At last month’s Annaba Mediterranean Film Festival, when Palestinian-Syrian filmmaker Abdallah Alkhatib won Best Short Film, he took the stage to speak. The crowd in Algeria cheered loudly upon learning he was Palestinian. Alkhatib told the overjoyed audience: “My mum usually calls me every day when I’m abroad to check on how I’m doing. This whole week she didn’t call me once, so today I asked her why not, and she said: ‘You are a Palestinian in Algeria, so you are in safe hands.’” As the Algerian political analyst Zine Labidine Ghebouli wrote, “Algeria’s relationship with Palestine is both hi…