We the editors of Three Way Fight have retracted the essay “Camus and Algeria: A Short Retrospective,” by Kristian Williams, which we published on October 15, 2024. Publication of this essay was improper in light of Israel’s ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people and trivialized the realities of colonialist oppression more broadly. We take responsibility for this mistake and apologize.
“Camus and Algeria” condemned anti-civilian violence by both colonial authorities and anti-colonial forces in Algeria and Palestine, implying a false symmetry and equivalence between the two and ignoring the exponential disparity between Israel’s full-scale campaign of genocide, which so far has killed nearly 50,000 Palestinians and injured and maimed close to 100,000, and the Hamas-led attacks of October 7th. The day “Camus and Algeria” appeared, Israel bombed a makeshift tent triage center and hospital, and images of Palestinians burning alive in their beds went across the media—just one in a year-long chain of such attacks.
Although we disagreed with “Camus and Algeria” from the beginning, initially we thought it could promote useful discussion if accompanied by a critical response. We did not fully grasp the essay’s negative impact.