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From Algeria to Gaza: An Unbroken Chain of Colonial Violence

From Algeria to Gaza: An Unbroken Chain of Colonial Violence

The echoes of the Sétif and Guelma Massacre of 1945 in today’s Gaza.

Lukas Unger's avatar
Lukas Unger
Feb 21, 2025
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From Algeria to Gaza: An Unbroken Chain of Colonial Violence
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1967 demonstration in Sétif in memory of the massacre

When I see Palestine today, I think of Algeria.

Of villages butchered; of blood in the streets of Sétif and Guelma.

Of massacres and resistance.

Of liberation.

Settler Colonialism and Apartheid

In the Western discourse, and also the global discourse to a lesser degree, it is common to primarily compare the Palestinian struggle for self-determination and liberation with the struggle against the white-majority Apartheid regime in South Africa.

This has a lot of merits, on two different levels—and problems, related to them:

On one hand, it is simply accurate, although, as I will be arguing here, Apartheid is an understatement. Despite Western tendencies to uphold narratives in favor of their Israeli client state, and the untold millions the zionist regime sinks into Hasbara, most human rights organisations have caught up with, or rather been forced to admit by the sheer scale of terror, what Palestinians have been saying since the Nakba:

Israel is an Apartheid regime, in judicial, constitutional and informal terms. It sees the Palestinian population in its territories, be it Gaza, the West Bank or its ‘legal’ boundaries, as a nuisance at best, and other times, as a pest to be driven out or exterminated.

Proponents of the One-State Solution, and with that proponents of the liberation of the whole of Palestine from the zionist state, often argue along the lines of a struggle against Apartheid because it makes a clear case for why all of Palestine needs to be liberated. Instead of letting it come down to an argument of national self-determination in a rump state—graciously granted by the settler colony— it turns into a question of legal status, without accepting the legitimacy of the settler colony in the first place.

I too share this sentiment.

On the other hand, it is an effective tool in the discourse. In the year 2025, the vast majority of the Western world sees Apartheid as a fundamental injustice, despite their governments having supported it for decades—or maybe exactly because of that.

Pure, unblemished racial discrimination isn’t part of the acceptable spectrum of political ideology, even if racism obviously lives on and is deeply rooted in Western institutions. For the sake of the discourse, the real racism barely matters. It is about the seeming of anti-racism and the performative rejection of racism; the same sort of logic that allows people to signal their unabashed hatred for Muslims while acting shocked that you would dare to call them racists for it.

Western liberals in particular are scandalized if they are accurately described as supporters of an Apartheid regime, even more so than they would be when called supporters of a colonial settler regime.

Why? Because in the end, much of the Western world hasn’t really integrated the horrors of colonialism into the dominant ideological discourse. Colonialism may be broadly viewed as a bad thing, but you will find an endless supply of European reactionaries who will praise the civilizing mission of their respective empires in no uncertain terms—if they think about colonialism at all.

That doesn’t change a simple fact though: The struggle of Palestinians against the Israeli settler state is fundamentally and primarily a colonial liberation struggle. Apartheid is a tool of the colonial regime to control the native population, but it isn’t the primary contradiction—the contradiction between the settler and the native firmly takes that spot, as it does in all settler colonies where assimilation, dispossession and/or genocide have not been completed.

There barely is a more illustrative example of settler colonialism than French Algeria. More than that, it shows the whole lifespan of a failed settler colony:

  • The initial brutality of the conquest

  • The genocidal policy necessary to pave the way for settlement

  • The structural violence of upholding the colony

  • The formation and self-identification of a resistance movement

  • Finally, the victorious liberation struggle and destruction of the settler state

Today—and trust me this won’t be the last time I’m writing about Algeria in the context of Palestine, there is far too much to learn and tell—I’ll be taking a look at one very specific instance of settler-colonial violence in Algeria because it illustrates a core point about the ideology necessary to uphold it:

The settler must deny the humanity of the native to justify their treatment, be it in Palestine or Algeria.

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Sétif and Guelma — State and Settler Violence

Murdered Algerians near Guelma, 1945

May 8th is a day celebrated the world over—well, at least in Europe.

Victory Day, Remembrance Day, Liberation Day.

On May 8th the nazi regime was forced to sign its unconditional surrender, and the Second World War in Europe came to an end. A continent was left devastated and tens of millions—soldiers and just as many civilians—died along the way.

Of course, that does not only go for Europeans, and certainly not only for citizens of the European states. Both France and Britain drew millions from their respective colonial empires, both in auxiliary and military roles, and the native populations had to suffer disproportionately to supply the great imperialist armies in motion.

138,000 Algerian soldiers took part in the Liberation of France in 1944, suffering thousands of deaths as part of the campaign, and even there they were treated as a nuisance—famously, De Gaulle wanted to make sure that as few Algerians as possible took part in the liberation of Paris, favoring the image of an army of white Frenchmen taking back the motherland.

Naturally, in return for this sacrifice, the French government had given the Algerians promises for the time after the war, such as a path to citizenship, representation in the French National Assembly, better protection of land rights and even the potential for a referendum for independence in the not-so-distant future.

These were lies which would be exposed in all their shocking brutality sooner rather than later.

Already on May 1st, while many Algerians were still fighting in Germany under the tricolor flag, the first cracks started to show. Algerian nationalists had organized demonstrations in the largest cities, which were brutally repressed by the French authorities. Several deaths were reported in the capital Algiers and the major coastal city of Oran.

In response to this the Algerian People’s Party (PPA) under the leadership of Messali Hadj, the man who would become known as the ‘father of Algerian independence', organized peaceful demonstrations in other cities around the country, hoping to show the French authorities there was mass support for their demands all over Algeria—and this support was real, after suffering through drought and famine during the last months of the war, on top of the general deprivation caused by a lack of supplies.

Hadj, once following a policy of limited direct action against colonial rule, came to believe that a peaceful path to independence was possible after the great sacrifices made in the Second World War on behalf of the occupied colonial metropole. Despite that, the French colonial authorities had arrested him two weeks earlier, on charges of causing disorder and unrest, so he had no direct part in the demonstrations.

On May 8th, Algerians followed this call in the city of Sétif, but many also came out to celebrate the end of the war, with the hope that soon they would have a better life and their loved ones would return home from Europe. The lines between official celebration and demonstration were fluid that day.

The streets were decked out with flags of the Allied forces, including the French, while others waved flags of the Algerian independence movement—a green and white banner with a red crescent and star, the Algerian flag. Slogans for independence rang in the crowd.

The exact order of events is somewhat unclear, and the historical record remains confused, but two things are certain:

  • The French colonial police had been prepared for the demonstration, indeed its potential violent repression, and began to beat down the crowd to seize Algerian flags and other symbols of the independence movement.

  • At some point, during the struggle over the flags, shots were fired, and one of those shots killed an Algerian flagbearer. It remains unclear who fired first, colonial police or the demonstrators. The demonstration turned into a riot, under fire by individual armed settlers and colonial police.

The actual police contingent in Sétif was relatively small, relying on the army for repression of the Algerian majority. They were overwhelmed by the initial riot, and the violence turned against European settlers in the city and spread into the countryside over the next few days. About one hundred settlers were killed in total.

What followed was terror.

Genocide.

French colonial rule in Algeria was built on genocide—the first thirty years of settlement alone led to the deaths of 1/6th to 1/3rd of Algeria’s native population—as all settler-colonial regimes are, but over time that violence is often institutionalized, normalized and integrated into larger systems of violence.

Until it breaks out, that is.

The French repression was as swift as it was indiscriminate and brutal.

General Duval, commander of the Constantine département, received orders from Paris to carry out punitive measures that had usually been reserved for areas under the so-called régime du sabre—rule by the sword—meaning those that had historically been part of the ‘unpacified’ frontier. Effectively everyone in the immediate area was declared a target for ‘retaliations’ and part of the ‘unrest and disorder’ in the region, as the French colonial authorities were prone to framing it.

Within the next days, Duval mobilized the air force and the navy, using both to ruthlessly bombard villages in the area of Sétif. Meanwhile, the colonial army supported by foreign legion troops combed through the countryside, village by village, and carried out summary executions as a form of collective punishment against the rural population. The overwhelming majority of those murdered were civilians, who had no involvement, and more likely than not no knowledge, about the riots in Sétif.

A particularly terrible episode occurred in the town of Kherrata, further to the north. The initial gatherings on May 8th remained peaceful here, but nonetheless the next day the French army arrived and committed a massacre against the town’s population. Hundreds of Algerians were shot, one by one, before being thrown down the nearby Kherrata gorge, some of them still alive according to later testimony by survivors.

While in Sétif and its surrounding areas, these brutalities were mostly carried out by the French colonial authorities, in Guelma the settlers themselves were at the forefront of violence.

Here too, riots broke out. A peaceful demonstration of the Algerian independence movement marched through the town. Mostly young people carried the flags of France, the allies and Algeria and placards reading ‘Long live democracy’, ‘Long live Algeria’, "Free Messali (Hadj)’, "Long live the Transatlantic Charter" and "Down with colonialism".

When the demonstration passed the European quarters, where celebrations for the war’s end were ongoing, the local prefect André Achiary—he had made a name for himself hunting down communists in Algeria for Vichy France—led a contingent of colonial police to disperse the crowd. When they refused to back off, he fired into the air and gave the order to attack. subsequently, several Algerians were killed when European settlers fired into the crowd from the buildings above.

The ensuing riots in Guelma, unlike in Sétif, were contained relatively quickly—in part due to settlers being armed under the guidance of the local police chief some weeks earlier—and here too ‘retaliations’ followed immediately.

French militias were formed in cooperation with the colonial bureaucrats to carry out executions of known nationalists and their families, while Achiary instituted an arbitrary ‘justice system’ for Algerians, handing out brutal sentences (executions, mutilations, expulsions) by his own authority, enforced through settler militias. In Guelma, this colonial violence lasted for months, spreading into the countryside over time.

The bodies piled up so fast in some areas that the local authorities first ordered mass graves to be filled close to Guelma, but worried about potential backlash from the more ‘liberally’ inclined parts of the new French government, they had them soon dug up again to hide the evidence. They transported the dead away to be burnt by the truckload in lime kilns traditionally used to fire ceramics.

There they burnt bodies for ten days—and not just those of the dead. The Algerian historian Boucif Mekhaled, a survivor of the massacre, later recalled:

“In Kef-El-Boumba, I saw the French get five people out of a truck with their hands tied, put them on the road, and douse them with petrol before burning them alive"

Does the obvious comparison need to be made? I think not. It speaks for itself.

Genocide.

Modern estimates place the number of deaths between 15000 and 30000—men, women and children, most of them without any involvement in the young national liberation movement, but rather as victims of collective punishment against the native population of Algeria by a brutal settler regime.

Upon the conclusion of the massacre, General Duval gave his superiors in Paris a grim warning, suggesting immediate reforms to the colony as the only tenable solution, or else they would deal with the same situation again in some years, only less controllable.

He turned out to be right. In 1954 the Algerian War of Independence began.

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Thinking of Gaza

Great March of Return, 2018

From 2018 to 2019 tens of thousands of Gazans, trapped, blockaded and starved in Israel’s very own reservation, took part in the Great March of Return to protest for their right to go back to the land they were driven from by the zionist settler-colonists. The movement was intended as a peaceful form of protest against a regime that had no other means than violence to suppress the resistance.

The inevitable followed.

Most of those brave enough to stand in the front row, close to the militarized border fence of the regime, must have known it was inevitable and they stood there all the same. Most of us can only wish for that kind of courage.

The IDF killed more than 200 people—46 of them children—during the Great March of Return while injuring nearly 10000. The majority of those killed were intentionally executed by snipers with shots to the head. This was settler colonial violence in action, and when Frantz Fanon wrote that colonialism is ‘violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence’ he was, of course, right.

The inevitable followed.

Just as the existence and the structural violence inflicted upon the Gaza reservation is only a result of the zionist colonial regime, the antipathy of the Algerians against the French settlers and their subsequent attacks against them on May 8th was only a result of the violence of settler colonialism and the repressions against the independence movement.

Similarly, the Great March of Return and its brutal suppression by Israel resulted in a change of strategy. All those peaceful demonstrations led to were bullets to the head and murder by the IDF, followed by further limitations on imports of the basic necessities of life to Gaza. In these dialectics of violence Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, colloquially known as October 7th, was the result—colonialism will only yield to greater violence after all, and all other options had been exhausted over and over again. As Fanon said, only through the process of violence the colonized can reclaim their humanity from those who would deny it to them.

And once again, the inevitable followed.

Genocide.

Israel’s unscrupulous and indiscriminate campaign of mass violence, starvation, and ethnic cleansing against the entire population of Gaza has led to tens of thousands of deaths, and will likely continue sooner rather than later—the settler regime will not be satisfied until it has cleared the way for further expansion, and support from its supporters in Washington shows no sign of drying up, no matter the party in charge.

But no state, no matter how brutal, can survive on violence alone. In the modern age, there is no way to hide the mass graves by burning the bodies, no way to demolish the ruins before the public can see them—in fact, we have all seen the bodies and ruins a hundred times and there is no excuse to forget them ever again.

Colonialism is violence and in Gaza, we can see it stripped of any pretence in its purest form, something that has historically been left to those on the ground who saw the terror inflicted in the name of ‘order’ and ‘retaliation’ with their own eyes.

Houari Boumediene, the future Algerian president, who witnessed the events of Sétif and Guelma at a young age later recalled:

“That day, I aged prematurely. The teenager I was became a man. That day, the world was turned upside down. Even the ancestors moved underground. And the children understood that they would have to fight with weapons in hand to become free men. No one could ever forget that day.”

That day, May 8th 1945 and in the weeks that followed, the colonial regime in Algeria was stripped of the last vestiges of seeming humanity, when it shovelled mass graves for tens of thousands of Algerians for the crime of living on their own land, while thousands of them had helped liberate France from nazi occupation with nothing to show for it.

And they did not forget.

In 1947 the Organisation Spéciale was founded with the goal of taking the fight to the French settlers and the regime that upheld their occupation of Algeria, no matter the cost. They fought until they won the struggle for national liberation.

Gaza will not and cannot forget either, I am certain of it—and we owe them to remember too.

When I look back at Algeria, I think of Palestine.

Of villages butchered; of blood in the streets of Rafah and Khan Younis.

Of massacres and resistance.

Of liberation.


Thank you for reading. Free Palestine. Down with the settler colony.

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From Algeria to Gaza: An Unbroken Chain of Colonial Violence
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Antonio Versace Bhardwaj's avatar
Antonio Versace Bhardwaj
Mar 2

https://www.faf.ae/home/2025/3/2/france-and-algeria-navigating-a-complex-relationship-amidst-diplomatic-tensions-and-historical-legacy

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