Editors’ note
The Three Way Fight project is based on a recognition that debate and disagreement are essential for building a strong and vibrant radical left. As the war on Palestine, and now on Lebanon, intensifies and we see the mass murder, displacement, and wholesale leveling of cities by the Israeli state, 3WF is publishing the following essay by longtime contributor Kristian Williams, with a short response by Matthew Lyons, as a useful contribution to the analysis and discussion of this war.
Camus and Algeria: A Short Retrospective
by Kristian Williams
Settler and Exile
During the last decade of his life, and for half a century after his death, Albert Camus was regarded by the opponents of colonialism with a mix of condescension and hostility, viewed as a defender of French rule in Algeria. A consideration of the man’s actual views, and even more so his activities, shows that judgment to be unfair though not entirely false.
Camus did favor retaining Algeria as a part of France, but he did not seek to defend the status quo, with the domination of the metropole over the colony, and that of the European population over the African. Beginning in the thirties, Camus worked to draw attention to the government’s mistreatment of the North African population. His opposition to the suppression of the independence movement led to his expulsion from the Communist Party in 1937. Three years later, a series of articles about a famine in Kabylia—attributable, he thought, to government policies and racial discrimination—led to the suppression of Algier Républicain and to the blacklisting of Camus himself. Unable to find work in Algeria, he emigrated to Europe. Later, as a celebrated novelist and hero of the Resistance, he used his reputation to intervene in the cases of more than 150 Algerian political prisoners, helping win release for a handful and saving three from the firing squad.
Camus’ aim in Algeria was always to hold France to its own stated principles and “guarantee the rights and liberties of both populations”—the European and the African (Camus, Algerian Chronicles, 206). He envisioned a “regime . . . similar to the Swiss confederation, which embraces several different nationalities,” including a separate Algerian parliament, proportional representation for various ethnic groups, an end to racial discrimination, and full political rights for every citizen (Camus, Algerian Chronicles, 180).
Full independence, he feared, would result in the expulsion of the 1.2 million Europeans residing in Algeria, many of whom were—like his family—simple workers who had lived there for generations. But of equal concern were the rights of the Arab population; given his repeated reference to the large numbers who had fought during the Second World War, he seems to have felt that the Arabs had earned a place in the Republic, and did not want to see them excluded.
The intercommunal conflict, he saw, was animated by valid claims on each side, too often pursued by unjustifiable means and paired with a refusal to even consider the corresponding claims of the other group. The one side resorted to terrorism; the other, to collective punishment and torture. Neither, he felt, offered a future worth pursuing. To those who demanded that “Everyone must choose sides,” Camus countered “I have chosen. I have chosen a Just Algeria, where French and Arabs may associate freely. And I want Arab militants to preserve the justice of their cause by condemning the massacre of civilians, just as I want the French to protect their rights and their future by openly condemning the massacres of the repression.” (Camus, Algerian Chronicles, 142, emphasis added). To be free, he felt, require that one “refuse both to engage in terror and to endure it,” (Camus, Algerian Chronicles, 159) becoming—as he put it in the pages of the Resistance newspaper Combat—”Neither Victims nor Executioners” (Camus, “Neither Victims nor Executioners”).
A Civilian Truce and a Silent Protest
In 1956, in the early stages of the Algerian war, Camus returned to the land of his birth and, along with representatives of various ethnic and religious communities, proposed that “the Arab movement and the French authorities . . . declare simultaneously that as long as the troubles continue, civilian populations will at all times be respected and protected” (Camus, Algerian Chronicles, 152). This “civilian truce” was silent on the question of independence, and required no political concessions by either side—a point Camus stressed: “This proposal did not seek to interrupt or modify the present situation and was aimed solely at saving the lives of women, children, and the elderly, be they French or Arab. It was in no way intended as a basis for negotiations or even a simple ‘cease fire’ and consisted entirely of a set of purely humanitarian measures. . .” (Camus, Algerian Chronicles, 165). Regardless, the proposal found no constituency of support. In fact, as he delivered his address detailing the plan, Camus “was nearly drowned out by the shouts of ultracolonialists calling for my death” (Camus, Algerian Chronicles, 205).
Following this failure he “decided to stop participating in the endless polemics whose only effect has been to make the contending factions in Algeria even more intransigent and to deepen divisions in a France already poisoned by hatred and factionalism” (Camus, Algerian Chronicles, 24). It was a notable and symbolic refusal—both for a writer in whose work the theme of silence plays such a crucial role, and for an activist who had been engaged with the Algerian struggle for two decades.
Between Justice and Mother
But just as he had been attacked for speaking, Camus would soon be equally attacked for remaining silent. Upon receiving the Nobel Prize for literature, he was confronted by a young Algerian student, demanding that he address the conflict. Le Monde quoted Camus’s reply:
“I have kept quiet for a year and eight months, which does not mean that I have ceased to act. I have been and still am a proponent of a just Algeria in which both populations must live in peace and equality. I have said repeatedly that justice must be done to the Algerian people, which must be granted a fully democratic government, and I went on saying this until the hatred on both sides attained such proportions that it became unwise for an intellectual to intervene lest his statements aggravate this terror. It seemed to me that it was better to wait until the moment was right to unite rather than divide. I can assure you however, that you have comrades who are alive today thanks to actions you know nothing about. It is with a certain reluctance that I explain myself in this way publicly. I have always condemned terror. I must also denounce the blind terrorism that can be seen in the streets of Algiers, for example, which someday might strike my mother or family. I believe in justice, but I will defend my mother before justice” (Camus, Algerian Chronicles, 214–5).
The last sentence was soon reduced to a paraphrase: “Between justice and my mother, I choose my mother” (quoted in Kaplan, “New Perspectives,” 18). The comment was widely condemned as chauvinistic and sentimental. It was an ironic criticism against the author of The Stranger, a novel in which the murder of an Arab is treated by the authorities as a minor, almost technical offense, while “In our society any man who doesn’t cry at his mother’s funeral is liable to be condemned to death” (Camus, “Afterword,” 118). Moreover, what he had actually said was far more grounded and far less total: “People are now planting bombs in the tramways of Algiers. My mother might be on one of those tramways. If that is justice, then I prefer my mother” (quoted in Kaplan, “New Perspectives,” 18).
The ensuing controversy, though partly based on an error, is nevertheless revealing in its own way. Even accepting the simplified mis-quotation, there are nevertheless any number of reasons that one might favor one’s mother over justice. Your mother is a living, flesh-and-blood person, with whom one has a definite relationship. Justice is an abstraction, at best uncertain and often contested. Camus, as a general rule, valued human life and human beings over abstractions of any kind: “there is always progress when a political problem is replaced by a human problem” (Camus, Algerian Chronicles, 82). His critics, however, seemed even to view his mother as an abstraction, and sometimes treated her as a symbol of his loyalty to France. Camus, though, had in mind his literal mother—an elderly, deaf, mute, illiterate cleaning woman, who daily rode one of the transit lines the FLN had bombed.
Algeria and Palestine
I have been thinking about Camus and his mother a lot this last year, since the October 7 terrorist attacks and Israel’s devastating campaign of retaliation. In this current conflict, as in Algeria, it is true that every side engages in atrocities and “Each side uses the crimes of the other to justify its own” (Camus, Algerian Chronicles, 142). To insist, in that context, that human rights be respected and the laws of war applied equally, that civilians on neither side should be targeted either for direct violence or for displacement and starvation, is practically an invitation to be denounced simultaneously as a Zionist and an antisemite.
All criticism is read cynically, as an extension of hostilities. That one’s own favored side must be, not above reproach, but beyond questioning, is taken for granted. Hypocrisy is viewed as fidelity, and moral inquiry is treated as a betrayal. But it has been my experience that ordinary people—those unencumbered by conscious political commitments—are more reliably decent on this count than are partisans of any stripe. Such people do not even pretend to understand atrocities when they occur, and rather than offer rationalizations or denials, they react to the murder of civilians with simple horror.
If there is hope—whether for a ceasefire, for a lasting peace, or for justice in the Middle East—it depends not on turning this mute and bewildered mass to one side or another, but on finding a way to give voice to that horror, and to the grief that attaches not to any one nation or people, but to humanity in any form wherever it is suffering. It may help if we view the victims of the conflict, on either side, not as abstractions or as representatives of some cause or nation, but simply as people, not unlike the people we love.
Whenever tempted to excuse widespread or indiscriminate violence, imagine your mother among the victims.
Sources
Brée, Germaine. Camus, revised edition. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1964.
Camus, Albert. Algerian Chronicles, translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013.
Camus, Albert. “Afterword,” in The Outsider, translated by Joseph Laredo. London: Penguin, 1982.
Camus, Albert. “Neither Victims nor Executioners,” in Camus and Combat: Writing 1944 – 1947, edited by Jacqueline Lévi-Valensi, translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.
Crowley, Martin. “Camus and Social Justice,” in The Cambridge Companion to Camus, edited by Edward J. Hughes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Cunningham, Jesse G. “Albert Camus: A Biography,” in Readings on the Plague, edited by Jesse G. Cunningham. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, Inc., 2001.
Kaplan, Alice. “New Perspectives on Camus’s Algerian Chronicles,” in Algerian Chronicles, by Albert Camus.
Tarrow, Susan. Exile from the Kingdom: A Political Rereading of Albert Camus. University of Alabama Press, 1985.
Todd, Oliver. Albert Camus: A Life, translated by Benjamin Ivry. New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1997.
Zaretsky, Robert. A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus and the Quest for Meaning. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press, 2013.
Bio
Kristian Williams is the author of Between the Bullet and the Lie: Essays on Orwell and Gang Politics: Revolution, Repression, and Crime, both from AK Press.
Response by Matthew N. Lyons
These comments reflect Matthew’s personal views and are not an official Three Way Fight position.
I don’t know much about Camus or the Algerian Revolution, so I’m not going to say much about that part of the essay. But given the piece’s timing, all that is largely a reference point for what Kristian has to say about Palestine: “In this current conflict, as in Algeria, it is true that every side engages in atrocities and [in Camus’ words] ‘Each side uses the crimes of the other to justify its own.’” Kristian urges us to go beyond partisan allegiances to embrace the horror felt by “ordinary people” at the murder of civilians and “the grief that attaches not to any one nation or people, but to humanity in any form wherever it is suffering.” Kristian asks us to “view the victims of the conflict, on either side, not as abstractions…but simply as people, not unlike the people we love.”
On one level, my response to this is, yes, of course. I’m reminded of the statement that the group IfNotNow issued three days after the October 7th attacks, which spoke to me, an anti-Zionist American Jew, better than anything else I’ve read from that moment:
“We have been sold a lie: that hardening our hearts to the humanity of others will keep us safe. That our hearts cannot hold multiplicities of loss and grief. We won’t close ourselves off to the cries of fellow human beings who feel just as deeply & love just as fiercely as we do….
“Both: Apartheid is an abomination. Every day it continues is a blight on the lives of millions, and a moral stain on the rest of us. And: Abducting children and murdering families is an atrocity. We fight for a future worth living in for everyone, not a parade of corpses.”
I reject the dominant voices in US discourse, which mourn the murder of hundreds of Israeli civilians but downplay, ignore, or celebrate the murder of tens of thousands of Palestinians (and now also growing numbers of Lebanese). And I also reject the voices all too common on the left, which treat any statement of sympathy for Israeli Jews as a betrayal of the Palestinian people.
And yet, on another level, I find a key aspect of Kristian’s essay deeply troubling. It’s the symmetry—a framing that treats the positions on both sides as equally valid and equally problematic. We see it in the passage I quoted above (“every side engages in atrocities and ‘Each side uses the crimes of the other to justify its own’”) and also in this passage from earlier in the essay: “The intercommunal conflict, [Camus] saw, was animated by valid claims on each side, too often pursued by unjustifiable means and paired with a refusal to even consider the corresponding claims of the other group.”
This symmetry sounds okay in the abstract, but in concrete, historical terms it’s seriously misleading. Context matters. Michael Karadjis had it right when he called October 7th “a mass prison break in which the brutalised turned brutaliser.” As Kristian himself wrote a few years ago, “There can be no equivalency between the violence of a slave revolt and the violence of a slave master…” Similarly, a violent revolt by Algerians or Palestinians against settler colonial rule—however brutal its tactics, however unjustified its targets—cannot be equated with the violence of settler colonial rule itself. It’s not just the difference in scale (the Israeli military has carried out October 7th-size atrocities dozens of times over in the past year alone); it’s also the difference between an institutionalized system of power and an attack on that system.
Maybe Kristian didn’t address this context because he took it as a given. But we can’t do that—not when there’s a powerful campaign in the US (and much of Europe) to suppress criticism of Israel. And since Hamas has used 75 years of apartheid rule as justification to murder hundreds, while the Israeli government has used those murders as justification for a full-scale campaign of genocide, treating the horrors meted out by both sides as equivalent amounts to a false symmetry.
Photo credits
- Chlef: Photographer unknown, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
- Hebron: Photo by Friends123, CC0 1.0 Universal (public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.