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Negotiating Algerian Postcolonial Identities through Imagining Palestine, 1962-1982
Abstract by Sara Elizabeth Green On Session   (Geobodies and Geographies)

On Tuesday, November 12 at 2:30 pm

2024 Annual Meeting

Abstract
This paper seeks to investigate the role of the Palestinian question in forming postcolonial identities in Algerian and Franco-Algerian communities from 1962 to 1982. This work connects the dual contexts of the unique aftermaths of the Holocaust and the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948, alongside Algerian society’s violent rejection of settler colonial society (1954-1962) and the departure of the vast majority of Algeria’s Jewish community to metropolitan France. How were Algerian Jewish and Muslim communities transformed by the global influences of Zionist and Arabist ideologies, in what ways did these interact with local instances of coexistence, migration and intercommunal anticolonial solidarity? I argue that this context produced a diverse set of engagements with the Palestinian crisis far beyond presumed Jewish-Israeli and Arab-Palestinian axes of identification, and acted as a vehicle for consistent reexamination and reformulation of Algerian anticolonial epistemologies. Through an intertextual historical analysis of intellectual, literary and archival sources from a variety of activist organisations, I highlight the ways in which Muslim and Jewish communities cooperated and invoked the Algerian revolution to articulate a diverse set of positions on settler colonialism, popular memory of local Muslim-Jewish coexistences, concepts of indigeneity and belonging, gender and affect in anticolonial politics, and cultural decolonisation in the era of ‘Third World’ internationalism. By focussing on the relationships between Muslim and Jewish actors, this paper contributes a new perspective on the Palestinian question in Algeria and France by resisting conventional categorisations that often disperse this body of sources between Jewish studies, Middle East studies, settler colonial studies, and the postcolonial history of Algeria and France. By highlighting the ways in which experiences of exclusion of dispossession under French colonialism motivated both Jewish and Muslim activists to engage with the Palestinian question, this paper hopes to counter the separatist narrative that histories of colonial racism and antisemitism must be viewed through a ‘competitive’ lens. Particularly in light of the conflict in Gaza, this paper hopes to highlight the dissident histories of Muslim-Jewish cooperation that have shaped the current landscape of Palestinian solidarity movements in both Europe and the MENA region.
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
Algeria
Europe
Israel
Maghreb
Palestine
Sub Area
None