Algiers: the scathing Palestinian slap from Beijing

During the preparations for the Arab League summit held in Algiers in November 2022, Tebboune had scrambled, as much as he could, to extract an agreement between the Palestinian factions divided for many years. He had only obtained a call quickly forgotten by his signatories and remained without action to the great disappointment of the Algerian president who would have liked to add such an event to his meager list.

Tebboune swore only by Palestine. He declared to make it his personal business. He kept repeating, to anyone who wanted to hear him, the famous "with Palestine rightly or wrongly". In an unprecedented outpouring of generosity, in December 2021, he donated $ 100 million to the Palestinian authority, expressing Algeria's wish to place the Palestinian cause at the heart of the Arab summit that it was supposed to host in March 2022 and postponed to November of the same year. This donation will be followed by another amount of 30 million dollars, granted in July 2023, for the reconstruction of the city of Jenin devastated by an Israeli military operation. 

This was hardly enough to coax the Palestinians to snatch even a smile from Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the Palestinian authority, to the address of Brahim Ghali, the head of the Polisario, installed knowingly to his right at the official podium during the military parade organized on July 5, 2022, on the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of the independence of Algeria.

Since the outbreak of the war against Gaza on October 7, 2023, not a single HAMAS leader had visited Algiers. Not even a telephone communication. And to say that Tebboune was going to invite Smaïl Haniyeh, leader of the Islamist movement to the Arab summit in November 2022, were it not for the categorical refusal of Mahmoud Abbas who believed that the Algerian authorities had gone too far in their zeal vis-à-vis his rivals.

Upon learning the news from Beijing on July 22, in the midst of an election campaign for a second term guaranteed by the generals holding real power, Abdelmadjid Tebboune felt betrayed by his Palestinian "friends". He had just received a scathing slap that he hardly expected. His secret services, busy waging wars against political opponents living abroad, did not inform him of what happened in Beijing.

They themselves were completely unaware of the ballet of the fourteen delegations of the Palestinian factions who had moved to China. A country friendly to Algeria which has sidelined the Algerian government from the inter-Palestinian negotiations under the good auspices of Chinese diplomats. The latter, without making a sound, succeeded where the Algerians pitifully failed. They have just repeated the blow of the Iranian-Saudi reconciliation of April 2023.

Paradoxical as it may seem, in Algiers, we are disappointed by the news of unification. It is synonymous with the failure of a diplomacy that is said to be rising from the ashes. Not the slightest reaction to this event as long as things took place without his knowledge and without his participation, the Algerian regime, which turned the Palestinian cause into a real business fund to attract the sympathy of the Algerian people who are out of touch with him, since the confiscation of the "hirak" of February 2 2019 transformed into a tasteful electoral parody by enthroning Abdelmadjid Tebboune at the head of the Algerian state.

For their part, the Algerian media, tamed and kept on a leash, have not breathed a word. The Algerian public opinion only learned the news on foreign television channels and social networks. Which leads us to deduce that the Beijing declaration, of which we are publishing exclusively a copy containing the signatures of the representatives of the fourteen factions, is considered in Algiers as a scathing slap impossible to retaliate. We swallow the deep disappointment and act as if nothing had happened.