It was sheer barbarism and savagery that brought an end to France’s brutal 132-year-long occupation of Algeria, and it is the same destructive force that will end Israel’s war against the Palestinians in Gaza. At the moment, though, it is clear that Israel has learnt nothing from France’s blood-soaked occupation of Algeria.
Like the ongoing fight for the liberation of Palestine from Zionist rule, history still has much to write about the atrocities committed by French colonialists in Algeria during the occupation from 1830 to 1962. At least five million people were killed and hundreds of thousands were wounded in the struggle for independence.
In 1959, French President Charles de Gaulle declared that the Algerians had the right to determine their own future. Despite so-called terrorist acts by French Algerians opposed to independence and an attempted coup in France by elements of the French army, an agreement was signed in 1962, and Algeria was finally independent.
Algeria is still known as the Land of a Million Martyrs, a figure far too conservative, according to those who live in Africa’s largest country today. As for France, it has learned little or nothing from its legacy as a brutal occupier and the terrorism that its occupation of Algeria fostered.
I now wonder if Gaza has reached its “Algeria moment” in a 75-year conflict which ultimately created the conditions for the 7 October attack against the brutal and rapacious Zionist occupation state. The scale of the attack has traumatised Israel and many within the Jewish diaspora. The ferocity with which the Hamas-led resistance fighters hit back has destroyed the arrogance and confidence of the Zionist State and its supporters in the same way that 9/11 knocked the stuffing out of the American swagger.
Source : MEMO