The Algeria Analogy

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.

“The Algerian Revolution does not have as a goal to ‘throw into the sea’ Algerians of European origin, but to destroy the inhuman colonial yoke.” The Algerian National Liberation Front (known by its French acronym FLN) issued this statement in 1956. In the years that followed, they repeated time and again: Their goal was to end colonial oppression and establish sovereignty for Algerians, not to kick the settlers out.

Still, in 1962, when Algeria proclaimed its independence, most Europeans left in a rush. Giant wooden crates filled the streets as people hastily packed up their belongings. Police blocked roads to the airports, since there were far more people trying to leave than there were seats on flights. Traffic jams accumulated as people abandoned their cars on the docks before rushing onto boats. In the month of June, as independence drew near, 350,000 people departed for France. A form of “hysteria” or “psychosis” had taken hold, French officials wrote in intelligence reports. Half the population of Algiers left in a matter of weeks, the city’s tall white buildings reflecting the shimmer of the Mediterranean Sea, suddenly strangely empty.

If this exodus was not an aim of the independence movement, then why did it happen? Any answer must begin with the roots of settler colonialism in North Africa. The French conquest of Algeria, which began in 1830, was, from the outset, a deeply violent and chaotic process, which took place “by sword and by plow,” as one 19th-century general, Thomas Robert Bugeaud, put it. The French army rampaged through the countryside, burning crops and throwing Algerians off their land, and the state redistributed the seized properties to incoming European immigrants. The more extreme among the colonists endorsed “extermination” of Algerians. Others thought that, as the native population was brought into closer contact with “civilization,” their resistance would melt away. As historian Hosni Kitouni notes, by the early 20th century, the French state and its settlers controlled 66% of agriculturally usable land in Algeria, and the European population had grown from near zero to close to a million.

For the benefit of the European settlers, Algeria was declared a part of France in 1848, a unique status among French colonies. But while the settlers enjoyed the rights of French citizenship, the vast majority of the population—the 90% who were described as “indigènes,” or “natives”—were ruled as subjects, deprived of all civil rights and brutally repressed. Under the French, the local colonial administrator could arbitrarily detain Algerians or issue collective fines. Algerians could not travel, gather, or speak freely within their own country.

This system of inequality transformed religious communities into racial ones, as historian Muriam Haleh Davis has written. According to French law, “Muslim” was not a religious category, but a status indicating that a person was subject to colonial rule. Someone born “Muslim,” for example, could convert to Catholicism, but they would still be legally designated a “Muslim Catholic” and considered a colonial subject. In this racial formation, birth determined physical safety, political power, and the ability to access the most precious resource in Algeria (at least until oil was discovered there in the 1950s): land.

This newly imposed racial system also exploited a divide between Muslim and Jewish Algerians, heightening existing tensions between the communities to enhance French power. Unlike Muslims, Algeria’s native Jewish population had religious counterparts in metropolitan France, who were keen to assimilate their brethren into the French imperial project. In 1870, the French Minister of Justice, Adolphe Crémieux, who came from a prominent Jewish family, signed a decree granting French citizenship to Algerian Jews. Without consultation, this small population of roughly 40,000 people was conscripted into the European side of the colonial divide. At the time of the decree, the French state was engaged in dismantling Islamic forms of property in order to seize as much land as possible for settlers. Crucially, Algerian Jews owned little land, so their absorption into the French citizenry did not raise major obstacles for the political economy of settler colonialism. Over the course of the next few generations, most Algerian Jews would come to view France as their path to social progress, giving their children French names and preventing them from learning Arabic. They included my ancestors, who became French in Algeria.

With Jews included in the French body politic, Muslims formed their own political organizations. From the interwar period onward, Muslims organized a series of movements to demand civil rights, but they were met with French repression. In 1945, the French responded to demonstrations for independence in the towns of Sétif and Guelma by massacring thousands of Algerians. Though Muslims managed to obtain limited representation in the French parliament after the Second World War, the colonial authorities openly rigged elections to prevent pro-independence parties from gaining power. In 1954, on the heels of a decade of failed electoral maneuvers, a small group of men decided to take matters into their own hands. On November 1st, they launched a series of attacks throughout Algeria, firing at military barracks, oil depots, and, controversially, two French schoolteachers. In their manifesto, they called themselves the Front de libération nationale (FLN).

This was the beginning of the Algerian revolution, and what the French would call the Algerian War. The FLN’s manifesto called for armed struggle to achieve national independence. By establishing their sovereignty, these men held, they could dissolve the inequality of the colonial situation into an equality between two distinct states. In a liberated Algeria, the FLN would offer Europeans a choice; they could opt for Algerian citizenship and become equal to everyone else, or retain French citizenship and be legally treated as foreigners. The manifesto was clear: An independent Algeria would “respect all fundamental liberties without distinction of race or religion.”

But exactly what this future Algeria would look like was uncertain. The French government responded to the FLN’s initial insurrection with extreme military force—and in the years that followed, those fighting for liberation faced such intense repression that they could rarely meet to discuss a political program. In 1956, at the peak of the counterinsurgency effort, more than 400,000 French soldiers were deployed to Algeria. That same year, French forces hijacked a plane carrying members of the FLN leadership, detaining four of the men who had launched the insurrection. Repressed and fractured, FLN forces found themselves scattered across borders—with fighters in Algeria, troops in neighboring Morocco and Tunisia, and a wandering political leadership in exile. These groups vied for power, and many members of the resistance were killed not by the French army but by their own.

The members of the FLN were united by their struggle for independence, but they agreed on little else. As the war progressed and French violence escalated, closing off political alternatives, people with increasingly varied views joined the organization, from Islamic reformists to communists to those who had previously pursued more moderate change through legal means. All of them were committed to building a sovereign Algerian state, but would it be a socialist one? Would Arabic be the sole official language of the state, or would there be a place for the Indigenous Amazigh languages? The FLN’s manifesto specified that a future Algeria would operate “within the framework of Islamic principles,” but what exactly would that mean? In a 1957 interview with a Libyan newspaper, an FLN colonel framed the struggle as a fight between the “forces of evil” and the Muslim faithful; meanwhile, a tract issued in the FLN’s name proclaimed that the future Algerian republic would be secular. Was the goal to energize Islam by liberating it from the confines of a hostile colonizing and secularizing state, which would allow it to form the moral base for a revived Muslim society? Or was it to abolish the colonial linkage between religion and race by forming a secular society for all Algerians? In retrospect, these divisions seem glaring, but in the midst of colonial repression, they mattered less than the struggle to resist annihilation.

The French media portrayed the FLN as “bandits” (“fellaghas”) and “outlaws” (“hors-la-loi”) who had no political program. They “spread the idea that we are a movement of fanatics and nuts whose essential goal is the total and unconditional eviction of Algerians of French origin,” one local FLN head wrote in a letter to Europeans. The FLN repeatedly stressed that their goal was not to supplant one system of ethnic supremacy with another: “ALGERIANS OF JEWISH FAITH UNITE YOUR EFFORTS TO THOSE OF YOUR MUSLIM COMPATRIOTS SO THAT AN INDEPENDENT ALGERIA MAY LIVE,” exhorted one pamphlet published in 1961 near Algiers. “MUSLIM ALGERIANS HAVE SUFFERED FROM RACISM, THEY WILL NOT WANT IT TOMORROW AGAINST ALGERIAN JEWS.” When some Europeans and Jews joined the struggle—by transporting money or weapons, pushing French conscripts to desert from the army, or joining the guerrilla movement in the mountains—the FLN made clear that it considered their contributions essential.

But the FLN’s program was far from the sole determinant of events: Soon, the war’s spectacular brutality overtook the slow-burning structural violence of colonialism, touching every aspect of society. The French army forced millions of Algerians from their villages into camps, where they could control their movement and limit their contacts with the FLN, and soldiers made systematic use of torture and rape as weapons of war. In 1955, enraged Muslim peasants killed dozens of Europeans in the port city of Skikda, including children. The French media sensationalized these atrocities, conjuring nightmarish but baseless images of pregnant women with their bellies torn open; French leaders in turn used these fabricated horrors to justify the massacre of tens of thousands of Muslims in the area. FLN militants also committed massacres of Algerian villages accused of supporting rival nationalist movements. It was not always clear who was killing whom: For example, the 1961 assassination in broad daylight of Cheikh Raymond, a Jewish musician, remains unresolved to this day. No single set of actors could control the targets and nature of the violence.

Even as the accelerating violence swiftly exceeded the FLN’s strategic decision to pursue armed struggle against France, its actions were successful in drastically escalating the costs—both economic and reputational—of France’s continued presence in Algeria. Political tensions broke out in France, creating a crisis for the government. In 1958, the French army and settler activists in Algeria, determined to prevent negotiations with the FLN, launched a coup that toppled the French Fourth Republic in Paris. The new government, led by Charles de Gaulle, eventually entered into bitter talks with the group, though there were many attempts to derail the process. In March 1962, the two sides came to an agreement that declared an immediate ceasefire and established a transitional framework for Algerian independence. Dubbed the Évian Accords (after the town on the French-Swiss border where they were signed), the treaties specified in minute detail what would happen to Europeans in a new Algerian state. Although some Europeans had already departed for France, both sides estimated that a majority—at least 600,000 out of one million—would remain. The agreement was quite favorable to them. They would, for instance, enjoy special local representation in the cities of Oran and Algiers, where they composed a majority of the population. Many within the FLN denounced this compromise as an unacceptable capitulation, an extension of colonial domination.

But this imagined future did not come to pass. A hard-line French minority refused to accept independence under any circumstances, and some of the worst violence of the entire conflict exploded in the four months between the ceasefire announcement and July, when a referendum officially established Algeria’s independence. In March, French citizens who had demonstrated against independence in the streets of Algiers were placed under curfew and then shot by their own army. Some European activists formed a clandestine organization, the Secret Army Organization (OAS), which launched a scorched-earth campaign to prevent the peaceful transfer of power—bombing, kidnapping, and killing in both Algeria and France, with increasing desperation. On June 7th, they notoriously set fire to the library at the University of Algiers, burning thousands of books. Simultaneously, just as independence was effectively won, many Algerians joined the FLN, and used the turmoil as an opportunity to settle personal grudges and disputes. They haphazardly committed acts of violence against Europeans, including random kidnappings and murders, none of which had been authorized by the FLN leadership. While the organization struggled to exert control over its supporters, it was also plagued by internal disputes, as different factions came to the fore hoping to control the new state.

It was in this atmosphere of chaotic terror that Europeans started to flee. Nobody told them to go: not the French government, nor the OAS, nor the FLN. Instead, the exodus built inexorably upon itself, as people watched their neighbors and family members depart and chose to follow. Even as people left by the tens of thousands, few understood that a historic migration was taking place. The OAS continued to advocate ongoing resistance in June, even as the very basis for its fight evaporated. That same month, an FLN summit anticipated that the presence of a large French population opposed to independence would be “one of the gravest problems the Algerian state would have to resolve.” As historian Malika Rahal noted in her recent book on the year 1962, it looked much more likely that instead of departing, an embittered minority of settlers would stay to fight and make a viable independent Algerian state impossible. The French government was dumbfounded by the arrival of hundreds of thousands of people in its ports and airports, and scrambled to house them. Even some of those who left Algeria were convinced that they would return, perhaps after the summer vacation. It was only once the departure had happened that it came to seem like the only possible outcome.

Over the years, I have changed my mind as to the meaning of this exodus. I was raised by people who left. My family were no settlers; they were in the Maghrib long before the French arrived. But, for them, as for many other Jews, decolonization meant leaving their country. Growing up, I was told that departure was inevitable, and that North Africa was closed to us. I have tried to challenge these stories, both personally and professionally, as a historian of colonialism in Algeria.

My grandparents were born in Algeria, but they had moved to Morocco by the time the war struck, and in 1956 they left Casablanca for France with my father. Decolonization took a different shape in Morocco, and perhaps this is why they did not tell me traumatic war stories—but they did retain a strong sense that Muslims did not want to live with us. The French right articulates a more extreme version of this sentiment. To this day, supporters of the OAS continue to denounce a fictional plan by the FLN to engage in what they call “ethnic cleansing” and wipe out Algeria’s European population.

While these accounts blame the FLN entirely for the exodus, others are more inclined to blame those who left, reading their departure as a cohesive political statement. On the new state’s 60th anniversary, Joseph Massad, a scholar of Middle Eastern studies, reflected that in Algeria, “independence would bring equality between the colonists and indigenous Algerians, but the colonial settlers would have none of it. Horrified by the prospect of equality and the loss of colonial and racial privileges, they opted to return to France where their white privilege would be preserved.” This neat analysis ignores the fact that people left for a variety of reasons, as they often do in times of uncertainty and war. By treating leaving as an ideologically coherent act, it also obscures the hundreds of thousands of Muslim Algerians who supported independence and also departed for France during this period—most of whom were simply seeking to make a living by leaving a country devastated by more than a century of colonial exploitation and years of war. They came to France carrying the new Algerian passports and were called immigrants. I grew up in France alongside people whose parents had also come from North Africa, for different reasons and with different statuses. Settler colonialism relentlessly politicizes movement and dwelling, but the basic act of staying or going is not, in itself, indicative of a person’s political position.

For those who, like me, were raised by those who left, the problem of how we tell this story now is urgent: How can we prevent our own history of departure from being twisted to support the ongoing colonization of Palestine? I am not the only one interested in such questions. One day in 2015, I came across a letter, republished on the blog of French historian Pierre-Jean Le Foll-Luciani, by a man named William Sportisse. Born into an Algerian Jewish family in 1923, Sportisse was a lifelong communist who participated in the struggle for liberation. He spread the call for Algerian independence on the radio, in Arabic and French, from 1953 to 1955 in communist Hungary. In 1955, after the outbreak of the revolution, he returned to Algeria, where he went underground and published revolutionary tracts. This activism, he would later explain in a 2019 documentary, grew from witnessing the effects of racism and antisemitism as a Jew, and wanting to participate “in popular struggles” for “the emancipation of humanity” as a whole. Like several of his European and Jewish communist comrades, Sportisse chose to stay in Algeria after 1962 and participate in building the new state.

The letter I came across was written to Algerian president Houari Boumédiène in 1967, as the Six-Day War erupted. Sportisse praised Boumédiène for his support of the Palestinian struggle and reiterated his own long-standing denunciation of Zionism:

As an Algerian Jew whose family has suffered from Hitlerism, I will deny to this state [Israel], which does not condemn racism and which practices it towards the Arabs of Palestine, the right to present itself as a “defender” of the interests of the Jewish working classes . . . It is not in Arab countries that the anti-Jewish pogroms of the 19th and 20th centuries have occurred. They took place in European countries dominated by capitalism.

When I first read this text, I was struck by the clarity of Jewish anti-colonial thinking in North Africa. Members of an earlier generation had opposed colonialism in both its French and Zionist forms. I felt like I had found an ancestor, one who had stayed to fight for his country.

But my excitement was mixed with sadness: Sportisse wrote this letter from jail. Under the FLN, the new nation saw the gradual consolidation of an increasingly repressive single-party state, which turned against many of its own former allies. Following a military coup in 1965, Sportisse was incarcerated, along with many of his fellow communists. Activists who had been tortured by the French found themselves tortured again by people they had once called comrades. Sportisse was among them, punished not only for his communism but because, despite his clear anti-Zionist position, he stood accused of Zionism by the Algerian soldier who tortured him in jail.

The trajectory of the new Algerian state was profoundly affected by the exodus of Europeans and Jews. Absent the need to negotiate with those constituencies, the government was able to carry forward a revolutionary agenda, implementing a radical economic program in the wake of the mass departure. In 1962, it was estimated that the European minority—about 10% of the population—controlled at least 75% of industry, agriculture, and trade. By some accounts, it was 90%. Algerians moved into the apartments and farms that had been left empty. Often, they inherited even the furniture, which the previous occupants had not taken with them. A few months after independence, in March 1963, the government nationalized all this “vacant property,” which it then redistributed, ending in one sweep more than a century of colonial dispossession. It was perhaps the Algerian revolution’s single biggest achievement.

Even as the revolution smashed the military, political, and economic systems of the settler colony, it did not dissolve colonial legal categories. The same month that it announced the nationalization of vacant property, the new government reinscribed French racial designations into the new state, releasing a nationality code, which, for the purposes of citizenship, defined an “Algerian” as a person whose male ancestors had been legally considered “Muslim” by the French. Others could acquire Algerian nationality only if they could demonstrate that they had participated in the liberation struggle. Hocine Aït Ahmed, one of the FLN’s original leaders, denounced this tiered system as “indecent” toward the “European brothers” who had participated in the independence struggle, and who would now have to prove their loyalty. The effects soon had a broader reach: In keeping with the emphasis on a singular Muslim community as the basis for the nation, the new government defined Algeria as an “Arab–Muslim” entity, yoking together language and religion. This not only cast out non-Muslim Arabic speakers like my ancestors, but also marginalized the much more numerous Amazigh Muslims, who were central to the independence struggle.

When I first read Sportisse’s letter, I was struck that he and others like him had refused their conscription into French colonialism and devoted their lives to fighting against it. They were proof that, as one high-ranking member of the FLN, Frantz Fanon, had written in Studies in a Dying Colonialism, “it is not true that the Jew is with colonialism and that the Algerian people rejects them in the camp of oppressors.” But in the end, none of it had mattered. As was the case for many of his fellow Maghribi Jewish anti-colonial activists—from Abraham Serfaty in Morocco to Gilbert Naccache in Tunisia—neither Sportisse’s commitment to liberation nor his anti-Zionism exempted him from political persecution and accusations of foreign loyalty.

I see the same letter differently now. In the years since I first encountered Sportisse, the ongoing present of Palestine has changed the way I look at the past in North Africa. After I started learning Arabic to study my own history, my Palestinian teachers led me to spend more time in meetings and marches for Palestine. I have come to see the struggle against colonialism less as a historical problem that can be judged from a comfortable distance, and more as an enduring one. I no longer look back on Sportisse with what historian E. P. Thompson called “the enormous condescension of posterity.” I recognize that in the middle of the upheaval, we have to do what we can with the conditions available. One does not engage in political struggle because one knows the outcome in advance, but because one refuses to accept the conditions of the present.

Like the colonization of the Algerian people, the colonization of the Palestinian people must end. It has brought incalculable pain to Palestinians, and allowing it to continue degrades all of us. It is peculiar that some people gaze upon the fragmentation, occupation, and genocide of Palestinians and, as a precondition for supporting their liberation, demand that they specify exactly what a decolonized Palestine would look like. I do not need to know what decolonization will look like in Palestine in order to fight for it. It is impossible to know such an outcome—and that uncertainty does not make it any less essential.

To recognize that revolutions are products of twists, turns, and historical contingencies is not to abandon any hope in them. On the contrary, it opens us up to understanding the entanglement of struggles across time and place. Palestine cannot be a repetition of Algeria because the two have long been linked. Indeed, the Palestinian cause was formative to the rise of Algerian nationalism. Observing the 1936–39 revolt in Palestine, Algerians saw a mirror image of their own anti-colonial struggle. After the success of Algerian independence, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) built on the model of the FLN: As one 1965 Fatah document put it, “the glorious Algerian experience has proved our belief to be correct, that it is the armed struggle that unites the popular base.” Algerians, in turn, have remained staunch supporters of Palestinians: After independence, they trained Fatah members like Khalil al-Wazir, supplied weapons, and later pushed for the PLO to be recognized as the sole representative of the Palestinian people. Today, as Algeria pushes for a ceasefire in Gaza via its role on the UN Security Council, it remains clear that, in the words of activist and writer Khaled Barakat, “Palestine is an Algerian national cause.”

In our attempt to imagine this future, Algerian history is a reminder that models are of limited use for decolonization. Decolonization is a dynamic process that involves more than one set of actors and results in unexpected outcomes. These outcomes are determined in part by what sovereignty settlers themselves are prepared to imagine, and not simply by the policies of anti-colonial movements. It is also a reminder that the most careful institutional frameworks can rapidly be rendered useless by facts on the ground. In Algeria, a combination of the refusal of many Europeans to comply with the decisions of negotiators, alongside the incapacity of two governments to tame the massive violence that had been unleashed throughout colonialism and a brutal war, led to an unexpected outcome. I turn to history not in order to know the endpoint, but to expand my sense of what it is like to fight without knowing the future.