Re: On the other hand, there is no evidence of Israeli involvement with the OAS.
Indeed, there is no HARD evidence of such an involvement --I guess it's still too early for the Israeli government to declassify Mossad files pertaining to the French-Algerian war... In yesterday's Haaretz issue there was an article about Sharon's unwillingness to release a Knesset report on the Yom Kippur war --and that was 1973!
Yet there is circumstancial evidence supporting the claim that Israel's Mossad was fighting against the FLN --from the same link:
While we lack the data that would enable us to determine if this plan was carried out, Algerian-Israeli relations were in any case marred by Israeli involvement in training self-defense units among Algeria's Jews. In 1955, the Mossad established a special force in the Maghrib known as the Misgeret [Framework]. The Misgeret was active in Algeria in the three central departements [regions] of Constantinois, Oranie, and Algerois. In the Constantinois, it consisted of about one hundred young members whose unit commanders underwent training in France or Israel. Possessing French citizenship, like the overwhelming majority of Algerian Jewry, they were reservists in the French army stationed in Algeria and thus experienced in the handling of weapons. The Misgeret created weapons caches, and only its Algerian unit commanders could have access to the Israeli emissaries in charge. Between May 1956 and the end of 1961, Misgeret neutralized terrorist activity aimed against Algerian Jews. The Muslims may not have known about Misgeret, but they suspected some form of Israeli-inspired local Jewish "commando activity."
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Moreover, there are still many living witnesses who took part in the French-Algerian conflict, among them is Georges Fleury who was a young French soldier at the time. He met his (Pied-Noir) wife and married her in Algiers and was pro-Pied-Noir --he almost joined the infamous terrorist outfit OAS. Fleury, in his OAS monograph published in 2002 (*), claims that Jewish Pieds Noirs were deeply involved the Oran branch of OAS.
Anyway, the French-Algerian war (1954-1962) is indeed the best historical "benchmark" to deal with the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict --mutatis mutandis. That's why it's impossible for the French to support the US-Israeli colonialism in the Mideast: to do so would be tantamount to squandering/repudiating the Gaullist legacy... How would North Africa look like today if France had been ruled by the same clique of Judeo-Protestant crazies in the 1950s as the US is today??? President De Gaulle would have done like George W. Bush: French invasion/occupation of Tunisia (and eventually of Morocco as well), the Pied-Noir government in Algeria would have been supplied with nuclear missiles, a French Abu Ghraib/Guantanamo would have been set up in (racist) Corsica(**), Le Pen's Front National would be much more powerful --winning about 30% of French votes. Bottom line: France would be today in the same racist, proto-fascist shit as the US.
Gus
(*) livres.lexpress.fr
(**) muslimnews.co.uk
From the New York Times:
August 26, 2004
Racial Tensions Puncture Corsica's Picturesque Setting
By CRAIG S. SMITH
BASTIA, Corsica, Aug. 23 - Khalid Diani stepped into the local branch of Wafa Bank here last week, taking care not to hurt himself on the shattered glass and twisted metal left by a bomb that destroyed the office in July.
The concrete walls were cracked, and debris blocked the counter where Moroccan workers once lined up to repatriate their earnings. Less than an hour after the bombing, an Arab pastry shop in the center of town named One Thousand and One Saviors was hit.
"Since September 11, they consider us all terrorists," said Mr. Diani, referring to the anti-Arab violence that has unsettled this French island in the Mediterranean for the past year.
The violence is a magnified version of the racist disquiet percolating through the rest of France and many other places in Europe as a generation born to Arab immigrants comes of age and tries uneasily to take its place in societies that were once mostly homogeneous. Many people fear it is a harbinger of conflicts to come as immigration, particularly Arab immigration, reshapes Europe's aging populations. The conflict is greatest in tradition-bound areas like Corsica and Alsace, where distinctive local customs are under pressure.
"This is an island, a geographically isolated place, where the original population is afraid that their culture is disappearing," Pierre-René Lemas, Corsica's prefect, said last month.
Corsica has a long history of resisting outsiders and has been home to a simmering independence movement since the 1960's. That movement has depended largely on homemade bombs, which have become an almost daily feature of Corsican life.
By the 1980's there were 600 to 700 explosions a year, and sometimes dozens of detonations within hours of each other on what Corsicans called "blue nights," a reference to the flashes from the bombs. There were 295 blasts last year, and while the pace has somewhat slowed there is still, on average, one explosion on the island every other day.
Police stations are a favorite target, but some attacks are aimed at vacation homes built by French mainlanders or foreign nationals, who Corsican separatists say are slowly colonizing the island. Some attacks are meant to settle scores or warn off commercial competition.
More recently, though, the island's growing Arab community has become a target. While those bombings still account for only a small fraction of the attacks, nearly everyone here seems to recognize that there is something more sinister about them.
Corsica's Arab population has increased sharply over the past 30 years, primarily from Moroccans imported by former French colonials who fled newly independent Algeria in the 1960's to work the fields here. North African Arabs now represent at least 10 percent of the island's 260,000 people.
There was little problem for the original immigrants, but as their children have taken their place in society, competing with Corsicans in the island's sparse economy, problems have grown. Most people agree that anti-Arab sentiment came to the fore after the Sept. 11 attacks.
"What concerns me is that many Corsican teenagers today are viscerally anti-Arab," said Christophe Raffin, a local magistrate, whose daughters have been pressured to take sides in Corsican-Arab schoolyard disputes.
The trouble has accelerated since last year, after tension between young Arabs and Corsicans in Bastia's crumbling old quarter erupted into a brawl along the narrow Rue Droite, a street that is now predominantly inhabited by Arabs. The government counted 60 racist incidents in 2003 and already lists 35 this year - nearly double the rate in the rest of France.
Of 115 bombings in the first seven months of this year, ten have taken aim at Arabs and eight of those have been clearly identified as racially motivated, in most cases because they were accompanied by racist graffiti or followed by claims of responsibility by racist groups.
About one out of every five car burnings - the island's second most popular rebel sport - is also directed at Arabs and in recent months Arabs have drawn gunfire as well: one North African farm worker in the coastal village of Olmeto took a bullet in the leg from an unknown assailant in June.
Anti-Arab graffiti has spread over the picturesque island, whose main business is catering to tourists. "Arabs, the suitcase or the coffin," reads one spray-painted slogan.
Many people attribute the growing racism to the island's own frustrated independence movement, whose "Corsicans First" platform implicitly assigns secondary status to Arabs and other non-Corsican groups.
After the Wafa Bank explosion, a previously unknown group calling itself Clandestini Corsi issued a statement saying: "These actions have a precise goal: to stop the immigration that for too many years has gnawed at this island."
The statement, accompanied by a photo of a man wearing a black ski mask and carrying a Kalashnikov assault rifle, warned that Arabs "will be hit in their homes" and that the most recalcitrant "will be physically eliminated."
But leaders of the independence movement have been quick to distance themselves from the anti-Arab violence, saying that the French government wants to conjoin the two in order to discredit Corsican nationalists.
"We've nothing to do with this," said Jean-Guy Talamoni, head of the Corsican nationalists in the island's provincial legislature. "Corsicans have themselves been the victim of racism, we are part of the antiracist movement."
He argues that Corsica is open to anyone who wants to build a future on the island, though he wants voting on local matters to be restricted to people who have lived here at least 10 years.
Many Arabs, though, have begun questioning whether they have a future in Corsica. Some began moving to the European mainland two years ago, largely to escape the unemployment and high cost of living here. Now, many are leaving to escape the racist attacks.
Muhammad el-Yousfi, a butcher now settled in southern France, says his businesses were attacked five times before he finally decided to leave the island. "As soon as an Arab succeeds there, someone is unhappy," Mr. Yousfi said, sitting at a cafe near his new butcher shop in Montpellier.
His father arrived in Corsica from Morocco in 1963 to work in a butcher shop, and Mr. Yousfi grew up on the island and opened his own butcher shop, selling meat from animals slaughtered according to Muslim rules. But the shop was ransacked in 2000, and the next year a sport utility vehicle rammed through the front window of a second butcher shop he opened outside of town.
In 2002, a bomb destroyed the front of the second shop and the next year his original shop was bombed, and then bombed again last year. He still owns the businesses in Corsica, but he has moved his family to France.
"I don't want my sons to grow up in fear," he said.
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