Prophet of Peace

JANUARY 30, RIGHT WHEN small batches of hostages captured by Hamas were being released, I was in Israel. It was, of course, the 76th anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination. I found myself reflecting, once again, on the importance of his life and message—indeed, the meaning of his death. Which took on a different meaning, in the very special place and context of the Middle East. Especially when the Indians in my group did not remember or mention Gandhi, even on the day of his martyrdom, including an official from the Indian embassy.

Israel is one of the most complicated and difficult countries in the world, besieged by violence since its very foundation in 1948. The same year that Gandhi was murdered and less than a year after our own blood-stained independence. The ex-Mahatma is, of course, unpopular both in India and Israel. In India because the ruling dispensation seems to have adopted and promoted his ideological arch-rival, Vinayak Damodar “Veer” Savarkar, as its preferred mascot.

Savarkar had no use of Gandhi’s non-violence, whether as a tactic against British colonialism or India’s own internal and intimate enemy, Muslim separatism. Today, many Hindutva advocates accuse Gandhi of weakening Hindus, ceding Pakistan to Muslims, indeed, of much more and much worse. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, perhaps, a notable exception, still loves and revers Bapu. But I may be wrong.

In Israel, too, Gandhi is a controversial figure. Largely because of his oft-quoted remark that the Jews would have achieved much more by a principled self-sacrifice against Hitler’s hideous genocidal pogrom, whose “final solution” was the Holocaust. Gandhi is quoted by Louis Fisher, his biographer, as saying: “Hitler killed five million Jews. It is the greatest crime of our time. But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife…it would have aroused the world and the people of Germany…. As it is they succumbed anyway in their millions” (Fischer, The Life of Mahatma Gandhi, 1984, p 435).

This sounds like a heartless and insensitive comment, especially given that in his vast volume of published Collected Works, this is very little about the horrifying Holocaust that befell the Jews. Instead, we have Gandhi’s audacious, some would say delusory, attempts to woo Hitler in his two letters of July 23, 1939, and December 24, 1940. In both, he addressed Hitler as “Dear friend.” Not surprisingly, both letters went unanswered. In the first, he appeals to Hitler to end the war: “you are today the one person in the world who can prevent a war that may reduce humanity to the savage state.” In the second, he goes farther: Hitler’s pronouncements and actions, he says, “leave no room for doubt that many of your acts are monstrous and unbecoming of human dignity.”

Gandhi’s appeals, seen as indicative of his naïveté and ignorance, are considered too timid, if not abhorrent, by most Jews inside Israel and elsewhere. That Gandhi was also against Zionism as a political ideology does not help. He did not support the movement to establish a Jewish state in Palestine or Judea, as it used to be known till the Romans changed its name. To Gandhi, Zionism was more a spiritual mission whose intent was to discover the inner Jerusalem, the city of peace, and dwell in it than to establish a Jewish state in the ancestral lands.

As he said in his famous pronouncement of November 11, 1938, published in Harijan on November 26, “My sympathies are all with the Jews. I have known them intimately in South Africa. Some of them became life-long companions. Through these friends I came to learn much of their age-long persecution. … But my sympathy does not blind me.…The cry for national home for the Jews does not make much appeal to me…. Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same way that England belongs to the English or France to the French.” This statement led to the famous exchange between Gandhi and noted Jewish thinker, Martin Buber. We must not also forget that Ben Gurion, Israel’s founding prime minister was a great admirer of Gandhi and the latter’s method of peaceful and non-violent resistance.

Yet, especially after Hamas’ ghastly and gruesome October 7, 2023 attack, even moderate and left-leaning Israelis are less prone to feel sympathetic to Gandhian ideas and ideals. Ironically, then, the antipathy to Gandhi is another thing that Indians and Israelis have in common. That is why we need to flip Gandhi and the Jewish question altogether—it is the Palestinians who can use Gandhi much more effectively than the Jews today.

I would argue that Gandhi’s message of peace should be embraced by Palestinians. Because the methods of violence adopted by Hamas—terrorism, rape, and attacking Israel—have yielded no results. Except the terrible destruction wrought on Gaza by their actions, with numbers as high as the reported 45,000 dead. Gandhian satyagraha would yield better results than Jihadism.

If Hamas were to renounce violence, terrorism, and the ideologies of extremism and Jihadism, there could be a significant shift in both the local and international action on the Palestinian struggle. The first Intifada, we might remember, was marred by stone pelting and even some Molotov cocktails, but was largely non-violent. It managed to shift global opinion and led to the Oslo Accords, an attempt at peace which, although flawed, was a step in the right direction.

A return to non-violent action could be conducive to development and prosperity in Gaza. If the energies currently directed towards conflict were instead channeled into education, health, and economic development, Gaza might become a global economic hub of stability, peace, and prosperity. Peaceful coexistence would also open avenues for international aid, investment, and collaboration, which are essential for rebuilding and development.

But will this happen?

From what I have learnt during this visit, Hamas seems to have captured the minds and hearts of the inhabitants of Gaza. Almost every home has Jew-haters and anti-Israeli propaganda, in addition to weapons. Urea is used to make bombs, cement to construct bunkers and underground tunnels. Islamist violence has supporters, tacit or explicit, not only in the region, but worldwide, including zones of assault closer home to us in India.

Fortunately, I also met Arabs who want to live in peace with Jews. Only time will tell when the conflict with end. But, even without an immediate resolution in sight, we must be clear what our position must be. We must choose co-existence, peace, and the rule of law over unrest, violence, and extremism, whether religious or secular.

Israel-Palestine conflictMahatma GandhiPalestinianssatyagrahaterrorismviolence