Mahatma Gandhi’s views on Israel, Palestine

Gandhi had deep sympathy for the Jewish people

Gandhi had deep sympathies for the Jewish people, who had been historically persecuted for their religion.

“My sympathies are all with the Jews… They have been the untouchables of Christianity. 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,” Gandhi wrote in the Harijan article.

“The German persecution of the Jews seems to have no parallel in history,” Gandhi said. He expressed concern over Britain’s policy of placating Adolf Hitler (before World War II broke out in September 1939), and said that for the cause of humanity and to prevent the persecution of the Jewish people, even a war with Germany would be “completely justified”.

“If there ever could be a justifiable war in the name of and for humanity, a war against Germany, to prevent the wanton persecution of a whole race, would be completely justified,” he wrote.

Gandhi had a long association with the Jewish people; during his time in South Africa (1893-1914), most of his friends were Jewish. Notable among them were the likes of Hermann Kallenbach, who remained a lifelong associate of the Mahatma.

In her book Gandhi and his Jewish Friends (1992), Margaret Chatterjee wrote that Gandhi saw the East European Jewish immigrants in South Africa “as a group of people who, like Indians, were being victimised for no fault of their own… [They] became his closest friends and on whom he depended for his social and political work both in Johannesburg and London.”

But he had a problem with a Zionist state

Despite his sympathies for the Jewish people, Gandhi was not keen on a Zionist state. He believed that a call for a Jewish homeland would undermine the Jewish people’s cause to be treated with dignity, and as equals elsewhere in the world.

“If the Jews have no home but Palestine, will they relish the idea of being forced to leave the other parts of the world in which they are settled?” Gandhi wrote. He added that the Jewish claim for a national home afforded “a colourable justification for the German expulsion of the Jews”.

He wrote: “If I were a Jew and were born in Germany, I would claim Germany as my home even as the tallest gentile German may, and challenge him to shoot me or cast me in the dungeon; I would refuse to be expelled or to submit to discriminating treatment”.

Given the Holocaust (1941-45) that would begin soon, this view might sound naive; however, Gandhi was not alone in thinking this way.

He had, however, another reason to oppose a Jewish homeland, especially in Palestine.

“It is wrong and inhumane to impose the Jews on the Arabs…,” he wrote. “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,” Gandhi said.

The Mahatma believed that the way the Zionist project was proceeding, with British support, was fundamentally violent.

“A religious act [the act of Jews returning to Palestine] cannot be performed with the aid of the bayonet or the bomb,” he wrote. Gandhi felt that the Jews could settle in Palestine only “with the goodwill of Arabs”, and for that they had to “forgo the British bayonet”.

A change of heart? Not really

Some have argued that Gandhi had a change of heart when it came to the question of Israel, and that his position on the issue changed significantly after the horrors of the Holocaust became known.

A conversation that he had with his biographer Louis Fischer in June 1946 is often quoted in this regard. Gandhi reportedly said: “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.”

However, there is little evidence beyond Fischer’s writings that Gandhi indeed said that “Jews have a prior claim”. After a newspaper published an article about Gandhi’s seeming support for the Zionist cause (citing his conversation with Fischer), Gandhi issued a clarification in Harijan in July 1946.

“But for their [the Jews’] heartless persecution, probably no question of return to Palestine would ever have arisen,” he wrote in “Jews And Palestine”. “They have erred grievously in seeking to impose themselves on Palestine with the aid of America and Britain and now with the aid of naked terrorism,” he wrote.

This is an updated version of an article first published last year