NYRB on Israel/Palestine

[Mark Pavlick]

>
>
>The New York Review of Books
>May 9, 2002
>http://www.nybooks.com/articles/15340
>
>The Road to Nowhere
>By Tony Judt
>
>In 1958, at the height of the Algerian crisis, with Arabs bombing
>French cafÈs in Algiers, Paris tacitly condoning the use of
>torture by the occupying French army, and paratroop colonels demanding
>a free hand to end terror, the French philosopher Raymond Aron
>published a small book, L'AlgÈrie et la RÈpublique. Cutting
>through the emotive and historical claims of both sides, Aron
>explained in his characteristically cool prose why the French had to
>quit Algeria. France lacked both the will and the means either to
>impose French rule on the Arabs or to give Arabs an equal place in
>France. If the French stayed the situation would only deteriorate and
>they would inevitably leave at some later dateóbut under worse
>conditions and with a more embittered legacy. The damage that France
>was doing to Algerians was surpassed by the harm the Republic was
>bringing upon itself. However impossible the choice appeared, it was
>nonetheless very simple: France must go.

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