No exception can possibly be taken to the natural desire of the Jews to found a home in Palestine. But they must wait for its fulfillment till Arab opinion is ripe for it.

—Mahatma Gandhi

2    Mahatma Gandhi and the Jewish National Home

Writing in his Harijan weekly in November 1938, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (more commonly known as Mahatma Gandhi) observed: “Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English and France to the French.”¹ This supposedly unequivocal endorsement of the Palestinians and repudiation of the Zionist demand for a Jewish national home figures prominently in Indian discourses on the Arab-Israeli conflict.² It is almost impossible to locate any discussion on the Middle East without a reference to this quotation. For example, meeting in Calcutta (now Kolkata) in August 1997, the plenary session of the All-India Congress Committee (AICC) passed a resolution on the international situation. Coming more than five years after the normalization of relations with Israel, it observed: “The Congress recalls that it was Mahatma Gandhi who said Palestine belongs to the Palestinians as England belongs to the English or France to the French.”³ Even the communists, who once accused the Mahatma of being an agent of British imperialism,⁴ do not hesitate to rely on him to explain, justify, and rationalize their stance toward Israel.⁵ One could go the extent of suggesting that this is the Mahatma’s most widely quoted statement on international affairs.

The Mahatma’s views are not a guide to India’s foreign policy. He is never considered, either by his disciples or by scholars, as a serious thinker on international affairs. Though his views at times provided a moral content, he was not setting the agenda of free India. A number of his positions were quickly, quietly, and forcefully buried by his colleagues and political successors because they were seen as utopian, impractical, unscientific, and even antimodern. From the nonconsumption of alcohol to cottage industries and the village-based economic model, a number of his ideas gradually disappeared from public discourse. One never hears about the Mahatma’s friendlier overtures to Pakistan in the immediate aftermath of the partition. It was only after he resorted to a hunger strike that Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru accepted his demands for an equitable distribution of assets of British India. His perceived “appeasement” toward Pakistan was the “immediate” reason for his assassination on January 30, 1948.⁶

Why are Gandhi’s views on Pakistan irrelevant but what he said about Palestine in 1938 sacrosanct? Was he aware of the historic sufferings of the Jews and their longing for a homeland? Did he consider the rival nationalist claims of the Jews and Arabs over Palestine? Was his opinion colored by his moral commitments to nonviolence and by his wish that Jews realize their aspirations through nonviolence and cooperation? Was he aware of the complexities and predicaments of the problem in Palestine? Was he as categorical as he is commonly portrayed? Are the views of the Mahatma relevant to the understanding of India’s foreign policy or only to its Israeli policy? Alternatively, if Mahatma Gandhi’s endorsement of the Palestinian claims were unequivocal, how did India square the circle, when it recognized Israel in 1950 and normalized relations four decades later?

In short, is Mahatma Gandhi correct, consistent, or even relevant to the understanding of India’s Israel policy?

Empathy but Indifference

The Mahatma was no stranger to Jews or to their historic sufferings. His personal association with Jews dates back to the late nineteenth century, and as he admitted, “I have known [the Jews] intimately in South Africa.”⁷ Some of them became his lifelong companions, and one can identify the following prominent Jewish personalities who interacted with the Mahatma: Henry S. L. Polak and Hermann Kallenbach knew the Mahatma when the latter was living in and later began his satyagraha (nonviolent struggle) in South Africa between 1893 and 1914; the Zionist officials Selig Brodetsky and Nahum Sokolov met the Mahatma on October 15, 1931, in London; the Sanskrit scholar Immanuel Olsvanger visited India in 1936 as the official emissary of the Jewish Agency in Palestine and met the Mahatma; in 1937, Kallenbach came to India and secured a private statement on Zionism and two years later returned and met with his old friend Gandhi; Hayim Greenberg, the editor of the Zionist-socialist periodical Jewish Frontier, corresponded with the Mahatma in mid-1939; Joseph Nedivi, the town clerk of Tel Aviv, met him on March 22, 1939;⁸ the British MP Sidney Silverman met the Mahatma in March 1946; and the Jewish delegation for the Asian Relations Conference met him in New Delhi in early 1947.

These Jewish associations and contacts fall into two distinct categories. There are those who were drawn to the Mahatma because of their shared interests and admiration for nonviolence, communal living, vegetarianism, natural cures for diseases, or his philosophical worldview. His Jewish friends Kallenbach and Polak come under this category. They lived in his ashram in South Africa, and their friendship continued even after the Mahatma returned to India in 1914 and joined the nationalist struggle. Though prominent, as Gideon Shimoni reminds us, “they were not the only Jews closely associated with him.”⁹

In the 1930s, the Mahatma encountered different Jewish figures. They were organized and political in nature. The Jewish Agency sought his endorsement for Jewish nationalist aspirations in Palestine. Toward this end, it enlisted the services of Gandhi’s Jewish friends from his South African days. When the Sanskrit scholar Olsvanger met the Mahatma in 1936, he did so not as an individual admirer of the Mahatma but as an official emissary of the Jewish Agency. Soon afterward, upon the request of Moshe Shertok (later Moshe Sharett and Israel’s first foreign minister), the head of the political department of the Jewish Agency, Kallenbach sought to influence Gandhi’s views on Zionism. In short, if his friends in South Africa happened to be Jews, later on Mahatma Gandhi was courted by those who sought his support and endorsement for Zionist goals in Palestine. This crucial difference is often overlooked by scholars who have dealt with the role and influence of Gandhi’s Jewish friends.¹⁰

As he admitted, through his personal acquaintance in South Africa, Mahatma Gandhi “came to learn much of the long persecution” of the Jews.¹¹ He was familiar with the historic sufferings of the Jewish people. Placing their plight within the context of his commitments to the uplifting of India’s downtrodden, he saw the Jews as “the untouchables of Christianity.” For him, the “parallel between their treatment by Christians and the treatment of untouchables by Hindus is very close. Religious sanction has been invoked in both cases for the justification of the inhuman treatment meted out to them.”¹² Their miniscule population in India did not prevent him from frequently referring to Jews along with other religious communities. One can find innumerable references to the Jews in the Mahatma’s speeches and writings.

The real problem was not Gandhi’s unfamiliarity with Jewish suffering but his failure, if not inability, to see the link between Jewish suffering and their political aspirations for a homeland. The influence of his Jewish friends in South Africa upon his understanding of the Jewish struggle for statehood was minimal, if it existed at all. Lamenting on this, Gideon Shimoni suggests that not only were Polak and Kallenbach not “equipped authentically to interpret Judaism” to Gandhi but that they were “also alienated from normative Jewry, both in the religious and in the communal sense.”¹³ Moreover, the Mahatma did not suggest any means of resolving the problems facing the “untouchables” of Christianity. In the absence of a link between Jewish suffering and its resolution, Gandhi’s position becomes unequivocal as presented by conventional scholarship on the subject. It becomes easier and even inevitable to agree with his statement that “sympathy” for Jews “does not blind me to the requirement of justice.”¹⁴

Long before the Zionists made a concerted effort to win him over, the Mahatma had formulated his position on Palestine. He adopted a pro-Palestinian position in the immediate aftermath of World War I, which generated anti-British sentiments in India, especially among the Muslim population. The dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire resulted in Indian Muslims rallying around the caliph, who was viewed by the believers as their temporal head. The Mahatma perceived the mass agitation among the Muslim community, the Khilafat movement, as an opportunity to forge the necessary but conspicuously absent Hindu-Muslim unity against the British.¹⁵

In March 1921, the Mahatma categorically defined the Jewish rights in Palestine. Repudiating the Balfour Declaration of November 1917, he observed:

Britain has made a promise to the Zionists…. All I contend is that they cannot possess Palestine through a trick or a moral breach. Palestine was not a stake in the war. The British Government could not dare ask a single Muslim soldier to wrest control of Palestine from fellow Muslims and give it to the Jews. Palestine, as a place of Jewish worship, is a sentiment to be respected, and the Jews would have a just cause of complaint against [Muslim] idealists if they were to prevent Jews from offering worship as freely as themselves.

At the same time, he warned: “By no canons of ethics of war… can Palestine be given to Jews as a result of the war.”¹⁶ A few weeks later, he went a step further and argued:

The Muslims claim Palestine as an integral part of Jazirat al-Arab. They are bound to retain its custody, as an injunction of the Prophet. But that does not mean that the Jews and Christians cannot freely go to Palestine, or even reside there and own property. What non-Muslims cannot do is acquire sovereign jurisdiction. The Jews cannot receive sovereign rights in a place, which has been held for centuries by Muslim powers by right of religious conquest. The Muslim soldiers did not shed their blood in the late war [World War I] for the purpose of surrendering Palestine out of Muslim control.¹⁷

Thus Mahatma Gandhi unreservedly endorsed the historical and religious claims of the Muslims and categorically ruled out non-Muslim sovereignty in Palestine.

The Mahatma’s remarks about Palestine being an integral part of the Jazirat al-Arab came within the context of the Khilafat struggle. As he repeatedly admitted, it became his “duty” to help his Muslim brother “in his hour of peril,” and “by helping [the Muslims] of India at a critical moment in their history, I want to buy their friendship.” He was honest enough to admit his own predicaments: “I would like my Jewish friends to impartially consider the position of the seventy million Muslims of India. As a free nation, can they tolerate what they must regard as a treacherous disposal of their sacred possession?”¹⁸ These statements, which came after the Balfour Declaration (November 2, 1917) but before Palestine was granted to Great Britain as a mandate (July 1922), ruled out Jewish claims to Palestine and their demands for a national home. Palestine, for him, was an Islamic land; Jews had no political claims over it. The Zionists would later regret that these one-sided observations of the Mahatma “went unchallenged.”¹⁹

Following the Khilafat phase, the Mahatma refused to discuss the problem of Palestine and repeatedly admitted his reluctance to express his views on the subject. Despite his meetings with Zionist emissaries in London and in India and the efforts by Kallenbach in 1937, Gandhi made no public statement on the subject. He eventually broke his silence and wrote a long exposition in the November 26, 1938, issue of Harijan. Some suggest that his observations were unnecessary and avoidable. Margaret Chatterjee, for example, suggests that the Mahatma could have practiced “noninterference [regarding Jewish] affairs and also refrain[ed] from making judgments about them.”²⁰ But, as the Mahatma admitted at the very beginning of his Harijan article, he wrote it because of “several letters” that he received “asking me to declare my views about the Arab-Jew question in Palestine and the persecution of Jews in Germany.” Aware of the complexities and controversies surrounding both issues, he confessed that it was “not without hesitation that I venture to offer my views on this very difficult question.”²¹ He subsequently responded to his critics, saying, “I did not write this article as a critic. I wrote it at the pressing request of Jewish friends and correspondents. As I decided to write, I could not do so in any other manner.”²²

The November 1938 Harijan article earned him the wrath of the Zionist leadership and swift responses and rebukes both inside and outside India.²³ The Jewish philosopher Martin Buber joined with Judah Magnes and explained the philosophical underpinnings of the Zionist movement.²⁴ This was later published as Two Letters to Gandhi²⁵ and at times is described as the “Buber-Gandhi correspondence.” Some suggested that “Buber and Gandhi were involved in a polemical exchange of views on the Jewish problem.”²⁶ Despite such claims, there is no evidence to suggest that Gandhi read the Buber-Magnes letters, let alone that he replied to them.²⁷

Acting on his somewhat neutral stand, which he detailed in his confidential note to Kallenbach in July 1937, the Zionist leadership sought his categorical endorsement for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. The Zionist pressures for a public statement from Mahatma Gandhi boomeranged. Disappointed and outraged by his public endorsement of the Palestinian position, an editorial in The Jewish Advocate, based in Bombay (later Mumbai), wrote a “comprehensive and dignified” editorial. It lamented that “we are very sorry that we sought” Gandhi’s views.²⁸ The November 1938 Harijan article effectively ended the brief Zionist courtship of the Mahatma.

But why were the Zionists interested in Mahatma Gandhi in the first place?

Zionist Courtship: Too Little, Too Late

Nonviolent struggle against colonial rule was a novelty. Thus the Mahatma’s struggle for India’s freedom attracted widespread international attention and admiration, and other movements and leaders who were seeking to overthrow imperial and colonial rule looked to Gandhi for inspiration and considered him and his colleagues as friends and comrades-in-arms. Shared interests, whether in his philosophy of nonviolence or political struggle against foreigners, resulted in Gandhi being courted by many different groups, nations, and leaders. Even if material help was limited, shared human concern and the desire to liberate national homes from colonialism resonated with many. Even Westerners, who did not always share his anti-British and anti-imperialist politics, came to appreciate his nonviolence and spartan lifestyle.

The Zionists were drawn to him for a different reason. Their interest was belated, short-lived, and ended in acrimony. According to Shimoni, Gandhi’s “unique moral character could not but evoke sympathy and admiration amongst Jews.”²⁹ This explanation is applicable only to Gandhi’s Jewish friends in South Africa and not to those who sought his support for Zionism in the 1930s. The Zionist interest in the Mahatma was principally governed by a desire to secure the support of, as Sharett remarked, “the greatest of the living Hindus.”³⁰ G. H. Jansen, a former Indian foreign-service official who wrote for international media from Nicosia, suggested a sinister motive: “the Zionists did not pursue Mahatma Gandhi merely because he was an influence in Asia, [but] rather because he had a large following in the West.”³¹

If one examines the timing and substance of the Zionist contacts, a more plausible explanation can be found for the sudden interest in the Mahatma. By the time the first formal but brief contact was made in 1931, Gandhi had emerged and was recognized as the undisputed leader of a country that also had the world’s largest Muslim population. This politico-demographic factor compelled the Zionist leadership to pay attention to India. The Zionists were not alone in looking at India through the Islamic prism. Both the British and Palestinian Arab leaderships were conscious of the role and influence of the Indian Muslims. As will be seen, if the British were afraid of the attitude of Indian Muslims, the Palestinian leadership looked to the same community for political support.

The Islamization of the Palestinian problem by Mufti Hajj Amin al-Husseini raised alarms in Zionist circles. While it was relatively easy for them to overlook British apprehensions regarding the Indian Muslims, the problem posed by al-Husseini was far more serious. Besides being a passionate speaker, he evoked respect and admiration among the faithful because of his official position as the mufti of the third holiest place in Islam. Chaim Weizmann, the president of the World Zionist Organization (WZO), was quick to recognize the consequences of the Palestinian issue spreading to the wider Islamic world. In January 1931, the mufti offered to bury the body of Mohammed Ali, a prominent Indian leader who led the Khilafat struggle, within the precincts of the Harem al-Sharif/Temple Mount in Jerusalem. A few days before Shaukat Ali accompanied his younger brother’s body to Jerusalem for burial, Weizmann met the Indian leader in London. This was the first known meeting between the Zionist leadership and an Indian leader. Weizmann’s efforts to quarantine the Palestine problem from domestic Indian politics proved ineffective. While Shaukat Ali agreed to Weizmann’s pleas in London,³² once in Jerusalem, he was overwhelmed by the mufti’s hospitality. As a result, the Indian leader collaborated with his host in or ga niz ing the Jerusalem Islamic Conference later that year.³³

It was under such circumstances that the Zionists made their first formal contact with Mahatma Gandhi. The meeting took place on October 15, 1931, in London, while Gandhi was attending the Round Table Conference. With a formal letter of introduction from Polak, the Mahatma’s old friend in South Africa, the Zionists Selig Brodetsky and Nahum Sokolov met the Indian leader. Brodetsky was a member of the World Zionist Executive and head of its political department in London; Sokolov had just taken over from Weizmann as president of the WZO. Surprisingly, they did not seek the Mahatma’s support for a Jewish national home in Palestine. They were aware of failure of the Weizmann– Shaukat Ali encounter a few months earlier and thus hoped that the Mahatma would help keep the Palestinian issue away from Indian politics. They wanted him to assure them that no attempts “to bring the problem of Palestine into the discussion of the Round Table Conference or into the atmosphere surrounding these discussions, would meet with his [the Mahatma’s] approval.”³⁴ Preoccupied with India’s own problems, the Mahatma was not keen to get involved in the Palestinian issue and accepted their request. Once this limited objective was achieved, Zionist indifference toward the Mahatma and India continued.

Efforts to influence the Mahatma and, if possible, secure his support for Jewish aspirations had to wait until mid-1936. The timing of this attempt once again points to unfolding events in Palestine. Shertok decided to send Olsvanger to India as the special emissary of the Jewish Agency. This happened shortly after the outbreak of a general strike in Palestine that eventually culminated in the Arab Revolt of 1936–1939, which evoked strong responses in the wider Islamic world. Even if they were not converted into concrete actions, one sees clarity and foresightedness in Shertok’s thinking. Underlining the need to cultivate Asian leaders, he observed that “once the conflict between us and the Arabs is conceived as one between Asiatics and Westerners or Westernizers it becomes a matter of instinct—not even of political reasoning—for the Hindus to side against the Jews…. It will clearly be much more difficult to fight misconceptions after they have hardened and gained currency than to prevent their formation.”³⁵ During his visit, Olsvanger held a brief and uneventful meeting with Gandhi.

The following year, Kallenbach visited India and met the Mahatma after a gap of twenty-three years. By then, the former was a supporter of the Zionist goals in Palestine and brought with him a detailed exposition of the yishuv activities prepared by the Jewish Agency. Although the Mahatma “had indicated to Kallenbach his willingness to help Jews and Arabs get together, it is significant that he never made this offer public.”³⁶ To further this endeavor, the Mahatma’s close confidant Reverend C. F. Andrews was planning to visit Palestine.³⁷

Thus the Zionist approach toward Mahatma Gandhi functioned at three distinct but interrelated levels. First, the leadership traced and enlisted the support of those Jews who were acquainted with him in South Africa. Shertok sought the help of Kallenbach to introduce Olsvanger to the Mahatma and India.³⁸ Brodetsky and Sokolov met Gandhi in 1931 with a letter of introduction from Polak. Second, a few official Zionist emissaries made direct contacts with the Mahatma. Here one can cite Olsvanger, A. E. Shohet (the editor of the Bombay-based Jewish Advocate), and the Jewish delegation to the 1947 Asian Relations Conference as examples. One can also add Kallenbach, who visited India in 1937 and secured a private statement from Gandhi on Palestine. And third, a number of Jewish individuals from Palestine and elsewhere approached him for sympathy and support for the Zionist cause. They include such figures as Margin Buber, Judah Magnes, Sidney Silverman, Hayim Greenberg, and Louis Fischer.³⁹

Otherwise, none of the leading lights of Zionism are known to have established any direct and personal contact with the Indian leader. Indeed, in July 1937, Weizmann, who had been marginalized by the rise of David Ben-Gurion, sought the counsel of Kallenbach in writing to Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru.⁴⁰ This suggestion came more than fifteen years after the Mahatma expressed his opposition to Jewish claims in Palestine. There is no evidence to suggest that the Mahatma had received any letters from Weizmann. Some individuals did approach him, soliciting support for a Jewish national home. But in the aftermath of the Harijan article of 1938, the Zionist-Mahatma contacts almost ceased.

Belated attempts to cultivate Mahatma Gandhi were not fruitful, and the disappointment of the Zionist leadership was clear. Olsvanger, who came to India with the explicit purpose of securing the support of the Indian nationalists, quickly dismissed the Mahatma as a “sham saint and simpleton.”⁴¹ Within weeks of Olsvanger’s arrival, even Shertok developed second thoughts about the Mahatma, remarking:

Olsvanger writes that Gandhi’s position and influence in the Nationalist movement is not what it used to be and that therefore it would be imprudent to try and get a public definition of attitude on his part as this might provoke a repudiation from the official leaders who, while inclined to see our point of view, would be extremely reluctant to do or say anything which might alienate Mohammedan sympathies of which they are much in need.⁴²

In a sense, the Zionist leadership wrote the Mahatma’s political obituary as early as 1936. As history would have it, even half a century after his assassination, the Mahatma’s views on Palestine occupy a prominent place in rationalizing India’s Middle East policy.

The Zionists were not alone in expressing skepticism about the Mahatma. A few Indian leaders felt that, given the rigid positions adopted by senior leaders like Gandhi and Nehru, there was a need for an alternate Zionist strategy. One such person was Sardar K. M. Panikkar, then prime minister of the princely state of Bikaner (currently in the western state of Rajasthan) and later India’s first ambassador to the People’s Republic of China. In 1947, he advised the Jewish delegation for the Asian Relations Conference that the Zionist “efforts should be concentrated not on top leaders like Nehru, Gandhi, [Sardar Vallabhbhai] Patel etc., but on leaders of the second rank, who are free to form, and even to voice, their own unbiased opinion.”⁴³

On the whole, if Gandhi’s 1937 private statement to Kallenbach failed to satisfy the Zionists, the November 1938 Harijan article proved to be a disaster and led to widespread disappointment, outrage, and doubts about cultivating Gandhi.⁴⁴ The Zionists in India used the pages of The Jewish Advocate to rebuke and repudiate his views.⁴⁵ In Jerusalem, Eliahu Epstein (later Eliahu Elath), who subsequently became Israel’s first ambassador in Washington, was alarmed over the prospect of the Mahatma’s views being widely disseminated in the Arab world. He was anxious “to avoid entering into polemic with Ghandi [sic] in order not to give unnecessary publicity to his views.”⁴⁶ Epstein enquired of a Jewish Agency official in London: “Was this article reprinted in the English press and how wide was its circulation?”⁴⁷

Contrary to Olsvanger’s assessment, Gandhi was far from a spent force. Recognizing his continued influence over the Indian masses, only months after the Harijan article Shohet was pleading with the Jewish Agency officials in Jerusalem: “However cranky his views may appear to the outside world, we should not lose the opportunity of a real and serious attempt to try and convince him.”⁴⁸ Shohet, who wrote highly critical editorials on the Mahatma following the November 1938 remarks, felt it necessary to accompany Joseph Nevidi, a Zionist emissary from Palestine, in trying to persuade Gandhi.⁴⁹ For all practical purposes, however, formal Zionist approaches to Mahatma Gandhi came to a clear halt after the Harijan article. Shimoni presents a sober picture when he observed, “if account is taken of his private statements to Kallenbach, his hesitancy to speak out, the double standard by which he judged Jewish self-determination and Moslem self-determination, as well Jewish behavior and Arab behavior, and above all, the realities of the Indian political context in which Gandhi functioned, a more complex pattern of thought suggests itself.”⁵⁰

If one examines Gandhi’s views on Palestine and Jewish national aspirations, a certain broad—but at times blurred—picture emerges.

Mahatma and the Jewish Cause

The overall views of the Mahatma toward Jewish aspirations exhibited both a degree of consistency and fundamental contradictions. Despite citing him ad nauseam, scholars have only highlighted the former aspect. Though he did say that “Palestine belongs to the Arabs,” it was not the Mahatma’s central view on the subject.

Let us first look at the consistencies. The Mahatma had argued throughout that the Jewish national home should be realized only with the consent of the Arabs of Palestine. Much to the consternation of his Jewish and Zionist interlocutors, he repeatedly underlined the need for Jewish accommodation with the Arabs. From the very beginning, he was not blind to the Arab character of Palestine, and in so doing, he unequivocally rejected the arguments of Israel Zangwill that Palestine was a “land without people.”⁵¹ While gradually diluting his opposition regarding a Jewish homeland, he emphasized the need for the Jews to cooperate with the Arabs.⁵² Even in his private statement to Kallenbach, he declared: “No exception can possibly be taken to the natural desire of the Jews to found a home in Palestine. But they must wait for its fulfillment till Arab opinion is ripe for it.”⁵³

Gandhi periodically repeated this argument, and even in his Harijan article, he stressed the need for a cooperative attitude:

They [the Jews] can settle in Palestine only by the goodwill of the Arabs. They could seek to convert the Arab heart…. They can offer satyagraha in front of the Arabs and offer themselves to be shot or thrown into the Dead Sea without raising a little finger against them. They will find the world opinion in their favor in their religious aspirations. There are hundreds of ways of reasoning with the Arabs, if they will only discard the help of the British bayonet. As it is they are co-sharers with the British in despoiling a people who have done no wrong to them.⁵⁴

In short, Jewish aspirations must be realized in consonance and not in conflict with the Arabs.

This position lines up with the Mahatma’s basic belief that liberation could not be realized through a collaboration with imperialism. His attitude toward World War II clearly exhibited this line of thinking. He refused to support the British war effort even in defense of democracy. He was not convinced that the British were fighting tyranny and safeguarding democracy while keeping India under subjugation.⁵⁵ Just as he was critical of Zionist dependence upon the British for their political goals, Gandhi also opposed the nationalist leader Subhas Chandra Bose for seeking Japanese help to secure India’s freedom.⁵⁶ His advocacy for Jewish-Arab cooperation in Palestine was reflective of the prevailing mood in India. In February 1938, the Congress Party urged the Jews “not to seek the shelter of the British Mandate and not to allow themselves to be exploited in the interests of the British imperialism.”⁵⁷ Likewise, in a personal letter to Olsvanger, Nehru underscored his opposition to any collaboration with imperialism.⁵⁸

Contradictions in the Mahatma’s stance are equally interesting. He was the first non-Muslim leader to invoke Islam to justify Arab demands. In his first comments on the subject in 1921, he used religion to dispute Jewish demands. According to him, the injunction of Prophet Mohammed “does not mean that Jews and Christians cannot freely go to Palestine or even reside there and own properties. What non-Muslims cannot do is to acquire sovereign jurisdiction.”⁵⁹ A few weeks later, he reminded his readers that Jazirat al-Arab had been “under Mussalman control” before World War I.⁶⁰ Under his influence, the following year, the Indian National Congress demanded that the “effective guardianship of Islam and the Jazirat al-Arab [be] free[d] from all non-Muslim control.”⁶¹ The introduction of Islamic claims and religious terminology into the political discourse by the Mahatma (and briefly by the Congress Party) came within the Khilafat context. Mahatma Gandhi felt the need to embrace, support, and endorse Muslim religious claims to Palestine.

There is a fundamental problem with Gandhi’s approach. If one accepts the injunction in the Qur’an, then it is not possible to overlook the religious claims of the Jews over Palestine. According to the Old Testament, Palestine was “promised” to the Jews centuries before the birth of Islam or the arrival of Prophet Mohammed. Thus, one either accepts the religious claims of both or rejects both Jewish and Islamic injunctions. In the post-Khilafat period, the Mahatma did not use religious terminology to justify Arab claims or negate Jewish demands. This could be interpreted as his realization of the conflicting religious claims over Palestine.

Second, Mahatma Gandhi never questioned the Jewish longing for a homeland or for the city of Jerusalem. He treated it as a religious and not a political question. He gradually modified his November 1938 position and began to recognize the validity of the Jewish claims. The brutality of the Holocaust perhaps compelled him to revisit the whole issue. In June 1946, he told the American journalist Louis Fischer: “The Jews have a good cause. I told [British Zionist MP] Sidney Silverman that the Jews have a good case in Palestine. If the Arabs have a claim to Palestine, the Jews have a prior claim.”⁶² This is a significant departure from the 1921 statement, when the Mahatma had categorically ruled out Jewish claims over Palestine.

Gandhi repeated this in April 1947, a few days after his brief and uneventful meeting with the Jewish delegation from Palestine. He observed that if the Arabs could “provide refuge for the Jews without the mediation of any nation, it will be in their tradition of generosity.”⁶³ This statement came shortly after Great Britain handed over the problem of Palestine to the newly formed United Nations. A month later, he told a Reuters correspondent: “If I were a Jew, I could tell them: ‘Don’t be silly as to resort to terrorism, because you simply damage your own case, which otherwise would be a proper case.’”⁶⁴

In June, when the UN committee (which also included India) was deliberating the future of Palestine, the Mahatma told an American journalist that the solution to the Palestine problem rested on a total abandonment of “terrorism and other forms of violence” by the Jews.⁶⁵ While insisting that their means should be noble, Gandhi did not call for the abandonment of their political demands. These public statements were made long after the 1938 Harijan article. Moreover, in his July 1937 confidential statement to Kallenbach, Gandhi was more candid. “No exception can possibly be taken to the natural desire of the Jews to find a home in Palestine,” but he added that they should seek this through Arab acquiescence.

In other words, in the years following his “Palestine belongs to the Arabs” statement, the Mahatma had moved away significantly from this position. He was no longer as categorical as he was in 1938. He recognized that the Jews have “a good case,” “a prior claim” to Palestine, “a proper case,” and was prepared to admit “the natural desire of the Jews to find a home in Palestine.” Therefore, to conclude that the Mahatma was opposed to Jewish claims to Palestine or had unequivocally rejected the demand for a Jewish homeland are not substantiated by facts.

If this is the case, then why were these pro-Jewish statements ignored? One could make some inferences. His post-1938 statements indicate that the Mahatma had significantly diluted, if not changed, his opinion on Palestine. Highlighting them would erode the claim that he was consistently opposed to the idea of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. This was not in the interests of the Arabs and Palestinians and would also have worked against India. For a long time, Indian leaders and commentators used Gandhi’s 1938 statement to explain, rationalize, and even justify the prolonged absence of relations with Israel and the host of anti-Israeli positions India took since 1947. Any references to post-1938 statements of the Mahatma would have made these claims untenable. Admitting that Gandhi had recognized the “prior claims” of Jews to Palestine would have eroded, if not destroyed, the “moral” content of India’s pro-Palestine policy.

But why did the Zionist leaders also ignore these statements? Their interests in the Mahatma, or India for that matter, were belated, limited, and one-sided. Preoccupied with the problem of homeland enterprises, they had little time or interest in non-Western personalities, especially the anti-British Gandhi. Zionist interest and interaction with him came to an abrupt end following the Harijan article. They were no longer paying attention to any of Gandhi’s subtle shifts; from the Zionist viewpoint, it was too little, too late. In short, not only Palestinians and Indians but also the Zionists choose to ignore the nuanced changes in the Mahatma’s post-1938 position.

Third, Gandhi’s espousal of nonviolence was not absolute, and this negates his criticism of Jewish violence in Palestine. While deploring the Nazi persecution, in 1938 he urged the Jews to practice nonviolence against Hitler.⁶⁶ When his Zionist critics pointed out the plight of Jews in Germany, he replied: “Their nonviolence, if it may be so called, is of the helpless and the weak…. I have drawn a distinction between passive resistance of the weak and active nonviolent resistance of the strong.”⁶⁷ Gandhian nonviolence was effective against the British in India. It is highly debatable whether it could have been replicated in other parts of the world—especially in Nazi Germany. The Mahatma’s hope that active Jewish nonviolence would have “melted” Hitler’s heart is highly questionable.

Furthermore, the Mahatma demanded Jewish nonviolence against the Nazi dictator in 1938 but took a milder view on Arab violence against the British in Palestine. The Harijan article, which appeared during the Arab Revolt in Palestine, deplored the use of force by the Jews in Palestine and their dependence upon the British. At the same time, he declared, “I am not defending the Arab excesses, I wish they had chosen the way of nonviolence in resisting what they rightly regarded as an unwarrantable encroachment upon their country. But according to the accepted canons of right and wrong, nothing can be said against the Arab resistance in the face of overwhelming odds.”⁶⁸

In other words, Arab political claims vis-à-vis the British were valid, and the Arabs were outnumbered by a more powerful adversary. Therefore, the Mahatma was prepared to understand if not endorse Arab violence. Ironically, only a few paragraphs earlier, he had implored the Jews to practice nonviolence against Hitler. He chose not to give similar advice to the Arabs of Palestine against the Mandate authorities. Likewise, during the Khilafat struggle, he did not demand nonviolence as a precondition of his support for the Muslims.⁶⁹

Fourth, was the Mahatma realistic when he demanded that the Jews abandon the support and patronage of the British? Was there a possibility that the Zionists could have abandoned the imperial power, sought a compromise with the Arabs, and still secured a homeland? History is not the place to answer such hypothetical questions. But it is obvious that the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine meant a massive migration of Jews from the Diaspora to Palestine. At the time of the Balfour Declaration, the Jews were a microscopic minority in Palestine, constituting less than 5 percent of the total population. This objective reality resulted in a number of rather unique international developments, such as the exclusion of Palestine from U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s fourteen principles enumerated at the end of World War I, the British Mandate over Palestine, endorsement of the Balfour Declaration by the League of Nations, Zionist opposition to the Arab exercise of self-determination, and the Zionist linkage between Palestine and the Holocaust. They all emerged from Jews being a small minority in Palestine. The entire Zionist leadership, including binationalists like Martin Buber, who advocated coexistence with the Palestinian Arabs, was unanimous on the question of unrestricted Jewish immigration. Indeed, during the darkest days of World War II, Palestine was a major refuge for the persecuted Jews of Europe.

At the same time, Jewish immigration and the resultant demographic shift in Palestine meant national suicide for the Arabs. Irrespective of their political affiliations, familial loyalties, social status, and religious beliefs, the Palestinians were unanimous in opposing Jewish immigration.⁷⁰ Jewish immigration to Palestine, the cornerstone of Zionism, was also the fundamental cause of Arab opposition. Under such circumstances, Arab-Jewish accommodation, as visualized by Mahatma Gandhi, was nothing but a fantasy.

For the very same reasons, expecting the Zionists to give up their support of British imperialism was also unrealistic. The creation of an immigration-based national home in Palestine depended upon the British, the Mandate authorities. Despite all the hurdles and restrictions, during much of the Mandate years, London was their only hope. This dependence upon the British explains the absence of any serious political contacts between the Zionists and the Mahatma or for that matter with the Indian nationalists. The success of the homeland project depended entirely upon the ability of the Zionist to project a convergence of interests with the British. How could they identify with the anti-British Mahatma and still hope to secure the support of the British? In short, realization of a Jewish homeland required the Zionists opting for the Mandate British over the Arabs in Palestine and for imperial Britain over Gandhi in India.

Fifth, Jewish critics of Gandhi at times have accused him of failing to understand Judaism. A harsh editorial in The Jewish Advocate, for example, admonished him for his lack of understanding of Jewish history. It accused him of acquiring his knowledge “from Christian missionaries. There is a strong hint of this in your remark that ‘indeed, it is a strong stigma against them [the Jews] that their ancestors crucified Jesus’—a remark, if you will forgive us, worthy of a professional missionary or a medieval scholastic.”⁷¹ Similarly, the Israeli scholar Shimoni concluded that Mahatma Gandhi “saw Judaism essentially through Christian spectacles,” resulting in “a distortion of considerable proportions… and Christian-induced misrepresentation of Judaism.”⁷²

As discussed elsewhere, one can extend this further and argue that Indian nationalists, like their counterparts in many non-Western countries, were unfamiliar or even immune to the Judeo-Christian heritage that prevailed in Europe. Despite religious and cultural proximity to Islam, in the politico-social realm, Judaism found a common cause with Christian Europe.⁷³ This Judeo-Christian heritage significantly contributed to the emergence and growth of Zionism and the eventual formation of Israel. His student days in Britain and long association with foreigners, however, did not sway Gandhi to these Judeo-Christian sentiments. The concept of divine right and biblical promises were foreign to him. Nor was he consumed by the guilty conscience that dominated mainstream European thinking during his time.

Yet Gandhi was not immune to religious influences. Like his colleagues in the nationalist struggle, he viewed the Palestinian problem through an Islamic prism. His belief that Palestine was an integral part of Jazirat al-Arab and his invocation of the injunction of the Prophet bear this out. It would be unfair and even incorrect to accuse him of compromising on truth for the sake of enlisting the support of the Indian Muslims. Nevertheless, the attitude of the Muslim population toward Palestine undoubtedly influenced his thinking. Gandhi was the leader of a nationalist movement, not a sectarian struggle, and thus could not afford to ignore the sentiments of a large segment of the Indian population. The absence of a significant Jewish presence in India also precluded the need for him to seek a compromise between Jewish and Muslim positions on Palestine.

Thus the views of Mahatma Gandhi toward the demand for a Jewish national home in Palestine were not unequivocal and consistent, as they are often presented. On issues such as Jewish violence in Palestine, the need for Arab consent for the realization of the Jewish demands, and Zionist-imperialist connections, he was fairly consistent. On other issues, the picture is more complex. His emphasis on nonviolence was neither universal nor proportionate. During the Khilafat days, he endorsed Islamic sanctions over Palestine but gradually recognized the “prior claims” of the Jews over the same territories. He saw religion as a means of promoting Hindu-Muslim unity in India and thus looked at Palestine through an Islamic prism. Though opposed to religion-based states, both in Palestine and in the Indian subcontinent, he did not reject outright Jewish claims in Palestine. Despite the widespread publicity given to his 1938 statement, as partition became inevitable in India, he began to see the events in Palestine differently. Softening his position, he began to hope that the Zionists could abandon their close links with the British and seek an accommodation with the Arabs. Given the overwhelming odds facing the Zionist leadership, neither was possible.

For their part, the Zionist interest in Gandhi was too little, too late. They sought his endorsement without offering any reciprocal political support for his nationalist struggle. The Zionists were to be partly blamed for “the image of Jews as alien to Asia,” because “they avoided an identification with anticolonial nationalist movements.”⁷⁴ Perhaps this was not possible in light of their need for British support in Palestine. The pro-British Zionist stance had an adverse impact not only on the Mahatma but also upon the Indian nationalist movement. Thus his sympathetic views toward Jewish claims to Palestine, especially after 1938, simply went unnoticed and unrecognized.

The Mahatma’s political career spanned over three decades. Yet none of the leading figures in the Zionist movement had met Gandhi in person or established political contacts. His Jewish friends during his South African period had no political or Zionist agenda, although the same cannot be said about other emissaries who were sent to India in the mid-1930 to solicit his support. However, the Zionist emissary who was sent dismissed him as a “simpleton and sham saint.” Above all, while demanding his support, the Zionist leadership was unable to reciprocate. It was not able to share or empathize with the Mahatma’s struggle against British imperialism.

This asymmetrical situation became even more lopsided as the Indian National Congress formulated its policy toward the problem in Palestine.