Palimpsests
Part III of "What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Algeria?"
Note to Readers: This is Part III of a five-part essay series I announced on my Substack on May 6. It explores the parallels between the Algerian War and what we’re currently witnessing in Israel/Palestine. You can find Part I here and Part II here.
For reasons that may or may not be obvious, I’ve been thinking a lot about Algeria lately.
In the fall of 2023, not long after the attacks of October 7, I picked up a book I’d been anticipating for quite some time: Nancy-Kabylie, by the acclaimed French*Algerian journalist and filmmaker Dorothée-Myriam Kellou.
Dorothée and I first crossed paths as undergraduates on the Hilltop in the early 2000s. She’d arrived as an exchange student from Sciences Po Lyon: we both ran in the same circle of international students, young professionals and interns with ties to the French Embassy on Reservoir Road and both attended the same parties where, if you showed up at the door with a bottle of Two-Buck Chuck, your hosts graciously hid it in the basement and returned with a glass of Blanc de Blancs from Épernay.
In her book, Dorothée self-deprecatingly jokes that she grew up as a “demi-beurre, sans sel”1 — the daughter of an upper-crust French mother and a secular Kabyle father who worked as a television producer for France 3 Champagne-Ardennes and never spoke to her in Arabic or his native Berber.
We were each high off language and its ability to take us somewhere in the world — or perhaps within ourselves — we couldn’t otherwise access. She’d fallen for the rhythms of Khalil Gibran’s poetry in its original Arabic and would go on to date men named Mostafa and Reda; I was partial to the prose of Françoise Sagan and attended Dip Ball with Guillaume.
After graduation, Dorothée continued her quest to “arabize” herself.2 The same summer I took off for California and drove across an American landscape marked by foreclosed houses and boarded-up Starbucks at the height of the Great Recession, she found herself working as a press attaché for the French Consulate in East Jerusalem, where a different housing crisis was underway.3
In the opening chapters of Nancy-Kabylie, she describes sitting with two Palestinian men as they watch Israeli settlers take over their homes in Sheikh Jarrah. The men have nicknamed her “la France.” She attempts to comfort one Palestinian father, Maher, by emphasizing that France condemns the Israeli court ruling that has now resulted in his displacement. Maher’s friend, Yacub — a “professional clown, sad this morning” — sits on the sidewalk nearby and lets out a laugh of despair, defeated.4
The next day, when Dorothée returns to Sheikh Jarrah, she’s surprised to see the men’s faces light up. “They no longer call me ‘la France,’” she writes, “but refer to me instead as “l’Algérie.” In her heritage, they’ve started to see the promise of eventual liberation.5
A young man named Hani, who envisions “a one-state solution [for Israel-Palestine] and full equal rights for Palestinians” begins talking to her animatedly about Ferhat Abbas — the Algerian political leader who “called for equal rights between French and Muslims under French sovereignty in Algeria.”6
Dorothée simply listens, unaware of her own history.
That fall, Dorothée finds herself back on Georgetown’s campus for a master’s in Arab Studies, and a professor — hearing in both her heritage and travels the “echo of a colonial drum” — encourages her to focus her research on France’s history in Algeria.7 As a starting point, she asks her father, Malek, whether anyone in their family has written their memoirs.8
He invites her to re-read an unproduced screenplay he’d written and gifted her one Christmas Eve, then sent to her again via snail mail in Occupied East Jerusalem. He hadn’t wanted to visit — “to relive the checkpoints, or the visible presence of the army.”
(“Relive,” she writes. “The word should have caught my attention.”)
The screenplay, entitled Lettre à mes filles (Letter to My Daughters), had originally been Lettre à mon ami Pierre (“a Pied Noir friend”) and later Lettre à mon ami Abedellah (“an Algerian friend”). “Like Sisyphus,” she writes, “my father had tried to tell his story through this script over and over. Until now, no one had acknowledged receipt.”
The opening of her father’s screenplay reads as follows9:
And so it is — in the recesses of our alma mater’s library and across the ocean from her hometown — that Dorothée finally comes to understand what lays hidden beneath her father’s silence: namely, in 1955, when Malek was only 10 years old, he was forcibly displaced from his home by the French military.
The year prior, on November 1, 1954, the FLN had launched a series of coordinated terrorist attacks on a day now known in France as La Toussaint Rouge (All Saints’ Day Massacre).10 The struggle for Algerian independence was gaining momentum, and its leaders relied on support from the rural population in areas that were harder for the French to access or surveil. To “protect” the civilian population from the terrorist/liberation group, the military forcibly evacuated somewhere between 2 and 2.5 million Algerians from their homes and placed them in “regroupment” camps surrounded by barbed wire; another million were forcibly resettled in larger villages and town centers under strict military supervision.11
(The strategy, as Mathieu Olivier explains in Jeune Afrique, followed a deceptively simple logic: “seeing as the ‘rebel’ swims among the population like a fish in water, all one needs to do is drain the water to kill the fish.”)
News of the military’s regroupment strategy and mass displacements wouldn’t hit the French mainland press until April 1959, after an official government report was leaked to editors at France Observateur and Le Monde. Their exposé came on top of mounting revelations of torture and detailed what was unequivocally a humanitarian disaster: indigenous populations had been cut off from cultivating their land and reduced to surviving on rations that were grossly insufficient; infant mortality had soared and sanitary conditions were dire.12
Today, historians consider the regroupment camps to be one of the most consequential and under appreciated aspects of the Algerian War. In 1959, French Prime Minister Michel Debré, called to testify before the Assemblée nationale, denounced reports of the camps as a communist plot.13
I read Dorothée’s recounting of the camps, meanwhile, curled up on a couch in Marshall, Virginia, as Israel prepared its full-scale incursion into the Gaza Strip. My social media was flooded with statements comparing Hamas to ISIS and claiming the “world loves nothing more than a dead Jew.” Only a few weeks earlier, I’d DM’d Dorothée excitedly and told her I couldn’t wait to write about her book upon its release.
Now, I felt instinctively protective.14
Never mind that her work is a complex, beautifully interwoven narrative that blends painstaking historical research with questions of colonial memory and aches for reconciliation — both in French society and within herself. I skimmed through its pages, picked up on references to Edward Saïd and Frantz Fanon, and pictured whatever I wrote going viral, taken out of context, and prompting attacks on both Dorothée and my alma mater from the likes of The Free Press and Bari Weiss.
In the weeks and months that followed, without even consciously realizing what I was doing, I attempted to review Dorothée’s book in draft after draft that wrote around her opening chapters — ignoring the adage that writers have known for generations: that writing, no matter how seemingly benign, is inherently a political act.
I sidestepped the palimpsest of Algeria/Palestine in her work and focused my lens on the questions that felt safer, more palatable, and, “to my credit!”, political just the same. Might France’s upcoming legislative elections make for a timely hook?
For each vignette Dorothée shared about her own life, I found myself writing a parallel anecdote and writing toward — but never into — the things I felt too hesitant to say.
No matter how many poetic vignettes I wrote, I found myself circling back to that one word: revivre.
I visited the West Bank in 2016 almost by accident — a girlfriend needed to escape bedbugs in Paris, and I agreed, on a whim, to join her in the Middle East. We spent ten days in Jordan and crossed into Israel via the Allenby Bridge during what was then being called “the Knife Intifada.”
When our Airbnb hosts in West Jerusalem commended our courage and commitment to visiting the Holy City despite the headlines, my friend and I each shot each other a quizzical look. I stumbled through a polite response and tried to mask our ignorance about current events; as I chit-chatted, my friend quietly booked us a “Dual Narrative Tour” on her phone.
The next morning, we boarded a bulletproof bus to Hebron.
The best way I’ve known to describe my experience of that day — an experience countless others have written about in accounts far more eloquent and detailed than I ever could — is to borrow the language people reach for to describe moments of shock or trauma. What remains seared in my psyche are less the blatant injustices — water shortages, netting strung carefully over Palestinian streets to catch debris and feces thrown down by Israeli settlers, a shopkeeper permanently disabled for failing to hand over a soccer ball to an IDF soldier as a young child15 — than the disorientation I felt crossing back over 1967 lines to the beaches of Tel Aviv, and the ways what I had just witnessed was explained away to me.
A friend who graciously offered to show us around Haifa explained the occupation in terms of Islamic Jihad: whereas one side worships darkness, the Israelis, like the French, choose life.16
There’s a temptation, even as I type these words now, to frame my own narrative arc in a way that mirrors Ta-Nehisi Coates’ — to pat myself on the back and tell you I returned home and instantly became an outspoken supporter of the Palestinian cause.
The truth — of how I continued to turn over the question of Israel/Palestine in my head once I returned home — is far messier.
I moved back from France in 2017 and, in one of those scenarios that can only happen in Washington, DC, found myself loosely romantically involved that same summer with both a pro-Israel lobbyist and a man who worked for the PLO. The former had bookshelves stacked floor to ceiling with encyclopedias and tomes on world history; we would quite literally binge-watch Black Mirror while he pulled out maps of Judea and Samaria. I edited op-eds he wrote that put terms like “occupation” and “West Bank” in quotes. When the articles went live, he’d send me texts like: “despite our political differences, I still want you quite carnally.”17
In his arms, I felt comforted in my long-standing identity as a bright-eyed blonde who needed protection and still had a lot to learn.
As for my PLO beau, I don’t know if I loved him so much for his five o’clock shadow as for the ways he gradually helped me feel a little more sane, simply by gently challenging the political myths I’d been asked to absorb and suggesting I could trust my own mind. Maybe it’s a sign of how much he cared for me that when I told him I finally felt ready to write something about Palestine, he said:
“If I have one piece of advice, Pumpkin — don’t.”
I took his words as a blessing and, like the best of Progressives Except for Palestine, focused the lens of my political advocacy elsewhere. What did the conflict have to do with me, after all? Besides, there was plenty to criticize back home.
Now, Dorothée’s book was challenging that silence in a way I hadn’t fully anticipated.
To believe the Israeli actress and spokesperson Noa Tishby, to make sense of what I saw in the occupied territories would be to buy into the most vile of antisemitic tropes. It starts, she says, with the same ancient hatred that tells you Jews “control the weather.” Before you know it, you’re buying into claims that Israel is a colonialist state.18
It took me three full readings of Dorothée’s book before I translated “colonie de peuplement” in my reader’s mind and another before I properly read up on the controversy over what felt like an esoteric, academic term.
Putting aside, for now, the longstanding debate over whether the term accurately describes Israel’s founding —
What were we witnessing, if not a colonial war?
This was Part III of a five-part series entitled: “What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Algeria?” This Thursday, May 22, I’ll break down the explicit parallels between France/Algeria and Israel/Palestine that I continued to notice in over a year of productively procrastinating on the essay above.
“Half-butter, without salt” — a playful, self-deprecating jeu de mots. In French slang, beur (from arabe) refers to someone of North African descent, often second-generation. Demi-beurre riffs on that term, and sans sel (“without salt”) connotes a lack of flavor or edge — i.e., not “Arab enough.”
“It’s the intimate side of the language that I’m missing. The language of sounds, of smells, the language of love, of joy, of fears, of nothingness, of life, of the street — made harsh and joyful, soft and rough by the everyday. It’s not the fixed language of books that escapes me. That’s not the one I thirst for, even if I’ll eventually resolve myself to learn it.
Like Algeria, who, at independence, sought to reclaim ‘its’ identity and ‘its’ language — but came up against the impasse of the singular — I decide to Arabize myself.” — Nancy-Kabylie, p. 22
“Return to Jerusalem. Near the Old City, Palestinian families — refugees in East Jerusalem since the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 — are once again at risk of being thrown out onto the streets. They are engaged in legal battles against Israeli settlers who claim an ancestral presence in the neighborhood. After thirty-seven years of legal struggle, the verdict has come down. In the summer of 2009, more than fifty Palestinians — entire families — were evicted in favor of the settlers.” Dorothée-Myriam Kellou, Nancy-Kabylie, p. 39
You can read more about that summer in this Guardian article.
Nancy-Kabylie, p. 39
Ibid
Nancy-Kabylie, p. 43
Nancy-Kabylie, p. 51
Nancy-Kabylie, p. 55
Ibid
Benjamin Stora, La Guerre d’Algérie expliquée à tous, p. 5. In response to the question "When did the Algerian War begin?”, Stora writes: “The Algerian War is generally considered to have begun on the night of November 1, 1954, when the FLN (National Liberation Front) launched thirty coordinated attacks on police stations and military barracks — all symbols of French colonial power — across Algeria. The insurrection resulted in the deaths of seven people, including a schoolteacher and a caïd (a Muslim official aligned with French authority). French journalists at the time dubbed the insurrection “La Toussaint Rouge” (Red All Saints’ Day), recognizing the synchronized nature of the attacks — explosions, arson, and commando raids — as evidence of an organized movement.
He continues: “Some consider that a “first Algerian war” began in 1830, when France conquered Algerian territory by force. Others argue that the Sétif massacres in May–June 1945 mark the true beginning of the Algerian War. I believe we can still retain the dates of November 1, 1954, as the war’s start, and July 5, 1962, as its end. But we must remember that nothing begins suddenly, “as if by magic” — on November 1, 1954.”
Dorothée-Myriam Kellou, Nancy-Kabylie, p. 49. Kellou writes: “In total, nearly half of Algeria’s rural population was displaced from their original place of residence during the Algerian War.” She draws on figures from Michel Cornaton, Les Regroupements de la décolonisation (Éditions Ouvrières, 1967), and Fabien Sacriste, Les camps de regroupement en Algérie: Une histoire des déplacements forcés (1954–1962) (Presses de Sciences Po, 2022), who estimates that between 2 and 2.5 million Algerians were displaced during the war.
Michel Rocard, Rapport sur les camps de regroupement et autres textes sur la guerre d’Algérie, Paris: Mille et une nuits, 2003. From Claire Andrieu:
”On February 17, 1959, in Algiers, a 28-year-old inspector of finances submitted a report to the General Delegate in Algeria — a report that had been requested only unofficially — concerning a reality ignored by the public and yet essential to understanding the Algerian War: the regroupment camps, in which more than a million villagers, over half of them children, were confined.
Lacking food and medical care, these populations — already experiencing a frightening rate of child mortality, which the report’s author estimated at nearly 500 children per day — faced the threat of famine, in the complete ignorance of public opinion and the apparent indifference of civil and military authorities.
Alerted by the author himself, the office of Justice Minister Edmond Michelet (under Michel Debré’s government) decided to share the report with the press. On April 16, France Observateur, and on April 17, Le Monde (dated the 18th), published extensive excerpts from the report and echoed its alarming assessment of the fate of the Algerian population.
In France and abroad, the outrage was immediate, proportional to the gravity of what had been revealed by a document presented as coming from ‘six civil servants, at the request of the General Delegate,’ and received, from then on, as an official report confirming the testimony published on the same subject in La Croix on April 11 by the Secretary General of Secours Catholique, Monsignor Rodhain. A major report by Le Figaro on the Bessombourg camp added to the pressure and further swayed metropolitan public opinion.”
Ibid
As we know now, that protective instinct was well-founded. Dr. Badar Khan Suri, a postdoctoral scholar at our alma mater’s Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, was detained by the Trump Administration on March 17. He was held at an immigration facility in Alvarado, Texas — charged only with being married to a Palestinian — and released on May 14.
See reporting in Zeteo:
A quietly devastating aspect of Israel’s occupation is its targeting of Palestinian soccer players and young athletes — presumably to limit international recognition and representation. See Dave Zirin, “After Latest Incident, Israel’s Future in FIFA Is Uncertain,” The Nation, June 3, 2014: https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/after-latest-incident-israels-future-fifa-uncertain/
In 2016, France was still reeling from the attacks on the Bataclan and Charlie Hebdo. The book Vous n’aurez pas ma haine — a memoir by a Bataclan victim’s widower — was a bestseller at Relay bookstores in train stations across the country. The national conversation echoed the civilizational rhetoric heard in Israel and in post-9/11 America.
A theme worth an essay in itself is the erotic undertones of colonial dynamics. See Camus’ “La Femme Adultère” or the way Algeria was described to French soldiers in the early years of colonial conquest: “These lands are vacant territories, abandoned to weeds by the laziness and indolence of the poor. The local women are left, through the Arabs' laziness — who spend their entire lives smoking — to the depravity of extremely loose morals." (See Déjà le sang de mai ensemençait novembre [18:12].) The term “beurette” as Kellou explains in her book, has become a racist insult and is also one of the most commonly searched terms on French porn sites: the fantasy of a “submissive woman, emancipated, bursting with sensuality.” (Nancy-Kabylie, p. 154)
I recognize the importance of Israel to my Jewish identity, but that doesn't mean that I can possibly approve of what is happening in Gaza.
Have you read about the horrors of The Esther project? This from the NYTimes that should alarm us all for its deception in its goals: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/18/us/project-esther-heritage-foundation-palestine.html This is ultimately anti-Semitism at its worst. Read all the way through to understand.
I'm just catching up with this now, as my life has been pretty chaotic, lately, too. This is my favorite section so far. It's beautifully written. Keep up the good work.