38 mahatma gandhi and the jewish national homeand 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 signifi cant 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 un-
eventful 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 cor-
respondent: “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 delib-
erating 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 abandon-
ment of their po liti cal demands. These public statements were made long
after the 1938 Harijan article. Moreover, in his July 1937 confi dential state-
ment to Kallenbach, Gandhi was more candid. “No exception can possibly
be taken to the natural desire of the Jews to fi nd 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 Ar-
abs” statement, the Mahatma had moved away signifi cantly from this posi-
tion. 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 fi nd 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 signifi cantly diluted, if not changed, his opinion on
Palestine. Highlighting them would erode the claim that he was consis-