The Jews Who Helped the Allies Take Algeria

In 1942, Allied forces invading Algeria, then under the control of Vichy France, cooperated with a group of mostly Jewish local resistance fighters. The story is the subject of a new Israeli film, Night of Fools, directed by Rami Kimchi. Eliezer Hayon explains:

“The [Algerian] underground numbered 800 fighters, half of them Jewish. But at the moment of truth, 400 of them had cold feet, and just 400 were left—almost all of them Jewish,” says [one of their commanders, Jacques] Zermati. They were led by José Aboulker, the Jewish head of the underground. . . .

The plan was simple, yet almost surreal: Allied forces would land on the coast of north-western Africa, and the underground would take care of paralyzing the regime’s troops in order to hand over the city of Algiers to the Allies. It might sound simple enough, until one takes into account the fact that there were just 400 underground fighters, and 200,000 Vichy and Axis soldiers.

How did they do it? The resistance, with the help of some sympathetic Vichy officers, disguised themselves as French troops and succeeded in rounding up the entire French garrison without firing a shot. And why did they do it? Kimchi’s answer:

“The Jews in Algeria were proud of their French citizenship, and even today they live in France. But the film shows that Jewish motivation was a dominant factor. This was a war against the fascists, but what motivated them was not just French identity, otherwise they would have withdrawn like the other 400 fighters.”

Read more at Ynet

More about: Algeria, History & Ideas, Mizrahi Jewry, Resistance, Vichy France, World War II

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF