#Dounia El Barhdadi

[documenting-apartheid]

MARCH 30th 2024- Moroccan writer Dounia El Barhdadi reflects on the cruelty her father faced under the French occupation of Algeria and it's parallels to the oppression and occupation of Palestinians by Israel.

"Just as previously and currently colonised communities are bonded by their bloodstained history, so too are their colonisers. There exists a unifying doctrine embedded in colonial history, one which has been weaponised to commit atrocities across the globe, and it has many names: the French ‘mission civilisatrice’, the British ‘white man’s burden’, and the German ‘Kulturmission’. The French justified their brutality in Algeria with claims that FLN activists, and Algerian civilians by extension, were ‘savages’ and ‘animals’, and that their subjugation was a ‘necessary evil’, just as Hitler denounced the Jewish people, and all non-Aryan people, as ‘Untermenschen’ - ‘subhumans’.

"The same ideology existed in Apartheid South Africa, where the social, economic and legal divide between black and white people was characterised and maintained for almost 50 years by the idea that the latter were intrinsically superior. The myth of intrinsic ethno-superiority can also be observed in comments made by Israeli officials since the inception of Israel, and even before; the most notable recent comments include Netanyahu's description of Palestinians as 'children of darkness', as well as Yoav Gallant's assertion that Israel is fighting 'human animals', when questioned about the ethics of disproportionate reprisals in Gaza."

"This kind of propaganda operates by dehumanising the colonised in the eyes of settlers, through portraying them as ‘Other’, as lesser, as alien. Even more than this, these doctrines portray the actions of the colonial power as a mercy to the colonised - the latter must be ‘civilised’, and if they do not respond to their education, then it is necessary to remove them altogether. George W. Bush’s ‘War on Terror’ repackaged and weaponised this xenophobic ideology in order to profit from manufactured conflict in the Middle East after 9/11, and desensitise the global public to the suffering of Arab and Muslim civilians."