[News] The False Equivalence of the Colonized and Colonizer

[Anti-Imperialist News]

 The False Equivalence of the Colonized and Colonizer

   - by Hamza Hamouchene <https://www.blackagendareport.org/#>
   - Dec 6, 2023
   -
   https://www.blackagendareport.org/news/1772/33/The-False-Equivalence-of-the-Colonized-and-Colonizer



Still from The Battle of Algiers, 1965 © British Film Institute/Rialto
Pictures.

*Originally published in Africa is A Country
<https://africasacountry.com/2023/11/the-false-equivalence-of-the-colonized-and-colonizer>*

*Choosing to focus on denouncing Palestinian violence is akin to asking
them to passively accept their fate—to die quietly and not resist.*

*"By what standard of morality can the violence used by a slave to break
his chains be considered the same as the violence of a slave master?"* *-
Walter Rodney*

Following Hamas’s October 7 attacks on Israel that caused more than 1,200
fatalities, there was a barrage of injunctions from Western mainstream
media, politicians, and pundits insisting that anybody wishing to express
an opinion on the events and the ensuing Israeli war crimes and genocide in
Gaza, first denounce Hamas before expressing any other view. The failure to
explicitly do so or any attempt to put events in their historical context
or emphasize the root causes of the conflict were interpreted as condoning
Hamas’s actions (that the speaker was a Hamas sympathizer) and conflated
with antisemitism.

It was as if the history of what is called the Palestinian-Israeli conflict
started on October 7 and not with the 1917 Balfour Declaration that saw the
colonial British government announce its support for the establishment of a
“national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. That announcement
culminated in what Palestinians and Arabs call the Nakba (the Catastrophe)
in 1948, concomitant with the founding of the state of Israel through the
widespread ethnic cleansing, massacres, and the displacements of hundreds
of thousands of Palestinians. More wars followed, more violence, more
killings, and more occupation of new territories. This led to still more
displacements, more illegal settlements, and more bombings, which cost the
lives of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and forced millions more to
live as refugees. I will not dwell on this history as numerous wonderful
resources have done so brilliantly. Rather, my purpose here is to draw some
parallels from the history of the Algerian anticolonial struggle to show
the vacuity, shortsightedness, and injustice of denouncing the violence of
the oppressed/colonized and oppressor/colonizer in equal terms. The moral
dilemmas, debates on violence, and disagreements around how oppressed or
colonized people should resist, and what they may or may not do, are not
new.

When I think about Palestine, I cannot help but draw parallels with the
case of my home country Algeria during the colonial era (1830-1962). It is
no coincidence that the Algerian popular and working classes strongly
support the Palestinian cause as both countries experienced/experience
violent, racist settler-colonialism. To understand why, it is worth
visiting Frantz Fanon’s writings and analyses about what he called
“revolutionary violence” in his masterpiece The Wretched of the Earth,
which he wrote based on his experiences in Algeria and West Africa in the
1950s and early 1960s. The Wretched of the Earth is a canonical text about
the anticolonial struggle and served as a kind of bible for liberation
struggles from Algeria to Guinea-Bissau, South Africa, Palestine, and the
Black liberation movement in the US.

Fanon thoroughly described the mechanisms of violence put in place by
colonialism to subjugate oppressed people. “Colonialism is not a thinking
machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its
natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater
violence,” he wrote. According to Fanon, the colonial world is a Manichean
world, which, taken to its logical conclusion, “dehumanizes the native, or
to speak plainly it turns him into an animal.” For him, “National
liberation, national renaissance, the restoration of nationhood to the
people, commonwealth: whatever may be the headings used or the new formulas
introduced, decolonization is always a violent phenomenon.”

The Algerian independence struggle against the French colonialists was
among the most inspiring anti-imperialist revolutions in the 20th century.
Part of the decolonization wave that began after World War II (in India,
China, Cuba, Vietnam, and many African countries), the Bandung Conference
declared these movements to be part of the “awakening of the South”—a South
that has been subjected for decades (in some cases more than a century) to
imperialist domination.

Following the November 1, 1954 declaration of war in Algeria, merciless
atrocities were committed by both sides (1.5 million deaths with millions
more displaced on the Algerian side, and tens of thousands dead on the
French side). The National Liberation Front (FLN) leadership had a
realistic appraisal of the military balance of power, which tilted heavily
in favor of France, which then had the fourth-largest army in the world.
The FLN strategy was inspired by the Vietnamese nationalist leader Ho Chi
Minh’s dictum “For every nine of us killed we will kill one—in the end you
will leave.” The FLN wanted to create a climate of violence and insecurity
that would ultimately prove intolerable for the French, internationalize
the conflict, and bring Algeria’s struggle to the attention of the world.

Following this logic, Abane Ramdane and Larbi Ben M’hidi decided to take
the guerilla warfare to urban areas and launch the Battle of Algiers in
September 1956. There is perhaps no better way to appreciate this key and
dramatic moment of sacrifice than the classic 1966 realist film of Gillo
Pontecorvo: The Battle of Algiers. In the film, there is a dramatic moment
when Colonel Mathieu, a thin disguise for the real-life General Massu,
leads the captured FLN leader Larbi Ben M’Hidi into a press conference at
which a journalist questions the morality of hiding bombs in women’s
shopping baskets. “Don’t you think it is a bit cowardly to use women’s
baskets and handbags to carry explosive devices that kill so many people?”
The reporter asks. Ben M’hidi replies: “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? Give us your bombers, and you
can have our baskets.”

Through widespread favorable coverage of the Algerian revolution in the
African-American press, many local screenings of The Battle of Algiers, as
well as Fanon’s writings, Algeria came to hold a seminal place in the
iconography, rhetoric, and ideology of key branches of the African-American
civil rights movement, which came to see its struggle as connected to the
struggles of African nations for independence.

After visiting Algeria in 1964 and the Casbah, the site of the Battle of
Algiers against the French in 1956-1957, Malcom X declared:

*"The same conditions that prevailed in Algeria that forced the people, the
noble people of Algeria, to resort eventually to the terrorist-type tactics
that were necessary to get the monkey off their backs, those same
conditions prevail today in America in every Negro community."*

A few months later, in 1965, he went on to say:

*"I don’t favor violence. If we could bring about recognition and respect
of our people by peaceful means, well and good. Everybody would like to
reach his objectives peacefully. But I’m also a realist. The only people in
this country who are asked to be nonviolent are black people."*

And upon hearing of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968,
the Black Panther Party leader Eldridge Cleaver proclaimed:

*"The war has begun. The violent phase of the black liberation struggle is
here, and it will spread. From that shot, from that blood. America will be
painted red. Dead bodies will litter the streets and the scenes will be
reminiscent of the disgusting, terrifying, and nightmarish news reports
coming out of Algeria during the height of the general violence right
before the final breakdown of the French colonial regime."*

We too must challenge the victim-blaming narrative that fixates on
Palestinians as imperfect victims, which in the words of the
American-Palestinian scholar Noura Erakat
<https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/45383>, amounts to an “absolution of,
and complicity with, Israel’s colonial domination.” In choosing to
highlight Palestinian violence, our message to them “is not that they must
resist more peacefully but that they cannot resist Israeli occupation and
aggression at all.”

Denouncing and singling out the violence of the oppressed and colonized is
not just immoral, but racist. Colonized people have the right to resist
with any means necessary, especially when all political and peaceful
avenues have been stymied or obstructed. Over the past 75 years, every
Palestinian attempt to negotiate a peace deal has been rebuffed and
undermined. Every non-violent means has been blocked, including the “March
of Return” endorsed by Hamas in 2018 (savagely repressed, with more than
200 people killed and tens of thousands wounded and maimed) as well as the
international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, which has
been made illegal in several Western countries under pressure from the
Zionist lobby.

Amid a barbaric, colonial occupation, and Apartheid conditions, it would be
fitting for any talk about justice and accountability for violence against
civilians to start with the oppressor. As Fanon’s rationality of revolt and
rebellion puts it, the oppressed revolt because they simply can’t breathe.

Choosing to focus on denouncing Palestinian violence is akin to asking them
to passively accept their fate—to die quietly and not resist. Instead, let
us focus on an immediate ceasefire, halting the unfolding second Nakba, and
ending the siege and the Occupation, while showing our solidarity with
Palestinians in their struggle for freedom, justice, and
self-determination.

Palestinian lives matter!

*Hamza Hamouchene is a London-based Algerian researcher and activist. He is
currently the North Africa program coordinator at the Transnational
Institute (TNI).*
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