A short history lesson on Colonialism and Audacity

Lessons from Iraq, Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, and the French/Israel duo

Unfortunately, this article must be made shorter than I would have preferred, as I recently found out I will be speaking at this Sunday’s Palestine rally and have had to prepare a speech for it.

In the name of Allah, the Lord of Mercy, the Giver of Mercy

There is a wretched relationship that has brought us all into its messy house and forced us to bear witness to an abomination. We have watched the family grow old, and now we, the third and fourth and fifth and sixth, and in some cases, the seventh or later generation, have assumed it to be normal. We have merely become used to it, in the same way one stops noticing a bad smell with time. This bad smell, however, emanates from our homes and is the product of the unholy matrimony that built our homes.

After all, who formed our nationalities except the creators of our borders? Who permitted us to have Independence Day except our ‘owners’ who ‘freed’ us? We now look to our colonisers as parents, and it is their example that we find ourselves deviating from. So long as we are colonised, we are stuck in this dialectical relationship of absolute reciprocity (for an example of this term in writing, if my explanation does not make it clear, look at pages 121-123 in this article) between us and the coloniser. Dialectical, in this context, refers to the connection between two opposing or contrasting ‘things’, such as colonised and coloniser, which reinforce each other. The absolute reciprocity, in this context, is that they both depend on each other for their continued existence; without the coloniser, there can no longer be the colonised—they revert back to their identities. In order for us to no longer be colonised, we must separate ourselves entirely from the identity of the colonised through education and action.

But how do we separate ourselves from an identity that has formed our worldview for centuries? Let me give you an example from my own people.

There was, after all, neither Iraq nor Iraqi prior to its inception and naming by the British in 1921. There was the south of Iraq, Baghdad, and towards Basra, which was, depending on one’s language, called عراق (I’raq), meaning both a place situated between two rivers and the bottom of a waterskin. This word, of course, came from the Middle Persian word I’raq, meaning lowlands, as the Persians ruled modern-day Iraq for centuries. Then, when the Arabs conquered the Persian empire in the 600s, the region from Baghdad to Basra, known as I’raq, became I’raq Al-Ajami (عراق العجم), meaning the Mute Lowlands. Al-Ajami, meaning mute, referred to a people who did not speak Arabic, but historically, it was almost exclusively an insult towards Persian-speakers. The region of modern-day Iraq did not speak nor welcome Arabic in any significance for centuries after the conquest, and it is only around 1000–1100 AD that Arabic became a relevant language of usage amongst civilians. It was only around 1400 AD that the term Al-Ajami was dropped from popular usage. The north of modern-day Iraq, however, historically, had no identity-based connection to the south except that they shared the two rivers, Tigris/Dijla and Euphrates/Furat (دجلة والفرات). And yet, I am as bound to the north as I am to the south when I claim and recognise that my mother is Iraqi. This identity, formed and created for me by the British, has become the identity I now defend from them. What then of my maternal great-great-grandparents who proceeded the conception of Iraq, or my maternal great-grandmother who was born in the Fars province of modern-day Iran to a Persian family, or my other maternal ancestors (through that line) who grew up in Ahvaz, in the Iranian province of Khuzestan? In the present colonial era, Iran and Iraq are like two separate worlds, and yet only a century and a half ago, prior to the borders and the secret agreements, the distance between Ahvaz and Baghdad (480 kilometres) was shorter than Baghdad and any other major Arab city, putting the two in intimate proximity.

Yet now, by virtue of these colonial identities that were created for me, I must view Iran as an entirely separate nation, home to an entirely separate people, and an entirely separate world. There can no longer exist the fluidity that once did, and in its place is a rigidity bound by the borders drawn on a topographic map by an Englishman who did not permit any closeness between the two. They are closer than the distance between the settler-colonial cities of Melbourne and Canberra, Adelaide, Sydney, and the rest, yet I in Melbourne must view those in Sydney as people holding the same identity as me, shared by our mutual bond in the settler-colonial state of Australia.

Now that we have understood how our identities, formed for us by the colonisers, uphold coloniality, it is time for us to pivot towards other examples in history. This lesson must be taught, especially because of the recent bombing of Beirut by Israel. Dahieh was bombed by Israel on January 2, 2024, and some six people were killed in yet another invasion of Lebanese sovereignty. Allow me now to look to Algeria and Iraq as historical precedents for what occurs now in Palestine and more closely demonstrate the impunity the coloniser feels they have.

In 1956, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal, which had been controlled by the European colonisers for 81 years. Nasser also cut off the Straits of Tiran from Israel, cutting it off entirely from the Red Sea and Indian Ocean, in an effort to exert economic pressure on the Zionist colonisers. In two moves, Nasser angered Britain, France, and Israel. However, in Algeria, Nasser appeared to be the political messiah, an example of a strongman who would embolden the Arabs to rise up against the colonisers. The French, petrified that Nasser would motivate the Algerians to move into revolt rather than isolated pockets of resistance, hatched a plot with Israel and Britain. In order to crush the Arab leader and put down any possibility of the other colonies getting any bright ideas of liberation, the Israeli army would invade Egypt first, and then Britain and France would join a few days later. The plan was that, as a combined force, they could take back the Suez, open the straits, seize Egyptian oil fields as a punishment, and kill Nasser, then replace his democratically elected government with a puppet head. On the 29th of November 1956, Israel began the first step of the plan and invaded Egypt, followed on the 1st of October by Britain and France. The Soviet Union appeared poised to intervene, providing Nasser with assurances that they would military back Egypt before the tripartite forces could reach Cairo. America, under Eisenhower, intervened first, however. Eisenhower took the side of Egypt against the tripartite force, and within 9 days, Britain, France, and Israel were forced to withdraw. In two weeks, Nasser had become untouchable, and the Algerians became emboldened. Nasser, having proved that the French colonisers were not untouchable, threw his lot behind Algeria after the victory, sending the resistance fighters money, resources, logistics, weapons, teachers, and leadership.

Thus, the Algerian revolt under the National Front for Liberation grew from a few hundred fighters in 1954 to several thousands in 1956, and within 2 months of Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal, the Battle of Algiers (September 1956–October 1957) began.

Unable to take their revenge against Egypt for a few more years, the French turned their focus towards North Africa. Here, the parallels between Algeria and Palestine are abundant, and we see where Israel has learned its lessons in audacity.

The French were unable to ascertain where the Algerian resistance was, and so they began policies of mass massacres and forced ethnic cleansing. Millions of Algerians were forcibly rounded up by the French army and displaced into concentration camps, where they were starved, raped, tortured, and forced to contribute free labour to the colonisers war effort against their fellow Algerians. Those who refused to relocate under the threat of the gun were then bombed by French planes and ships, a policy of genocide that killed uncountable Algerians and wiped out innumerable towns and villages. Algeria has yet to recover.

Infuriated by the resilience of the Algerians, the French took their anger out on the Algerian resistance sympathisers. And so, on February 7, 1958, the French bombed a Tunisian town, killing some seventy people and injuring hundreds of Tunisians and Algerians. Tunis, which had been independent for some two years by this point, had its sovereignty violated by its coloniser, an act for which the French were almost universally denounced. Yet, there was no punishment for the act, and the French continued to bomb Tunisian towns with impunity, killing hundreds of Tunisians and torturing several who were kidnapped in the night for interrogation.

This, after all, is because their sovereignty was no more than a gesture; it never meant more than to say, “Here, have a flag and a name; now continue to obey us willingly, or else.” When we opposed our colonisers, regardless of independence or sovereignty, we were punished wholesale, irrespective of borders or distinction (to some extent).

Here, again, we see the similarities with Palestine. Israel, which has failed to put down Palestinian resistance and will continue to fail, as has every single coloniser, takes its anger out on the surrounding people without concern for sovereignty. Towns, cities, villages, airports, hospitals, universities, mosques, churches, roads, train stations and railways, farms, silos, logistics, and barracks are all targeted by Israel irrespective of where they are, whether they be in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Yemen, or Algeria. Israel supplied support to the French in their ethnic cleansing of Algerians. The colonial state of Israel is a state that feels impunity to attack whomever it will whenever it desires. The colonial state of France felt and continues to feel the impunity to attack and pressure whomever it will.

One last example is the example taught to us by Operation Opera in June 1981. Israel, again, felt that it had the right to decide what Arabs would be permitted and not permitted to do, and in this instance, it determined that only Israel could possibly harbour or invest in nuclear energy. Iraq, which had bought a nuclear reactor from France in an effort to normalise relations between the two states and promote research, set up the Tuwaitha Nuclear Research Centre. For a state that had no nuclear capabilities, the intent was to invest heavily in founding the first Arab self-sufficient nuclear centre. Israel, without warning or evidence to suggest the contrary, bombed the centre. On the flight from Israel to Iraq, the Israeli air force was able to pass through Jordan and Saudi Arabia without challenge or questioning, and by 6 p.m., the centre had been levelled, killing eleven people. Israel maintained that Iraq was attempting to build nuclear weapons, that it had acted in self-defence, and that it reserved this right. It, unsurprisingly, turned out that the centre could never produce a single bomb, as Iraq did not have the capabilities to do so, and that Tuwaitha was genuinely a nuclear research centre. Arab science terrified Israel, so it did what colonisers do best: destroy.

On a side note, it bemuses me that history is filled with colonisers slaughtering and killing the colonised, destroying every means of capitalist success, then asking what the colonised have amounted to as though they did not hamstring the colonised. If they had not bombed Tuwaitha, Iraq would lead the region in nuclear research, becoming a hub for science and physics not just for Arabs but for the entire continent. Instead, the ‘free world’ has left Iraq nothing but scraps and misery. It is our story and our curse as the colonised and the subaltern to always lament over what could have been.

The lessons of history, therefore, help us understand the patterns that continue to play out in the present. What the French did in Algeria was informed by Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians and surrounding Arabs, and what Israel does now was informed by the French and every other colonial project.

But where does this impunity come from? What is the source of the colonial audacity, one that fills the coloniser with a sense of accomplishment in every atrocity, a sense of satisfaction in every misdoing, and a sense of justice in every injustice? It is imperialism, guided by the greed of capitalism.

And on imperialism, we will go through a lesson in the next article.

And Allah knows best.