From Algiers to Jerusalem
By Richard Cohen
Tuesday, April 2, 2002; Page A15
Ariel Sharon has been so busy as of late it's understandable if he missed an anniversary last month -- the end of the Franco-Algerian war. Before that war was over in 1962, at least 250,000 Algerians and 25,000 French soldiers had been killed. Add to that total about 4,500 European settlers, the _pieds noirs_, and maybe as many as 150,000 Harkis, Algerians who worked, and sometimes fought, for the French. They were slaughtered at the war's end.
I summon up the Algerian war because I have long thought it was the direction the Palestinian insurrection would inevitably take. It's not just that both societies are overwhelmingly Muslim but that they both consider themselves occupied by colonizers who, in turn, consider themselves to be virtually indigenous. Remember that Algeria was not a French colony; it was part of France itself.
And remember, too, that the French did not fight half-heartedly.
From the very beginning of the war, the French responded to guerrilla and terrorist tactics with extreme repression. Assassinations were commonplace, torture routine -- human rights abuses, such as gang rapes, hardly uncommon. The French considered their enemy barbaric. They descended to that level themselves.
The Battle of Algiers is now being fought in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, in Haifa and Netanya -- anywhere a Palestinian suicide bomber can infiltrate. It is being fought, too, with increasingly desperate Israeli tactics -- first preemptive assassination, now the virtual reoccupation of the West Bank.
The turn that the war -- the Palestinian struggle -- has taken may be lost on Sharon and, it seems, President Bush, but not on some of those involved....
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A48585-2002Apr1¬Found=true> -- Yoshie
* Calendar of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html> * Anti-War Activist Resources: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/activist.html> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osu.edu/students/CJP/>