25 guage thus became one of the features of national resistance. Awareness of the nature of the fight and its actual results on the ground and the battlefields was the first feature of the Algerian people’s fight against the ferocity of the colonisers. The second feature was the fact that the Algerian Revolution was always a popular movement. The Liberation Army was made up of men, old and young, coming from the depths of the Algerian countryside. Liberation forces were supported by the masses whose bare chests represented the shield protecting those forces. It was the masses who gave their money and blood to achieve victory for the nation of a million martyrs. When we remember the successive waves of colonisation overtaking the Arab world, we realise that the first wave took place in Algeria in 1830 and was followed by Tunisia in 1881. Expanding their sphere of influence in the Arab world, colonial powers occupied Egypt in 1882. Palestine came under Zionist occupation in 1948. Both Algeria, as the first, and Palestine, as the last, to fall victim to the imperialist siege of the Arab nation, are further united by the fact that they embody the essence of the conflict with external invading forces. So, if Arab countries suffered from military occupation, military bases, economic influences, the plundering of wealth and the exploitation of people, both Algeria and later Palestine have known first-hand the malignant disease of colonisation. With a unique revolutionary consciousness, the Algerian people understood the meaning of this phenomenon and con-
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