Israel's increasing likeness to the South African apartheid regime is obvious, but in recalling the Algerian war and reviewing Pierre Leulliette's book, St. Michel et le dragon (published in the UnitedStates as The War in Algeria), I was struck by its many parallels to the French colonial war in Algeria.
1. In Judea and Samaria, as many Israelis call the West Bank, they find their national identity to a degree many people do not understand, because it is the land of their fathers. For France, Algeria was much the same, as many foreigners fail to realize. Algeria was where de Gaulle established the Free French regime, outmaneuvering America's puppet, Giraud, in 1943, and assuring that France would come out of the war a truly independent state.
2. Both governments were controlled by the settlers in the colony, and outsiders could hardly believe that the metropolitan government could be so helplessly drawn by them to self-destruction.
3. The Arabs in each case were trained by oppression to become more and more uncompromising about independence. The colonizer's army gradually grew more brutal and unrestrained. In 1954, the French army was generally expected to behave, and for the most part exercised some restraint. By 1957, the French army had largely abandoned themselves to every kind of torture and other barbarities, and so far as they felt the need to justify themselves, they could point to the abundant barbarities of the FLN. The swift downward slide of the Israeli army into Nazi-style barbarism - appealing to the same excuses - is equally obvious.
4. For France, winning in Algeria could only be accomplished by earning the enmity of the whole world, as well as by destroying France as France. To win in Algeria could only be done by becoming Nazis and no longer in any meaningful way French. Thanks be to God that in 1958 France found a leader in Charles de Gaulle who was able to lead France away from Algeria in order to remain France. As it is, it was difficult. Not only fascists but even men like Jacques Soustelle turned against DeGaulle, and it was some years before the Organization Armee Secrete gave up trying to assassinate him.
For Israel, seeking to win in Palestine has already squandered almost all its moral credit in the world, and it can only get worse. Nobody with a conscience, especially any Jew with any fear of God at all, can watch Israeli behavior today without complete disgust. Such support as Israel retains in the world, including the Jewish diaspora, is based only on denial. People have simply not been able to come to terms yet with how completely Israel has simply repudiated its Jewish identity. As time goes on, the daily evidence can only sink in more and more.
It's obvious, as we look back, that if France had gone much farther in Algeria, the collapse of the 4th Republic would have led to some kind of fascist dictatorship - more like Vichy than anything a real Frenchman could live with and still call himself a Frenchman. Likewise, Israel, in its wanton vandalism in Gaza and Ramallah, has already followed the Nazis as far as the Kristallnacht pogrom, and in Jenin has replayed Jurgen Stroop's annihilation of the Warsaw ghetto. It's clear that hanging onto its colonial possession can only be done by abandoning Israel's Jewish identity and becoming the barbarous enemy of all that is truly Jewish.
Pierre Leulliette was a French paratrooper in Algeria from 1954 to 1957. I've been taking another look at his book, since the Palestinian war is so parallel to it.
Go to the Israeli reservist resisters site www.seruv.org and compare the testimonies of these Israeli soldiers with what Leuillette saw in Algiers:
Whatever the outcome of this Algerian war, it is certain that fifty, a hundred years from now, the Algerians will still remember, and will still be telling their children, about this year 1957: when the Casbah, the symbol of all they had most deeply in common, was day and night in a state of siege, when terror was absolute master, when every one of its inhabitants could every moment say to himself: "Within an hour, men will perhaps be knocking at my door to take me away forever."
And this below will sound familiar if you've taken care to read what those Israeli reservists have written, who wish unlike so many others to remain Jews:
Despite strict orders, I escape to Algiers as often as I possibly can. I have been silent among jailers so long I feel myself becoming vile, and what is more serious, I feel that in my mind the scandal of all these crimes that make up our day-to-day war is daily losing a little of its virulence.
To civilians capable of talking calmly about the army - there aren't
many, but they do exist even in Algiers in 1957 - I tell about what I see
every day. They have always had a lofty idea of the greatness of
France. They listen politely. But I sense their disbelief.
They are thinking: "This isn't possible. We'd have known about it."
Will they ever know about it? The German people, after the war, never
stopped saying, and it was probably true: "We didn't know . . ."
Have they ever really believed in the crimes of Dachau and of Auschwitz?
Have they ever realized that not knowing is also a way of being guilty?