‘What am I driving at? At this idea: that no one colonizes innocently, that no one colonizes with impunity either; that a nation which colonizes, that a civilization which justifies colonization—and therefore force—is already a sick civilization, a civilization that is morally diseased…’ Aimé Césaire (Césaire 2000)
‘We remembered all the miseries, all the injustices, our people and the conditions they lived, the coldness with which world opinion looks at our cause, and so we felt that we will not permit them to crush us. We will defend ourselves and our revolution by every way and every means.’ George Habash(external link), 1970
What do the Algerian and Vietnamese struggles have to do with the Palestinian struggle today? The answer is that the Palestinian liberation struggle must be uncompromisingly situated within the long line of anti-colonial revolutionary efforts. Despite their own specificities and differences, these three struggles need to be understood as such: as anti-colonial struggles for liberation. At the same time, the events in Palestine, including the current genocide, also demonstrate that the colonial world has not yet been fully dismantled.
The sections below focus on the intersections between the Palestinian liberation struggle and its Algerian and Vietnamese counterparts.
Palestine and Algeria: two sisters in the Arab world
‘I travelled on an Algerian airplane under Algerian protection as if I was an Algerian envoy, not just a Palestinian one. [Boumediene] wanted to tell the world that Palestinian envoy Yasser Arafat wasn’t coming alone but with Algeria by his side.’ Yasser Arafat(external link)
For obvious reasons, there are multiple connections between the Palestinian and Algerian revolutionary liberation struggles. One of them is the deeply racist, inhumane and genocidal settler-colonial experience both nations have been subjected to, uniquely within the Arab region. Sharing this common experience, Palestinian revolutionaries look up to their Algerian brothers and sisters, while the Algerians see in the Palestinian resistance and revolutionary efforts a mirror image of their revolution against the French colonialists. The Algerian FLN inspired the Palestinian strategy of armed struggle(external link) and the union of different political groups under a common banner. It therefore comes as no surprise that the Algerians have assisted the Palestinians since the 1960s in every realm: diplomatic backing, military assistance, and the provision of weapons and financing.
For a big part of the ‘Third World’, especially those countries that were still under the grip of colonial domination, Algeria’s liberation in 1962 provided hope and a model to follow. Its capital Algiers became a Mecca for revolutionaries from all over the world – from Vietnam to Palestine to southern Africa – who desired to bring down the imperialist and colonial order. The 1964 charter of Algiers declared Algeria’s support for the ‘struggles of other people in the world’, including ‘armed struggle’ (Deffarge & Troeller 1972), and independent Algeria went on to provide asylum and financial support to movements all over the world fighting for independence and against racism, colonialism and imperialism.
In the Arab world, the new regime in Algeria established ties with the Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, and was firmly part of the anti-colonial wave that chased out the French and the British after their pitiful adventure in the Suez in 1956, and which included independence in Tunisia and Morocco also in 1956, and the overthrow of the monarchies in Iraq (1958) and Northern Yemen (1962). In this period, the Palestinians also initiated their first actions to put their country back on the political map, from which it had been removed (Gresh 2012).
In the following paragraphs, I mainly rely on material gathered by the excellent educational website on the Palestinian revolution (https://learnpalestine.qeh.ox.ac.uk/(external link)), curated by the Palestinian scholars Karma Nabulsi and Abdel Razzaq Takriti, as well as on the enlightening The Dig podcast series Thawra(external link), on Arab radicalisms in the twentieth century.
The Palestinian liberation movement actively engaged with Algeria in the years after its independence in 1962, at a time when the country was a meeting point for various Afro-Asian liberation movements. The Palestinian writer and politician Muhammad Abu Meizar, who joined Fatah (the Palestinian National Liberation Movement) in 1962, has described how the first Palestinian meeting with the Cuban revolution took place in 1964, when Che Guevara travelled to Algiers. Palestinians at this time were establishing relations with various liberation movements from Africa, Asia and Latin America. It was also from Algeria that the first Palestinian delegation travelled to China in 1965.
Abu Meizar(external link) describes Algeria’s support to the Palestinian struggle at this time: ‘through Algeria, several interactions took place with liberation movements, the Vietnamese, the Chinese, African movements, it was a meeting place. Algeria also hosted one of the most important institutions, the Cherchell Military Academy, where many Palestinians were enrolled. Until that time Fatah had not fired its first shot. However, through Algeria, it made connections with the Moroccans, the Tunisians, the Africans, the Vietnamese, the Chinese, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Cuba. These were not minor relationships, they were extremely precious, and valuable.’
The Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) opened its office in Algeria in 1965. Its first chairman (1964–1967), Ahmad al-Shukeiri, was known for his ardent support for the Algerian cause: As a representative of Saudi Arabia and then Syria at the United Nations in New York, he played an active role in defending the Algerian revolution from 1955 till 1962, during annual sessions and special meetings. Algeria repaid the debt in kind: the first public support for the Palestinian revolution from any government was from Algeria. It took the form of the cover page of the official newspaper Al-Moudjahid, on 1 January 1965, which bore an article titled ‘The Revolutionaries of the 1st of November Salute the Revolutionaries of the 1st of January’.
During this time, Fatah opened a training camp for Palestinian fighters in Algeria, outside the framework of the Cherchell Military Academy, in coordination with the Algerian Joint Forces Command. A large number of Palestinian volunteers from Europe and the Maghreb, and even from the USA, trained there, some of whom went on to conduct resistance operations, becoming themselves symbols of the liberation struggle, such as Mahmoud al-Hamshari, Ghazi al-Husseini and Abdullah Franji.
Abu Meizar(external link) described Algeria’s support to the Palestinian armed struggle: ‘[In 1967 [w]e secured the first weapons shipment from Algeria to Fatah, with the delivery facilitated by Mohammad Ibrahim al-Ali [Commander of the Syrian Popular Army]. The first plane flew to Damascus loaded with weapons for Fateh. … This was our first weapons deal, but it should be remembered that in the days of Boumediene in 1966, the first official financial support was offered by the Algerian government to Fatah.’
Yasser Arafat, chairman of the PLO from 1969 to 2004, always acknowledged Algeria’s uncompromising and unshakable solidarity with the Palestinian cause, as well as its firm support for pan-Arab war efforts against the Zionist entity. For example, he explained how Algerian President Houari Boumediene sent forces to Egypt to fight in the 1967 Arab–Israeli war. Boumediene also went to Cairo and Damascus to ask what they needed for the war effort, and thereafter visited the Soviet Union to request they send Egypt and Syria tanks and weapons to replace those they had lost. Arafat recounted(external link) the negotiations between Boumediene and the Soviets at this time: ‘They told him they needed more time, and he said if by time they meant money then Algeria would pay. He immediately paid the Soviet Union 200 million dollars which would amount to 2 billion dollars today. He paid to make the Soviet Union expedite the delivery of weapons to Egypt and Syria. No one can forget this.’
After the Naksa (defeat) of 1967, Boumediene declared:
‘History will judge us as traitors and losers … if we accept the defeat … The Arab nation will not kneel. If Israel thinks that it captured the Sinai, the Golan and the west bank, it knows that the Arab depth reaches Algeria … Algeria cannot accept the defeat. Is the Arab nation using all its tremendous human resources? Is it using all the tremendous physical energies it has today … to say that it lost the battle. … The battle is not just a Palestinian battle. It is true that we are far geographically, but we have a role to play.’ (Boumaza 2015)
The Algerian troops Boumediene sent remained in Egypt to defend its borders until the 1973 Arab–Israeli war, during which they fought alongside Palestinian troops on the Suez front.
Finally, Algeria’s active support for the Palestinian liberation struggle was also seen in the choice of its capital Algiers as the site for the Declaration of Independence of the State of Palestine in November 1988, announced during the 19th session of the Palestine National Council.
Every day in Gaza there’s another Kham Thien
Like Palestine and Algeria, Palestine and Vietnam have a long history of fraternity. Vietnam’s fight for liberation, which pitted it first against France and then against the United States, inspired Palestinians in their struggle against Israel’s occupation of their lands.
One of the similarities in the Palestinian and Vietnamese struggles is their use of tunnels as a guerilla tactic against a superior and better equipped army. Perhaps inspired by the Chinese communists’ use of tunnels against the Japanese invaders, the Vietnamese first began digging their extensive network of tunnels during the 1940s, to hide from and launch attacks against French colonial troops. The 150-mile-long Cu Chi tunnels, located northwest of Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City), were a strategic stronghold for the Communist guerilla troops, known as Viet Cong(external link). They played a crucial role in the resistance against the American war on Vietnam, including acting as the base of operations for the Tet Offensive in 1968. Today, both the Palestinian and Lebanese resistance movements are using tunnels in their fight against Israel. The tunnels in Gaza serve as a base for the Palestinian resistance, which has used them to inflict significant losses on the Israeli military.
Another parallel between Palestine’s experience and that of Vietnam is the degree of destruction wreaked by their powerful oppressors. For Vietnamese, Israel’s destruction of Gaza today recalls the US bombing raids(external link) in 1972. Then-US President Richard Nixon ordered the bombing of the North Vietnamese capital Hanoi over Christmas 1972. Starting on 18 December and lasting for 12 consecutive days and nights, about 20,000 tonnes of bombs were dropped on Hanoi, as well as on the busy northern port city of Hai Phong and other localities. Hanoi’s Kham Thien neighbourhood suffered the most severe devastation.
These links between Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and the US war on Vietnam are now being clearly articulated by young Vietnamese activists to introduce the Palestinian cause to new audiences (Dang 2024). The historical echoes of the two wars, including images of the destruction of urban centres (Gaza and Kham Thien), alongside the aggressor states’ violent threats – with Israel declaring it would ‘flatten Gaza’ and the United States declaring it would ‘bomb North Vietnam back to the Stone Age(external link)’ – form part of a reservoir of shared symbols that point to a common history of colonial wars and anti-colonial revolutionary resistance. This shared experience is fuelling a renewed sense of transnational solidarities between the formerly oppressed and currently oppressed peoples.
These solidarities, which are now being renewed, actually go back many years: Vietnam’s support for the Palestinian people and their struggle for liberation was unwavering during the Cold War and into the 1990s. This is undoubtedly because of the belief among the Vietnamese leadership that the Palestinian cause mirrored their own fight for unification and independence against foreign powers. The PLO established relations with North Vietnam in 1968 and set up a resident representative office after the end of the war in Vietnam in 1975. The office soon became the embassy of Palestine in Vietnam. In the 1990s, Vietnam welcomed Palestinian leaders, including Yasser Arafat, on many occasions. On the Palestinian side, the bonds of friendship between the two countries were summed up by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish(external link) in 1973, as the war in Vietnam entered its final phase with the signing of the Paris Peace Accords: ‘In the conscience of the peoples of the world, the torch has been passed from Vietnam to us.’ The PLO was among the small minority of groups and countries of the Global South that openly condemned China for its invasion of Vietnam in 1979.
Source: https://www.tni.org/en/article/vietnam-algeria-palestine
