2 October 2019 is observed as the birthday of Mahatma Gandhi. This year is extraordinary as the world is celebrating 150th birth anniversary of Gandhi. Indian masses respect him by calling Rashtrapitatha, after leading the Indian masses in the struggle against the colonial powers. His popularity was mainly due to his successful attempt to unify India to liberate from British control, that too without any military power. His way of life, virtues and teachings have set the tone of values we share today.
Moreover, that is why famous quotes and teachings by him continue to hold a strong meaning as we celebrate the important day. He is counted as one of the most famous leaders in world history, who inspired people across the globe in different ways. His ideas, views and practices finally resulted in the Indian independence and led to civil rights and freedom movements all over the world. That is why his legacy resonates in the minds of millions of people even today. His philosophical, personal and political discourses continue to serve as a source of wisdom for academicians, intellectuals and leaders standing up against global injustice. This writing is on Gandhi’s take on the Arab- Jewish conflict in general and the question of Palestine in specific.
The Arab Palestinians are already struggling to live in dignity by different policy measures and laws introduced by the Israeli authority over the years. Adding fuel to the existing troubled situation, Benjamin Netanyahu, the longest-serving Prime Minister of Israel, has announced his intention to annex large areas of occupied Palestinian territories if he is re-elected. All these developments since the disintegration of Ottoman Empire, during two World Wars, during the Arab- Israeli Wars and even now have not just hurt the heart of Palestinians, but create obstacles to their aspiration of statehood and also made their everyday living impossible and insecure. Contextualising the evolution and contemporary status of Palestine and the plight of Palestinians, the author analyse the relevance of Gandhian ideas and views on the question of Palestine by revisiting his two articles published in Harijan in 1938 and 1946.
Mahatma Gandhi and the Question of Palestine
The manner in which Gandhi became involved in the Jewish-Arab conflict in Palestine is one aspect of his political life which has hitherto attracted little public attention and research. It has to be remembered that Gandhi’s views on Palestine relate roughly to the years between the two World Wars. In an article titled “The Jews” published in Harijan on 26 November 1938, Gandhi stated that his sympathies are with the Jews, some of whom have been his friends since his days in South Africa. He adds by saying that, he knows about the persecution suffered by the Jews. But, he draws a line here saying “his sympathy for the Jews cannot blind him to the requirements of justice”. Almost a decade before independence, Gandhi, had clearly articulated his position on the clash between Palestinian Arabs and Jews.
Gandhi declared: “The cry for the national home for the Jews does not make much appeal to me. ……..Why should they not, like other peoples of the earth, make that country their home where they are born and where they earn their livelihood?” (The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi 1938: 239)
He continues,
“Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs. What is going on in Palestine today cannot be justified by any moral code of conduct……. Surely it would be a crime against humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews partly or wholly as their national home….. Surely it would be a crime against humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews partly or wholly as their national home.” (The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi 1938: 239).
This remark made almost a decade before the creation of Israel has been the widely accepted as the statement of Gandhi on the foreign policy of India, especially on the Israel- Palestine conflict and on the wider Arab world or the Middle East. According to him, the settlement of the Jews in the Palestinian territory is akin to a religious act that rules out the use of force. In the 1938 article, Gandhi starts a paragraph by saying (and now a word to the Jews in Palestine).
I have no doubt that they are going about it the wrong way. the Palestine of the Biblical conception is not a geographical tract. It is in their hearts. But if they must look to the Palestine of geography as their national home, it is wrong to enter it under the shadow of the British gun. A religious act cannot be performed with the aid of the bayonet or the bomb. They can settle in Palestine only by the goodwill of the Arabs. They should seek to convert the Arab heart. (The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi 1938: 242).
In the concluding paragraph Gandhi says:
Let the Jews who claim to be the chosen race prove their title by choosing the way of non-violence for vindicating their position on earth. Every country is their home including Palestine not by aggression but by loving service (The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi 1938: 242).
In another article published in Harijan titled “Jews and Palestine”, written on 21 July 1946, after the German massacre of the Jews was over, immediate after the World War II and in the previous year of United Nations Special Commission on Palestine (UNSCOP) proposed the partition plan, he stood stern on his long-held and old stand on the forced Jewish occupation of the Palestinian land, by saying,
No wonder that my sympathy goes out to the Jews in their unenviably sad plight. But one would have thought adversity would teach them lessons of peace. Why should they depend upon American money or British arms for forcing themselves on an unwelcome land? Why should they resort to terrorism to make good their forcible landing in Palestine??” (The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi 1946: 273).
As Simon Panter-Brick observed, there are four phases of Mahatma Gandhi’s intermittent assessment of the situation in West Asia after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The first phase spans 1918- 1936 starts with Gandhi’s support of the Ottoman Caliph at the end of the First World War. For Gandhi, Palestine had, in effect, become a side issue. He was fully engaged with the problems of India itself, which required maintenance of Muslim-Hindu unity. The second unexpectedly reveals a secret overture of the Mahatma to the Jewish Agency. The third sees Gandhi counselling the Jews in their reaction to Nazism and the partition proposal of the Peel Commission in the second half of the 1930s. The last phase leaves one guessing as to what were Gandhi’s final convictions in the matter (Panter-Brick 2009: 127). Simone Panter-Brick’s Book titled Jews, Arabs and Imperial Interests: Gandhi and the Middle East observes that Gandhi believed
Palestine to be an Arab country where the Jewish minority, as in Germany, depended on the goodwill of the majority of the population. In the late 1930s, he advised the Jews, both in Palestine and in Europe, to use the same nonviolent resistance that he had successfully employed in India. The Jewish response categorically rejected the possibility of being left to the gentle mercies of the Arabs or the compassionate embrace of the Nazis. Gandhi did not succeed in achieving one of his ultimate goals, a peaceful end to British rule in India, and he failed to prevent partition (Panter-Brick 2008).
Gandhi was against the idea of two separate states for Muslims and Hindus in India. He also rejected the idea of the partition of Palestine along religious lines. Gandhi thought that there would be no more problems after the end of British colonial rule (Panter-Brick 2008). In a lecture delivered by Rajmohan Gandhi, a noted historian and the grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, on 18th April 2017 in the British House of Commons, he says, M.K Gandhi was a very Indian, a human and inconsistent. He adds, “Gandhi need not have, and should not have, offered his utopian advice to the British and to the Jews”. He continues:
Yet Gandhi may have been right in expressing a sense of injustice at the forcible conversion of Arab-majority Palestine into a Jewish homeland, and in saying that the entry of European or other Jews into Palestine should take place with Arab agreement. And surely he was right in suggesting then and later, before his assassination on 30 January 1948, that in the end the Arabs and Jews of Palestine, and the Jews from outside who wished to reside there, had to find a negotiated agreement (Gandhi 2017: 5).
Conclusion
The gradual and continuous process of occupation, settlement and annexation of Palestine land by the Jewish people with the support of the state of Israel is the major challenge which the Palestinians face now. The social, political and economic status of the Palestinians living in refugee camps in the region, in the occupied territories and inside Israel need much attention to solve the issue of this stateless group. In light of fruitless efforts made by regional and international mediators to solve the issue on a ‘final map’ that satisfies both Palestinians and Jews, it is important to remember that what Gandhi observed and opined way back in 1938 and 1946. He was against a partition or a “two-state solution” rather stood for a federal state. The same attitude he kept on the partition of India along religious lines. He was against the argument that such a kind of division of territories would eventually resolve clashes and conflicts between different groups. In other words, he was sure that this kind of temporary solution will not create two peaceful neighbouring states but can trouble the whole region.
Notes
1. The honorary name means great soul in the Sanskrit language. Gandhi received the name from Rabindranath Tagore, a Bengali short-story writer and poet and the first person of Asian and Indian origin to be awarded the Nobel Prize in 1913
2 It was Nethaji Subhas Chandra Bose, one of the most important freedom fighters of India who called Gandhi Rastrapita, in 1944. The term means ‘father of the nation’. Later, Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister had announced that the “Father of the Nation is no more” when he was assassinated in 1948.” Both the leaders used the term in radio addresses.
References
Gandhi, Rajmohan (2017): “Mahatma Gandhi and the Wounds of History: Palestine, India and the British Empire in the 20th century”, Lecture delivered on 18th April 2017 in Committee Room 14 of the British House of Commons, available at http://www.balfourproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Balfour-talk-18-April-2017-as-delivered4.pdf
Panter-Brick, Simone (2008): Gandhi and the Middle East Jews, Arabs and Imperial Interests, London: I.B.Tauris & co ltd.
The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (1938): “The Jews,” Vol. 74, No. 319, 9 September, 1938 – 29 January -1939: 239- 242.
The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (1946): “Jews and Palestine,” Vol. 91, No. 331, 20 May, 1946 – 8 August, 1946: 272-273.
