What were the views of Gandhi on Zionism ?
Mahatma Gandhi recognized the distinction between settling among indigenous people and outright expelling them when he was urged to lend his support to the Zionist mission by Jewish philosopher Martin Buber.
In 1938, Ben-Gurion encouraged Buber to exert pressure on some prominent moral personalities to demonstrate their public support for Zionism. They believed that Gandhi’s endorsement, as the leader of a nonviolent national movement against imperialism, would be particularly beneficial, and they were willing to utilize his respect for Buber to obtain it. Gandhi’s major remark on Palestine and the Jewish question occurred in a widely circulated editorial in the Harijan on November 11, 1938, in the midst of great uprising against the British government’s pro-Zionist policies by indigenous Palestinians. Gandhi opened his article by expressing his complete sympathy for the Jews, who had endured centuries of terrible abuse and persecution. However, he added:
My sympathy does not blind me to the requirements of justice. The cry for the national home for the Jews does not make much appeal to me. The sanction for it is sought in the Bible and in the tenacity with which the Jews have hankered after their return to Palestine. 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? 1
Gandhi thus called into doubt the political Zionist movement’s fundamental rationale, opposing the notion of a Jewish state in the promised land by pointing out that “Palestine of the Biblical conception is not a geographical tract.” Thus, Gandhi was opposed to the Zionist goal on political as well as religious grounds. The British government’s sponsorship of that scheme only served to further alienate Gandhi.
He had no illusions about who owned Palestine:
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 … 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.2
Gandhi’s stance to the Palestine dilemma is complex, spanning from an ethical position to political reality. What’s remarkable is that, despite his adamant belief in the inseparability of religion and politics, he persistently and passionately opposed Zionism’s cultural and religious nationalism. A religious justification for declaring a nation state made no substantive sense to him. Buber attempted to justify Zionism in response to this article, but Gandhi had evidently had enough, and the correspondence ceased.
Indeed, the Zionist movement’s need for space was not motivated by the desire to save oppressed Jews, but by the desire to acquire as much of Palestine as possible with the fewest possible inhabitants.
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