When France responded to the killing of 102 settlers by carpet-bombing villages and killing tens of thousands of people in Algeria, it was hoping to achieve much more than avenging the deaths of its citizens and eliminating “terrorists”, former UN official Moncef Khane writes for Al Jazeera.

It was using extreme violence to eliminate all native resistance. It wanted to break their will to resist.

Indeed, just as France was not “defending itself” when it killed hundreds of thousands of Algerians to stop them from achieving independence, Israel is not “defending itself” against Palestinians living under its occupation. It is waging a modern-day colonial war, trying to claim more land, and seemingly committing genocide in the process.

Read the full opinion piece here.