Algeria ...

Status:1830–1848: French colony | Part of France1848–1962:

As Mark Twain so famously said, History doesn't repeat itself but it often rhymes. applies to Israel's push to complete the job of driving out the Palestinians from Palestine in 2023, a process started in 1948 when 750,000 suffered the same fate in an event known as the NAKBA. Complicit in this crime is the US supporting Israel without limit to include December 9th's US's veto of a ceasefire in Gaza, an initiative the rest of the world and the UN support without question. Now that the Biden administration is all in with Israel, factor in the real possibility of Biden losing the 2024 election to Agent Orange as Muslim Americans will no longer support Biden in any way, shape or fashion, thus equating to a dumpster fire of biblical proportions regarding Biden's chances as the atrocity in Gaza is becoming  more important than even the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution opening up the horror of Vietnam based on a lie.

On May 7, 1945, Nazi Germany signed the act of military surrender to the Allies. The next day, people all over the world, including in occupied Algeria, took to the streets to celebrate the end of World War II.

An estimated 134,000 Algerians fought with the Allies and 18,000 of them gave their lives to defeat Germany. And so, on May 8,1945, in Setif, a city east of Algiers, some 5000 “moslems”, as Algerians were called by the colonial power to erase their national identity, marched in celebration. But they also marched clamouring for the end of over a century-long French colonial rule over their country. French police seized banners and eventually opened fire, killing demonstrators. Clashes erupted with 102 French settlers killed.

In the following fortnight, a blood frenzy overtook French authorities and settlers who massacred some 45,000 Algerians. Rural areas around Setif and the town of Guelma believed to be sympathetic to Algerian nationalists were bombarded by the French air force. Settlers avenged their compatriots by hunting down and lynching “the savages”.

To establish themselves in Algeria and legitimise their presence there, the colonists had dehumanised the indigenous population to the extent of perceiving them as nothing more than vermin.  This allowed French colonists and their occupation army to kill Algerians in their thousands, with little or no moral qualms.

                        

Sound familiar? Israel will not win as Hamas will not be eliminated and the Palestinians will not quit. Kennedy knew this to be true regarding Algeria. Sadly, Biden does not regarding Palestine.

Kennedy was open about his support for Algerian independence even before becoming president.

In July 1957, as a young Senator, he delivered a historic speech criticising the Eisenhower administration’s political and military support for French colonialism and called on the US to support Algerian self-determination.

“The most powerful single force in the world today is neither communism nor capitalism, neither the H-bomb nor the guided missile – it is man’s eternal desire to be free and independent,” he said. “Thus the single most important test of American foreign policy today is how we meet the challenge of imperialism, what we do to further man’s desire to be free.”

He went on to explain how the French insistence to rule over Algeria, against the will of the Algerian people, is harming the US, NATO and the entire global community, and concluded that “[t]he time has come for the United States to face the harsh realities of the situation and to fulfill its responsibilities as the leader of the free world – in the UN, in NATO, in the administration of our aid programs and in the exercise of our diplomacy – in shaping a course toward political independence for Algeria”.

Kennedy knew France was fighting a war it can never win, and wanted the US to be honest with its ally. Today, the history is repeating itself. A leading US ally, Israel, is engaged in a war it cannot win against a people suffering under its occupation. But unlike Kennedy, the current US President Joe Biden is not living up to the occasion.

Rather than telling Israel the hard truth, that it can not extinguish the Palestinian people’s “eternal desire to be free and independent”, President Biden is unconditionally backing the ongoing colonial assault on Palestine.

Indeed, just as France was not “defending itself” when it killed hundreds of thousands of Algerians to stop them from achieving independence, Israel is not “defending itself” against Palestinians living under its occupation. It is waging a modern-day colonial war, trying to claim more land, and seemingly committing genocide in the process. Biden should learn from Kennedy, end its support for Israel’s unwinnable war and war crimes, and remain on the right side of history.

Baricades set up during the Algerian War of Independence, 

January 1960, Street of Algier [Wikimedia Commons]