Algeria won, Palestine will win. Over the past year, this slogan has multiplied across social media posts, proliferated on posters covering the streets of Paris, and resounded at marches. Amid the despair of genocide, these words seek to give hope that something better is in store: If colonialism could be defeated after more than 130 years in Algeria, it can be defeated in Palestine. By reaching for analogies, we try not only to make sense of current events, but also, and perhaps more urgently, to imagine what is to come.

To help shape possible futures, people turn to a series of histories of decolonization: South Africa, Vietnam, Ireland. Among these, Algeria often plays the part of the radical option. The Algerian War of Independence is one of the few historical cases in which a colonized people successfully dismantled a settler colonial regime through armed struggle. A movement begun by a small but determined group of Algerian men in 1954 grew into a mass insurrection that expelled the French government. In 1962, celebrations of independence filled the streets for days. At the same time, around a million people—some 10% of Algeria’s population—fled the country. Most of those who left were from the group known variously as settlers, Europeans, or pieds-noirs, but they also included Algerians who had fought on the side of the French army, referred to as harkis, as well as more than 100,000 Algerian Jews. In the wake of this exodus, the formerly colonized built a new state for themselves alone.

While Algeria stands in for the violent route to decolonization, South Africa is frequently cast in the opposing role. The country’s transition from Apartheid to representative democracy is presented as the peaceful option for dismantling a settler colony. As writer and activist Iyad el-Baghdadi succinctly summarized this familiar formulation on X, “Algeria model = National liberation war ending with the expulsion of the colonialists. South Africa model = International isolation & anti-apartheid struggle ends with establishing democracy.” For some, South Africa represents the good option: a rare instance of multiracial coexistence across a former colonial divide. Others see South Africa’s enduring economic and racial inequality as evidence that its decolonization process is incomplete; in this view, Algeria, with its mass settler departure, appears as the only case of “true” decolonization. For others still, the South African model represents the greatest threat. In 2003, Ehud Olmert, at the time Deputy Prime Minister of Israel, lamented that Palestinians “want to change the essence of the conflict from an Algerian paradigm to a South African one,” from what he viewed as a far-fetched “struggle against ‘occupation’” to a “struggle for one-man-one-vote.” Here, South African moderation appears from an Israeli perspective as especially frightening because, Olmert says, it paves the way for a “more popular” movement, which could conceivably bring about “the end of the Jewish state.”

This binary opposition between a violent Algeria and a peaceful South Africa has long influenced conversations about Palestine’s future. It flattens the histories of both countries—as if a single, unified strategy had guided each struggle; as if the struggle to get free of colonial legacies were not, in both places, ongoing. It ignores the role of violence in the fight against Apartheid, obscuring the work of the paramilitary organization uMkhonto weSizwe within South Africa, as well as the wars that liberation movements in Namibia, Angola, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe waged against the Apartheid regime and its allies. In these discussions, the details of what happened in Algeria are often similarly hazy. Was settler expulsion really the condition of Algerian independence? Did Algerians force the settlers to leave, or did the settlers themselves decide to flee?

These are not just intellectual questions. Anti-Palestinian forces intentionally conflate decolonization with the elimination of settler populations in order to repress speech and criminalize activism. When Elon Musk proclaims on the social media platform he owns that “‘decolonization’ necessarily implies a Jewish genocide,” when chanting “from the river to the sea” can get you arrested in Germany and attending a rally where those words were spoken can get you fired from your job in the United States, the message is that the ongoing colonization of Palestine is justified by the need to avert a hypothetical future event. It does not seem to matter that, for decades, Palestinian movements have emphasized that it is not their goal to “throw [Jews] into the sea,” but rather to dismantle an Israeli state built upon Jewish supremacy. At the very moment when Israel and its allies are committing a genocide in Gaza, intensifying violence in the West Bank, and threatening the lives of Palestinians elsewhere, the specter of this imaginary expulsion serves to obscure the very real one that Palestinians have been experiencing for 76 years. To insist that Palestinians must account for the future of Israelis is to deflect from the central question: how to end a brutal colonial system.

Since a simplified version of Algerian history can be a weapon in the hands of repressive forces, understanding Algeria’s past—beyond a slogan or an analogy—is essential to countering attacks on decolonization today. Comparison can quickly become a trap, making the two cases at hand look stabler and more separate than they are. This risks fixing processes of decolonization into discrete, isolated national struggles and, in this instance, obscuring the connections that have long existed between Algeria and Palestine. We should ask not whether what unfolded in Algeria is especially similar to what is taking place in Palestine, but how reading these histories together might help us consider what decolonization feels like not as an end point, but as an ongoing process. For those who fought for Algerian independence, decolonization was essential but unpredictable. Even the settler departure that has become nearly synonymous with the nation’s name came as one of many surprises. Thinking deeply about Algerian decolonization, and understanding its unexpected turns, strengthens us amid the uncertainty that is part of any liberation struggle.