“With a small amount of sound common sense, however, they could have reached a compromise with Versailles…” Marx in a letter to Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis on 22 February 1881.
The question of hostages raised by Peter Watkins’ La Commune (Paris, 1871) has an uncomfortable parallel with the present.
La Commune tells the story of the Paris Commune, a French revolutionary government that seized power in Paris on 18 March 1871 after the defeat of Napoleon III during the Franco-Prussian War. The Commune lasted for over two months before being defeated by the forces of Third Republic of Versailles on 28 May 1871.
Similarly, the Communards discovered the terrible limits of taking hostages when the Versailles government was prepared to destroy the Commune regardless of the people it held.
The Palestinian resistance confronted its own version of that problem. Israeli captives provided bargaining power. They could be exchanged for Palestinian prisoners and could form part of negotiations for ceasefires and other concessions.
But hostages could not by themselves resolve the underlying political question.
Once the captives were returned, Gaza had become the Warsaw Ghetto: Palestinians confined within a devastated territory, subjected to overwhelming bombing and deprived of the conditions necessary for ordinary life.
The historical circumstances are remarkably similar. Like the resistance fighters in Gaza, the Warsaw Ghetto resistance had only a few weapons. They were completely outgunned by the military-industrial complex that they had confronted by breaking out of an open-air prison, resulting in confinement, destruction and starvation, but always resisting.
So, too, with the Paris Commune of 1871.
The occupation, dispossession and Palestinian demand for self-determination remained unresolved. So, too did the question of East Jerusalem and the broader Palestinian struggle.
That is perhaps the most disturbing parallel between Paris in 1871 and Palestine today.
Hostages can create leverage. They can force negotiations. They can sometimes secure the release of prisoners.
But they cannot substitute for a political settlement especially when neither the Israelis or the United States wish to negotiate.
And when the Israelis possess overwhelming military power provided by the United States — and is prepared to commit genocide — the Palestinians confront essentially the same terrible question that hangs over La Commune:
What kind of negotiation is possible, and what constitutes meaningful leverage, when the more powerful party believes that it can obtain its objectives through genocide?
The Paris Commune and anti-colonialist resistance
The Paris Commune began on 18 March 1871 and survived until its bloody suppression during the final week of May, ending on 28 May. The Kabyle uprising was under way in Algeria in March. On 16 April, while the Commune still controlled Paris, thousands of Algerians resisting French colonial rule surrounded the French position at Tizi Ouzou. The siege continued until 11 May.
Thus, for almost a month, the Commune in Paris and the siege of Tizi Ouzou were taking place simultaneously. Indeed, Even while grappling with the Paris Commune, the French government was already sending troops back to Algeria to break the insurrection.
Algerians were already fighting French colonialism while the Communards were fighting the forces of Versailles. The siege of Tizi Ouzou ended on 11 May; ten days later, on 21 May, the forces of Versailles entered Paris and began the Semaine sanglante, or Bloody Week. By 28 May, the Commune had been crushed. The suppression of the Algerian uprising continued afterwards, with French military operations in Kabylie extending through the summer of 1871.
There is another connection that takes the story beyond 1871. Following the defeat of the Commune, a number of Communards were deported to Nouvelle-Calédonie, or New Caledonia, another French colony. There they encountered another Indigenous population resisting French colonial rule: the Melanesian Kanak people.
Louise Michel from the Paris Commune was one of those who recognised the connection.
When the Kanak rose against French colonial rule in 1878, the deported Communards did not all take the same position. Not all of the deported Communards shared Louise Michel’s solidarity with the Kanak revolt. Michel’s position was distinctive. Having herself been imprisoned and transported by the French state, she identified with the Kanak resistance to French colonial rule.
The Paris Commune of 1871 intersected with the Algerian revolt against French colonial rule and, a few years later, with Kanak resistance to French colonisation in New Caledonia. These struggles were connected not only by the French state and its colonial system, but also by repression, imprisonment, deportation and exile.
There are also striking historical resonances with Israel’s genocide in Gaza and Nazi destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto: populations confined and overwhelmingly outgunned, subjected to siege, starvation and destruction, yet continuing to resist. The circumstances, political forces and historical periods may have been different, but each raises the question of what resistance becomes possible when a population faces overwhelming military power and the destruction of the conditions necessary for human life.
Ian Curr
4 October 2026