Opinion: The battle of Gaza: Ignoring the lessons of the Battle of Algiers

Palestinians displaced by the Israeli air and ground offensive on the Gaza Strip flee from Hamad City, following an evacuation order by the Israeli army to leave parts of the southern area of Khan Younis, Sunday, Aug. 11. Abdel Kareem Hana / AP
Published: 08-17-2024 6:00 AM |
Robert Azzi is a photographer and writer who lives in Exeter. His columns are archived at robertazzitheother.substack.com.
Several years ago, as dinner was wrapping up in one of Phillips Exeter Academy’s dining rooms, a student-faculty group that had gathered to discuss the Middle East began to break up. As guests began to leave, one faculty spouse (a reserve Israeli soldier, a ‘sniper’ they once told me) turned toward me and others and loudly declaimed, “Remember, the Israeli army is the most moral in the world.”
I laughed at his pretension and delusion, at the predictable arrogance and hubris of the oppressor.
As an occasional volunteer, and for a short-time paid, advisor to the school’s Middle East Society and to its Muslim Students Association — and as an Arab American Muslim photojournalist — I knew better; morality, especially in the military, is always in the eye of the beholder, and in the eyes of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories Israel is neither legitimate nor moral.
And in my eyes, in the eyes of most Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims and citizens throughout the Global South, not only was the sniper’s assertion an absurdity and lie but a dangerous delusion that will, as always, eventually defeat the oppressor.
I used to suggest, I still do, actually, that students who wanted to know more about the conflict watch Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 film The Battle of Algiers; a portrayal of the Algerian struggle for freedom after 120+ years of French occupation and colonialization.
Selected by The New Republic Magazine in 2023 as #1 in a list of the 100 Most Significant Political Films of All Time, I make a point of watching it at least once a year.
One of its most revealing moments is when the French stage a press conference for a captured Algerian rebel leader. “Tell me, general,” a French journalist asks the rebel leader, “do you not consider it cowardly to send your women carrying bombs in their handbags, to blow up civilians?”
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The Algerian resistance fighter answers: “And doesn’t it seem to you even more cowardly to drop napalm bombs on defenseless villages, so that there are a thousand times more innocent victims? Of course, if we had your airplanes it would be a lot easier for us. Give us your bombers, and you can have our baskets.”
Under the most generous circumstances one can always argue that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter;” less generously, one can argue — as I often do — that settler-colonial states are by their very definition immoral and maintain power only through the use of terror and fear, through the infliction of routine intimidations, humiliations, displacements, and arbitrary and administrative detentions.
Through torture and executions.
Today, I ask, shall we not call it cowardly to terrorize and bomb masses of innocent people in the world’s largest open-air prison to target a suspected few.
This week, just hours after President Biden promised it additional $3.5 billion in military aid, Israel targeted a school and mosque complex in Gaza City. Israel claimed that the Tabeen school was operating as a Hamas command and control post; perhaps, but it was also operating as a shelter for more than 6,000 displaced people — most of whom had been displaced numerous times.
The attack massacred more than 100 Palestinians and injured hundreds. Many bodies were ripped into such small body parts that victims could not be recognized and remains were given to family members in white cloth bags for burial.
That attack helped push the number of Palestinians killed in Gaza to 40,005 deaths, over 40,000 people murdered, mostly women and children, in Gaza since Oct. 7: 1.8% of its population.
While it may be true that since Oct. 7 Israel’s military has killed some thousands of Hamas fighters in Gaza that’s but a small fraction of the over 40,000 Palestinians it has murdered over the past ten months, including artists, poets, teachers, historians, doctors, women, children, aid workers, civil servants.
Worse still, killing people in the fish bowl known as Gaza isn’t enough for Israel; not enough to stop Israel from empowering its settlers to harass and kill Palestinians throughout the occupied territories and try to defile the Al Aqsa sanctuary, to annex land, shoot civilians and conduct pogroms in some Palestinian villages and destroy groves of olive trees.
Worst of all this is happening in lands the UN recognizes as the State of Palestine, which includes all of those parts of the former Palestine Mandate that Israel conquered and occupied in 1967 including East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank.
Lands where the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has not only found Israel in violation of Article 3 of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, including “racial segregation and apartheid,” but has also ruled that: “the Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem … have been established and are being maintained in violation of international law...”
To Israelis, as Algerians were to the French, the Arabs are a racialized Other, trying to define the conflict between them as a battle of “civilization vs barbarity.”
To Palestinians, as the French were to the Algerians, the Israelis are illegal occupiers and oppressors. Under international law Palestinians have the right to resist military occupation throughout the Occupied Territories and the Israeli occupier does not have the right to use military force to defend the occupation, only to defend its civilians.
Netanyahu may hope that by the time a ceasefire unfolds he will have killed every Hamas fighter, or perhaps every Palestinian, unconcerned that its continual occupation will elicit continual resistance.
But history cannot so easily be ignored because, as Tareq Baconi has written, the “fantasy that Israel could ever maintain its security by keeping Palestinians siloed interminably has come undone.”
Its historical lessons cannot so easily be ignored because, as Frantz Fanon wrote in “The Wretched of the Earth,” “For a colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity.”
In 2003 the Directorate for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict inside America’s Department of Defense offered a screening of the movie on Aug. 27, suggesting that it might be useful for commanders and troops facing similar issues in occupied Iraq.
DOD’s promotional flyer read: “How to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas. Children shoot soldiers at point-blank range. Women plant bombs in cafes. Soon the entire Arab population builds to a mad fervor. Sound familiar? The French have a plan. It succeeds tactically, but fails strategically. To understand why, come to a rare showing of this film.”
That went well, didn’t it?
When, in 2006, just after the Second Intifada, political scientist Bruce Hoffman screened The Battle of Algiers for Israeli colonels at Israel’s National Defense College, he reported that “They said [the movie was about] exactly what they were experiencing.”
They must have short memories — and must not have watched the ending.
Learn this lesson well: People denied bread, and dignity — from the river to the sea — will not yield.