In reaction to the French occupation of Algeria (1830), thousands of Algerians left their homeland and settled between 1830 and 1918 in Palestine, then under Ottoman rule. On the eve of the Palestinian Nakba in 1948, more than 6,000 Algerians lived throughout historic Palestine. Established for several generations in the major Palestinian cities (Jerusalem, Haifa, Jaffa, Safad, Ramla) as well as in rural Galilee, these Algerians experienced a fate similar to that of the Palestinian population between December 1947 and June 1949: they were forcibly expelled by Zionist forces to Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and the Gaza Strip.
1830–1918: A New Algerian Community in Palestine
Since the Middle Ages, there has been a great deal of movement between the Maghreb and the Mashriq. These flows were facilitated by the development of new means of transport and also by the emergence of new political entities (notably the Ottoman Empire), which led to greater geographical and political unity in the Near East–North Africa region. Famous political figures encouraged the establishment of new pious foundations in Jerusalem (waqf in homage to Sidi Abu Madyan and his Maghrebi battalions who took part in Salah ad-Din’s liberation of the country in 1187) to welcome needy and Maghrebi pilgrims passing through the holy city on their way to Mecca or on their way back.
The French occupation of Algeria in 1830 prompted thousands of Algerian families to flee and settle in the Arab provinces under Ottoman rule. Emir Abdel-Kader arrived in Damascus in 1855, and the Ottoman authorities granted him large tracts of land in the eastern Galilee, which were inhabited by Algerian migrants fleeing the ravages of colonial France in Algeria. In the Safad district, thousands of Algerians settled in several villages during the 1860s: Marus, Tulayl, Al-Husayniyya, and Dayshum; the latter was made up of migrants from the Tizi-Ouzou region who had been forced to immigrate east after the failure of the revolution of the Mokrani brothers and Sheikh al-Haddad in1871. In the Tiberias district, the Algerians took over several villages no longer inhabited: Ma‘dhar, Kafr Sabt, Samakh, Awlam. Some ten kilometers southeast of Haifa, the village of Hawsha was founded in the late 1880s by Algerian migrants from Constantine, Batna, and Oum al-Bouaghi. In these villages, they perpetuated their singular identity, working the land like their forebears in Algeria, preserving their language, Tamazight (Kabyle and Shawiya), and passing on Algerian culinary know-how to their children.
Many Algerians settled mainly in rural Galilee in part because of the great geographical similarities between this Palestinian region and rural Kabylia, their region of origin. The latter region shares many similarities with rural Galilee, with its mountainous terrain, olive groves, and prickly pear trees.
Algerian migrants also settled in the main Palestinian cities of Jaffa and Haifa on the coast, as well as in Ramla, Safad, Tiberias and, of course, Jerusalem, where the famous Maghrebi quarter was mainly inhabited by Algerians. These urban Algerians worked in a variety of occupations, according to the Algerian registration records of the French consulates in Jaffa and Jerusalem during the British Mandate: as guards, merchants, and even shoemakers. Endogamy, or marriage between Algerian men and women, was much more common in rural than in urban areas. This is borne out by the large number of mixed marriages between Algerians and Palestinian women in major Palestinian cities, according to data gathered from family descendants and official archives (registration registers, residence certificates, applications for Palestinian naturalization, letters, etc.). Algerians living in urban areas, particularly in Jerusalem, hail from several Algerian regions: Tizi-Ouzou, Constantine, Oum-el Bouaghi, Khenchela, Biskra, Oran, Nedroma, Blida, and Médéa.
The majority of Algerian migrants to Palestine in the nineteenth century chose Ottoman nationality. In many cases, this choice was motivated by political and legal interests. This status enabled them, once settled in Palestine, to benefit from privileges such as exemption from military service and taxation for a period of twenty years. Some Algerians claimed French protection from the consular services in the region (Jerusalem, Jaffa, Beirut), eager for the numerous privileges awarded by the Capitulations to protégés of the European Powers. As “French protégés,” they could evade Ottoman jurisdiction and be exempt from military service and taxation. This double game by Algerian migrants, who claimed to be Ottoman or French depending on their interests of the moment, sometimes led to diplomatic conflicts between the Porte and the French consular services in the Mashriq.
Algerians and Palestinians in Palestine: A Common Destiny, 1920–1948
Even if the French colonial conquest of Algeria had inaugurated new forms of collective, oppositional migration to Palestine, the latter would continue to welcome migrants with profiles that were hardly new: pilgrims graciously accommodated in the shelters of the pious foundations of Sidi Abu Madyan, set up for this purpose, merchants, or simple individuals wishing to try the "Palestinian adventure.”
Several years after the start of the British Mandate over Palestine, a census carried out by the French consular authorities in 1928 noted an estimated 4,000 Muslim Algerians living in the country. During the Mandate period, new Algerians took up residence in Palestine, including soldiers stationed with the French Army of the Levant, such as Mohamed Ali Imoussaine, born in Cherchell in 1888 and a member of the 9th Algerian Rifle Regiment during World War I, who later enlisted in the 17th Algerian Rifle Regiment of the Levant Army. After completing his military service, Mohamed moved to Jerusalem in 1923, where he lived until his death in 1940. Data collected from French consular posts in Palestine show that many Algerian soldiers who had completed their service in the Levant or deserted chose to settle in the Holy Land.
The political measures taken by the British authorities in favor of the Zionist project, and the great popular mobilization of the Palestinian people, which was then brutally repressed, affected the economic, political, and social conditions of the Algerian community in Palestine. The Algerians lost their privileges following the abolition of the Capitulations by the British authorities in 1922; they were no longer able to evade the jurisdiction of the country's courts. Despite their status as “French protégés,” they would henceforth suffer a fate similar to that of the local Palestinian population, now fighting against British occupation and Zionist colonization.
On 29 May 1936, shortly after the start of the Great Palestinian Rebellion (1936–1939), an informal collective of Algerians in Jerusalem wrote to the city’s French consul, complaining that they had been “seriously abused by the English police following the murder of an English policeman yesterday in Jerusalem. ... Since yesterday, the police have not stopped brutalizing and beating us. Passers-by are first searched and then beaten with sticks regardless of age, rank or nationality.” In November 1938, British police damaged the store of Algerian Rouaged Sadek ben Brahim, located in the village of Bayt Ur al-Tahta near Ramallah, before beating him, stealing his merchandise “estimated at over 60 Palestinian pounds,” and placing him in administrative detention in Acre prison with the intention of deporting him to Algeria. A few months later, in May 1939, the young Algerian Yahya Zouaoui from Jerusalem’s Maghrebi quarter, then barely 15, was taken into custody and sentenced to a year's imprisonment.
Numerous sources attest to the political mobilization of Algerians against the Zionist project and the British occupation. On 24 September 1934, Algerian activist Taher Ferhi, half-brother of Mahmoud al-Atrash, the famous communist leader born in Jaffa in 1908, was sentenced to six months' imprisonment for “illegal organization” (a reference to his communist activities). On 15 March 1936, Ferhi was taken by force to the port of Haifa, where he boarded the liner “Providence” to be deported to Algeria. Jaffa-born Algerian Mustafa Sherif, a sympathizer of Palestinian leader Aref Abdel-Razeq, was accused of “terrorist activities” and hanged by the Jerusalem military court on 30 January 1939. The Palestine Post devoted a series of articles to Mustafa Sherif, including one on the day after his death entitled “Abdul Razzik’s Agent Pays Death Penalty: El Jasairy [the Algerian] Executed in Jerusalem.”
Algerians and the Nakba: Conveying the Palestinian Tragedy to French Consulates in Palestine
On the eve of the adoption of the UN resolution which recommended the partition of Palestine (29 November 1947), more than 6,000 Algerians were living throughout historic Palestine. Victim of the misdeeds of British oppression throughout the Mandate, the Algerian community in Palestine was also to suffer the forced expulsion of 800,000 Palestinians from their land by Zionist militias between December 1947 and June 1949. While the Palestinian account of the Nakba was collected a posteriori by historians, the Algerians of Palestine were to deliver a first-hand account of their forced exile to the French consuls established in the Levant the day after their expulsion. A vast number of accounts exist of forced expulsions of Algerians by armed Zionist militias. As Paul Péquin, the French consul in Haifa, pointed out in a letter to the French ambassador in Israel on 22 October 1951, these “Algerian French nationals [...] are, in the final analysis, only sharing the general fate of the thousands of Arab peasants in Israel driven from their villages.”
On 16 April 1948, the Algerian villagers of Hawsha, 13 kilometers southeast of Haifa, were driven into exile by members of the Haganah. Estimated at over 450 residents, 80 percent of them took refuge in Syria, some 30 in the Mieh Mieh camp in Lebanon, 91 in Shafa Amr, and a dozen more in Jenin. On 10 October 1949, four Algerians from Hawsha, representing their fellow refugees in Syria, informed the French consul in Damascus of their adverse conditions and demands:
We, the undersigned, in our personal capacity and on behalf of the inhabitants of the village of Hocha in Caifa [Haifa] Palestine, Algerians and French subjects [...] The Jews drove us out of our village after ruining it and taking our furniture and buildings, our crops and our animals. We became refugees without support in Syria and Lebanon.
Many other Algerians would pass on their stories to French consular services. Mustafa Ben Taieb el Manoussi, born in Jaffa on 21 July 1895, wrote to the French consul in Haifa on 13 November 1948 “that I have been driven from my home by Jewish troops [...] and now find myself in the deepest poverty with my wife and two children, a refugee in the Al Bureij camp in South Palestine [in the Gaza Strip].”
At the same time as Zionist forces were expelling Algerians from Palestine, Zionist leaders were thinking about repatriating them to Algeria. In a letter from the French Minister of Foreign Affairs to the French Consul in Haifa on 3 February 1949, the minister informed the consul that “the Provisional Government of Israel proposes to the Department the payment of a sum of £300,000 (three hundred thousand pounds sterling) to enable the French Government to proceed, under satisfactory conditions, with the resettlement in Algeria of 2,000 to 2,500 Arab refugees of Algerian origin.”
Having learned of this collective resettlement plan, Algerians wrote to French consuls and demanded a return to Palestine, not to Algeria. In a collective letter from Algerian refugees from Palestine in Syria addressed to the French ambassador in Damascus on 5 August 1950, they wrote:
Our dearest wish is to return to our homes and lands in Palestine, where we live happily under God's protection. Mr Lambroschini has offered us repatriation to North Africa. We cannot accept this, as we would be strangers there too. [...] We can no longer accept such an offer, for we would be acknowledging the definitive loss of our property in Safad, Tiberias, Hoche etc....
Unable to return to their homes in Palestine, as they would have fervently wished, or unwilling to be resettled in their country of origin as Zionist leaders would have hoped, these 6,000 Algerians from Palestine found refuge mainly in Syria (around 40 percent of them, or 324 families according to French estimates) in the Golan Heights, Damascus, Der‘a, and later Yarmouk. In Lebanon, Algerians took refuge in the Nahr al-Bared camps in the north, Burj al-Shemali in the south near Tyre, Mieh Mieh near Saida, and the Sabra camp in Beirut. Others took refuge in Jordan and the Gaza Strip.
Conclusion
Human circulations and experiences between Algeria and Palestine remains a completely unrecognized subject. This shortcoming (which was also noted in the case of Palestinians moving to the Americas) is mainly explained by the primacy given to the national scale to the detriment of the transnational approach. But with the , large and diverse trove of sources—Ottoman archives, French consular archives, British Mandate archives, accounts by European explorers, memoirs by Arab personalities, family archives and testimonies—it is now possible to shed light on Algerian trajectories and experiences in Palestine during the contemporary era.
These archives, especially those of the French consular representations in Palestine and the region, provide information not only on the movements and experiences of over 6,000 Algerians in an unprecedented geographical setting (historical Palestine), but also, more generally, on the Palestinian experience in the face of British and Zionist colonialism. The French consular “protection” offered to the Algerian residents did little to shield them from the colonial methods that were to punctuate the daily life of the Palestinians who were colonized between 1920 and 1948, nor did it prevent their dispossession of their land, along with over 800,000 Palestinians.