Wisdom from a past war

Although there is danger in carrying historical comparisons too far, a reporter who covered Algeria's war for independence from France from 1954 to '62 finds similarities and lessons for the guerrilla war the Palestinians have now begun against Israel, and for prospects of settling that war and making real peace.

"Make no mistake," Arab East Jerusalem's senior politician, Faial al-Husseiny, recently told French TV interviewers who asked him about the daily violence in the Palestinian territories. "We are now in a battle for our national independence. We won't stop until we get it." In many ways, the bloody but ultimately successful Algerian war for independence, resolved largely by a peace partner of great vision, the late French President Charles de Gaulle, had even less promising beginnings than did the Palestinian effort.

The Algerian revolt of 1954 was launched by a mere dozen angry young men. So, in effect, was the Palestinian intifada, which began in the 1950s, when Yasser Arafat and a handful of university students and professionals with conservative, Islamist ideas in Gaza, Kuwait, and Cairo, conspired to form al-Fatah, an Arab acronym for the Palestine National Resistance movement, which has led both resistance and peace movements until today.

Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement, had similar roots, mainly the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, but first brandished its guerrilla and terrorist arm against Israel during the 1987 Palestinian uprising against Israel.

Palestinians said they would learn from Algeria's mistakes: trying to fight the French Army in static conventional warfare, and mindless terror against civilians - a tactic which the Palestinians, ignoring the bitter setbacks it caused the Algerians, have revived in Israel.

Like al-Fatah and the umbrella Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), created in 1963, Algeria's National Liberation Front (FLN) suffered factional quarrels. It produced troublesome individuals and splinter groups. Some refused to stop terrorism when FLN moderates like Ferhat Abbas so decreed, for the sake of compromise peace deals with the French.

Some adopted quietist tactics, preaching and lying low. Some even joined the camp of their French adversaries, who had occupied Algeria for 130 years. Both the Algerians and their Palestinian understudies had to cope with enemy agents, double agents, and traitors. Both have had to rely on often fickle, conditional, financial and arms aid from Arab neighbors and self-interested friends and allies like Egypt, Syria, and Iraq.

Like the Algerians, the Palestinians soon were disillusioned with the strings tied to Arab, Russian, or Chinese aid. Both developed their own commercial and banking networks. With only 10,000 fighters, the Algerians faced 1 million French settlers and nearly half a million French troops, some of whose commanders mutinied in April 1961, when they perceived that De Gaulle planned to "give away French Algeria" and tried unsuccessfully to overthrow him.

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