Jean benjamin stora biography of williams

I first encountered Algiers through the childhood memories of a Palestinian friend who grew up there until she was fourteen years old. Algeria became her family’s home in the 1970s, when the Israeli authorities revoked her father’s residency after he had spent some time studying abroad. For many years, he was denied access to his homeland, where many of his family and friends still lived. When I arrived in Algiers in 2022, I was vaguely aware that there was something special about Algeria’s relationship with the Palestinians, whose struggle it associated with its own. In fact, Algerians had not been fighting against French colonialism alone during their war of independence, but against imperialist structures worldwide. They had considered their struggle, from the outset, as part of the collective resistance of oppressed peoples around the globe. The stakes were high, and the commitment to other peoples’ liberation meant much more to them than merely a historical parallel or a political alignment. For independent Algeria, solidarity with the Palestinian cause became even a matter of state, enshrined in the 1976 National Charter: “The liberation of Palestine is at the heart of our conscience and our concerns”, it reads. “Our total commitment to the Palestinian people and to other Arab peoples whose territories are occupied is for us, more than a duty of solidarity, an act identified with our own liberation. Therefore, this commitment is unreserved and implies the acceptance of all sacrifices, including those of blood”. It comes as no surprise, then, that the PLO, founded in 1964, maintained a very active office in Algiers, right in the heart of the city, and that it was there, in 1988, that Yasser Arafat proclaimed the State of Palestine.

With that in mind, I expected to find an abundance of publications testifying to this special relationship with Palestine in Algiers. But my research efforts did not go very far. Although th

French historian, expert on North Africa (born 1950)

Benjamin Stora (born 2 December 1950) is a French historian, expert on North Africa, who is widely considered one of the world's leading authorities on Algerian history. He was born in a Jewish family that left the country following its War of Independence in 1962. Stora holds two PhDs (1974 and 1984) and a Doctorate of the State (1991).

Career

Stora taught at the University of Paris 13. He founded and has been head of the Institut Maghreb-Europe since its inception in 1991, and also taught for a couple of years at the Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilisations (INALCO, Paris). As a member of the French School of the Far East he lived for two years in Hanoi, Vietnam, where he pursued his research on the imaginary of the Algerian and Vietnamese wars. In 1998 he was guest lecturer at the University of New York. He also spent three years in Rabat, Morocco, researching Algerian and Moroccan nationalism.

He has published almost thirty books, the most well known of which include a biography of Messali Hadj (reprinted by Hachette-Poche, 2004); a Biographical Dictionary of Algerian Militants (L'Harmattan, 1985); Gangrene and Oblivion: Memory of the Algerian War (La Découverte, 1991); They Came From Algeria: Algerian Immigration in France (1912–1992) (Fayard, 1992); The History of Colonial Algeria 1830–1954 (La Découverte, 1993); The History of Algeria Since Independence (La Découverte, 1994); Ferhat Abbas (Denoël, 1995, with Zakia Daoud); Algeria in 1995 (Michalon, 1995); Dictionary Of Books on The War in Algeria (L'Harmattan, 1996); Conscripts in The War in Algeria (Gallimard, 1997); The 100 Doors Of Maghreb (L'Atelier, 1999); The Last Generation of October (Stock, 2003); and The Three Exiles, Jews of Algeria (Stock, 2006) (selected for the Renaudot Essay Prize, 2006).

Stora was a historical advisor for the film Indoch