Camus In Gaza

Why the Killing Has to Stop Now

In January 1956, Albert Camus gave a momentous speech in Algiers, in which he called for a ‘civil truce’ in the war between France and the National Liberation Front (FLN). It was not the most propitious moment for the Algerian-French writer to deliver a message like this.

The war - never recognised as such by France - was in its fourteenth month. Camus spoke less than six months after the uprising at the town of Philippeville in August 1955, in which Arabs were incited by the FLN to massacre and mutilate more than a hundred settlers - unleashing reprisals in which more than ten thousand Arabs were killed. The local FLN leaders counted on precisely this outcome, and they could always rely on the racism of the European settler population and the French state to get the reaction they sought.

To Algerian nationalists who believed that France would never abandon Algeria voluntarily, Camus was a bonne soeur or ‘good sister’ - a term not that far removed from the contemporary notion of a ‘virtue signaller’ - preaching morality in a war where morality was not required. To the pied-noir settler society that Camus came from, he was a traitor. When Camus gave his speech, he had to be escorted in and out of the building, to avoid an angry crowd of pieds-noirs that wanted to lynch him.

In this volatile atmosphere, Camus explained the purpose of his Committee for a Civil Truce to his 800 listeners:

What do we propose? Simply to get the Arab movement and the French authorities, without having to make con­tact or to commit themselves to anything else, to declare simultaneously that for the duration of the fighting the civilian population will on every occasion be respected and protected. Why this measure? The first reason…is one of simple humanity. Whatever the ancient and deep origins of the Algerian tragedy, one fact remains: no cause justifies the death of the innocent.

A former editor of the underground French resistance newspaper Combat, Camus was not a pacifist. But he was always sensitive to the dehumanising impact of violence on individuals and societies, and he was horrified by the viciousness of the war that was tearing his homeland apart, and concerned that it would make it impossible to reconcile French and Arab Algeria.

At this point, neither side was interested in reconciliation, and few people were prepared to respond positively to Camus’s suggestion that ‘we can at least exert some action on the most hate­ful aspect of the fight: we can propose, without making any change in the present situation, that we refrain from what makes it unforgivable—the murder of the innocent’.

Neither the FLN nor the French army fully recognized the category of the ‘innocent’ civilian, nor was either side prepared to place limits on the methods they used to fight each other. In these circumstances, Camus’s speech was brave and even noble, but also politically naive.

Depressed by the negative reception he received that night, and by the endless cruelty of the war itself, Camus made the decision not to make any further public pronouncements about Algeria. He was not always able to remain silent, however. Heckled by an Algerian student in Stockholm after receiving the Nobel Prize for literature in 1957, for his failure to condemn French atrocities in Algeria, he angrily retorted ‘I have always condemned terror. I must also condemn a terrorism which is exercised blindly in the streets of Algiers, for example, and which one day could strike my mother or my daughter. ‘

This was not exactly responding to the accusation. When Camus gave that speech, the Tenth Paratroop Division had just completed its brutal suppression of the FLN terrorist bomb squads in Algiers, known as the ‘Battle of Algiers’, in which more than a quarter of the population of the Arab kasbah were tortured, and thousands of real and suspected terrorists executed without trial.

Camus did not condone such actions, but he did not condemn them. For Camus, and for many of his countrymen, ‘terror’ was something that Arabs or Muslims did. Camus was contemptuous of the intellectuals who seemed to license what he called ‘comfortable murder’ from a safe distance, such as his former friend Jean-Paul Sartre, who supported the FLN throughout the Algerian war.

Algeria was a clear inspiration for Sartre’s (in)famous preface to Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, in which he argued that

The rebel’s weapon is the proof of his humanity…to shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time; there remains a dead man, and a free man; the survivor feels a national soil under his boot.

Sartre was not an entirely ‘comfortable’ advocate of revolutionary violence. His support for the Algerian cause carried some personal risk - two bombs were detonated outside his house by French fascists. But his glib celebration of violence-as-consciousness-raising could not have been more far removed from Camus.

History proved Sartre right - up to a point. The French lost, in part because of the way they fought, and because of the way the Algerians fought. But a million Algerians died before France finally recognized that it had lost, and more than a million pieds-noirs abandoned the country. Sartre had a more realistic political understanding of the war and its historical causes.

He recognized that the Algerian war was part of a global process of decolonization in which the European left had placed its revolutionary hopes, and he refused to criticise the methods that the ‘wretched of the earth’ might use to liberate themselves.

I mention all this, because there was a time when Algeria was cited as an inspiration for the Palestinian struggle, and for many other wars of decolonization, and throughout the last appalling weeks, the debates about terrorism, resistance, and counterterrorism have often echoed those of Algeria’s ‘war of peace.’

On the one hand there are those ‘comfortable murderers’, who, faced with the unbelievable savagery now being perpetrated in Gaza, shake their heads at the tragic inevitability of it all, and blame every atrocity on Hamas or the ‘tragedy of war.’

But I have also read leftists-turned-Chuck Norris celebrating the fact that Israel ‘got its ass kicked’ by Hamas, or celebrating Hamas’s pogrom/assault of 7 October as a glorious Palestinian Tet Offensive. In a speech to a Socialist Worker-organised gathering last week, Tariq Ali gave a slightly more elegant version of this position:

When I heard that Hamas decided to go in and say to the Israelis, “Here we are, get out of our territory, lift the siege”, I was actually very happy. Obviously, I was not happy by the death of civilians anywhere.

Ali pointed out that the Vietnamese had blown up civilian cafés during the Tet Offensive because US servicemen used them, and he also cited Algeria and Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers:

The same goes for the Algerian war. I recommend you see the film The Battle of Algiers, one of the most brilliant Western films ever made about anti‑imperialism. It shows what a national liberation movement is like. In one part, a resistance fighter is asked why they bombed cafes where French families were killed. He replied that they [the resistance] would be more accurate if the French gave them an air force.

The scene that Ali refers to is based on an actual episode from the war, in which the captured FLN commander Larbi ben M’hidi is asked whether it is cowardly for women to carry bombs in baskets. Ben M’hidi points out the destruction of Algerian villages by French planes, and replies ‘Give us your bombers, and we’ll give your our baskets,’

Seen through Pontecorvo’s romantic humanist lens, the ‘terrorism of the weak’ seems to make a kind of moral sense, even if it leaves out a great deal. The FLN’s violence was far worse than the film depicts, and colonisers were not the only ones at the receiving end of it. The FLN massacred rival ‘moderate’ organisations, mutilated collaborators, tortured and killed its own members.

Hamas’s Gaza breakout was also far worse than the deaths of civilians that spoiled Tariq Ali’s happiness. Not everything can or should be sanctified by the incantation of the words ‘national liberation’, either then or now. Nor can hideous massacres like the bombing of Djabalia camp be shrugged off as tragedies of war, or legitimised by the callous nostrums of counter-terrorism.

For thousands of years, humanity has tried to at least impose limits on war, in the tortuous legal and moral evolution of ‘international law’. Many governments have refused to observe these regulations when it suits them, and many ‘non-state actors’ like the FLN and Hamas have done the same.

If Ali is close to Sartre in his embrace of revolutionary violence, there is, at least at first sight, a Camus-like anguish in the Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland’s article condemning Celtic supporters for waving Palestinian flags, and rejecting ‘this tendency, this need, to see one side as all good and the other as all evil.’

All very empathetic. In the same breath however, Freedland dismisses the notion of an unconditional ceasefire, because

It seems such a simple, obvious remedy. Until you stop to wonder how exactly, if it is not defeated, Hamas is to be prevented from regrouping and preparing for yet another attack on the teenagers, festivalgoers and kibbutz families of southern Israel.

This is what Israelis call yorim ve bochim -‘shooting and crying.’ Freedland is dismayed by military operations that have ‘ killed so many Gazans.’ But he rejects the ‘easy remedy’ of those who want Israel to stop killing them, and suggests that calls for a ceasefire are legitimizing further aggressions by Hamas.

And he also warns of the ‘shift…underway, that has been starkly revealed these last few weeks’, which

squeezes the Israel-Palestine conflict into a “decolonisation” frame it doesn’t quite fit, with all Israelis – not just those in the occupied West Bank – defined as the footsoldiers of “settler colonialism”, no different from, say, the French in Algeria. Never mind that Jews sought a refuge in Palestine motivated not by an imperial desire for expansion, but because they faced annihilation. Never mind that Israeli Jews have no imperial metropole, no France, they could ever return to. And never mind their ancestral, millennia-old connection to the land – all of which makes them utterly unlike the French in Algeria.

Algeria again. Or maybe not. Because this deeply-shallow stuff, beneath the performative profundity. For a start, there is no need for scare marks around “settler colonialism”. That is what Israel is and always has been, as far as Palestinians are concerned, and the fact that it is Jewish settler-colonialism makes no difference. Palestinians have always been asked - told, to be more precise - to provide the solution to a (European) tragedy of persecution that they had no part in.

Even if that history gives the state of Israel a special moral authority in the eyes of the governments that supported its creation, it doesn’t change the dynamic of occupation and dispossession that created the Palestinian exodus in 1948, and which now threatens another catastrophe.

The death toll in Gaza is now 7,000 and rising. Most of the dead are civilians and non-combatants, and nearly half of them are children - many, many more children than Hamas killed last month. The bombing of Djabalia may have killed nearly 200 people in order, according to Israel, to kill a Hamas leader who may not even have been killed.

This is not happening by accident. It is not an inevitable tragedy. Given the amount of firepower being poured into Gaza Strip, even the most scrupulous observer of international law would struggle to avoid civilian casualties, and Israel is not as scrupulous as it claims, especially now, when it has basically been given permission to do whatever it wants.

The potential consequences of this nightmare are difficult to comprehend, and only a world that has lost its moral compass would even consider accepting them.

For this reason, it is worth revisiting the way that two writers, each of whom thought more deeply about the conflict that divided their country than many shallow commentators do about today’s conflicts - Andrew Roberts’s remarkably-fatuous suggestion in the Telegraph that Palestinians should just ‘move on’ being only the latest example.

Faced with a war of annihilation that neither side can win, and which has all the potential to provoke a regional conflagration, while unleashing inter-communal violence across the world, the world needs to recognize - as Sartre once did in Algeria - that the latest horrendous chapter in the ‘Israeli-Palestinian conflict’ has political causes and a political context that go beyond 7 October and beyond Hamas, and beyond binary formulations of good versus evil/terror versus civilization etc, and which has been left shamefully unresolved for too many years.

At the same time what Hamas did on 7 October should not be glamorised or glossed over, and not only because of the crimes against humanity that were perpetrated that day. For all its Tet Offensive comparisons, the fact is that neither Hamas, nor any other Palestinian organization, nor any Arab state or coalition of Arab states can defeat Israel, and the more Hamas fights, the more Palestinians will pay the price, until the last Hamas fighters die in the rubble of Gaza, and there are no civilians left..

Some fascist Israelis and settler-gunmen take satisfaction from this possibility, just as the fascist OSS death-squads once did at the mass murder of Algerians, in the last months of the war. They dream of final victory and the end of the Palestinian ‘problem’, and too many of Israel’s supporters seem to accept this too, or at least can’t be bothered to use what power they have to stop it.

But Israel cannot ‘eliminate’ Hamas without completely destroying Gaza itself, killing tens of thousand of civilians, and creating a new Palestinian exodus. Its leaders are clearly not concerned about these outcomes. Nor are they minded to heed the Israeli foreign minister and dovish Zionist Moshe Sharett warning many years ago, that Israel’s lawless violence risks transforming it into ‘a savage state that does not recognize the principles of justice as they have been established and accepted by contemporary society.’

So at this point, we should heed what Camus said in Algiers so many years ago, even if his listeners couldn’t. But we need more than a civil truce or a humanitarian ‘pause’.

We need a complete and immediate ceasefire - a cessation of hostilities. This is what hundreds of thousands of people are demanding across the world, but Israel is not listening, and the governments that support Israel are not listening, and Hamas is not listening.

The US, Europe, the UK government and the UK opposition continue to reject this option, on the grounds that it will enable Hamas to continue to threaten Israel - as if Hamas’s rockets are in any way comparable to the awesome machinery of destruction which is being unleashed on Gaza. As long as they continue to do this, they are complicit in every death, and they are helping to sow the seeds of despair, bitterness, and hatred that will poison the world for generations to come.

Even in the mad, brutal, hypocritical and dishonest world that we now have, it takes a kind of madness, and a kind of moral blindness to do this.

What comes after a ceasefire is impossible to predict, but anything is better than the ‘infernal dialectic’ that Camus once described in Algiers, in which

whatever kills one side kills the other too, each blaming the other and justifying his violence by the opponent's violence. The eternal question as to who was first responsible loses all meaning then. And because they could not manage to live together, two populations, simi­lar and different at the same time but equally worthy of respect, are condemned to die together, with rage in their hearts.

This is what is happening in Gaza. And in these circumstances, Camus’s plea on behalf of ‘simple humanity’ ought to be enough for the friends of the Palestinians, and the friends of Israel, to make it stop.