred their inhabitants to “regroupment centers,” camps surrounded by barbed wire where people died of malnutrition and disease.
But unlike Gaza, Peterson told Tel Aviv Tribune, these areas have never been bombed or attacked.
“I think the logic is the same in that (Israel and France) wanted to separate and isolate the civilian population in ‘safe zones’ in order to monitor them and separate them from the insurgents,” he said. declared.
“That means there were no-go areas and anyone who was in these no-go areas would be killed.”
“Savages”
Israel and France have both tried to label their enemies as rapists, according to Sara Rahnama, a specialist in the gendered history of the French-Algerian war.
“In November and December… the response to the massive protests (for a ceasefire in Gaza) was that Hamas was intentionally using rape as a weapon of war, which shows how depraved it is and how this struggle is necessary for the values of society. Western civilization,” Rahnama said.
She believes the Israeli accusations are part of a broader historical pattern in which indigenous populations are portrayed as morally and sexually depraved to justify the confiscation of their land and the use of violence against them.
“I remember thinking that this was a very old statement. From the beginning of the French colonial project, they (propagated ideas) about the sexual and gender inferiority of Muslims. This was imperative to allow the French to legitimize their (colonial) project. »
The UN said it had “reasonable grounds” to believe that some cases of sexual violence occurred on October 7 as well as against prisoners captured by Hamas, although it was impossible to determine the extent of the violence.
Hamas has repeatedly denied these accusations.
Diana Buttu, a Palestinian legal expert, said Israel’s October 7 allegations of mass rape also reminded her of how French colonial authorities entrapped Muslim Algerians.
“The (French) had talked about mass rapes and mentioned stories such as breasts being cut off and fondled by FLN fighters,” she told Tel Aviv Tribune.
“Fast forward to October 7…and Israel did the exact same thing. (Israel) portrayed (the attack) as super savage in order to elevate its (own status) and commit massive genocide.
Is the objective the erasure of the Palestinians?
Israel has long said it would investigate Israeli soldiers and settlers accused of carrying out human rights violations against Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
But academics and human rights activists say Israel’s legal system is designed to legitimize its settlements and occupation, not to seek justice.
From 2017 to 2021, investigations into Israeli soldiers resulted in indictments in less than 1% of cases, according to Yesh Din, an Israeli rights group.
Palestinians are tried in military courts and face a 99 percent conviction rate. In many cases, Palestinians are also held without charge or trial in “administrative detention”, a relic of British colonization in the region in which their lawyers are unable to see evidence against them.
“In the case of Palestine… there is a legal system that facilitates the colonial process and… its goal is the erasure of indigenous people,” Buttu said. “It is simply impossible to have a legal system that protects Palestinians. The national goal is the erasure of the Palestinians.
Davis added that Israel and France believed they could oversee a “good settlement” project.
In the 1950s, some French reformists called for granting political rights to a minority of Algerians who fought on France’s side in World War II. Others advocated giving Muslim Algerians some form of autonomy in parts of the colony.
Davis said these calls are similar to those of Israelis who advocate giving Palestinians limited rights or sovereignty.
“There is a fundamental fantasy… that France and Israel blame a few bad apples for a structural project of white supremacy that was behind (France’s project) in Algeria or Israel’s project as a Jewish state,” she declared.
“For those of us who organized around Palestine, we are now horrified by the scale of the violence (in Gaza). But none of us are fundamentally surprised by a genocide that underlies the (Israeli settlement) project.”