2. Mahatma Gandhi and the Jewish National Home
Writing in his Harijan weekly in November 1938, Mohandas
Karamchand Gandhi (more commonly known as Mahatma Gandhi) ob-
served: “Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that En gland
belongs to the En glish and France to the French.”^1 This supposedly un-
equivocal endorsement of the Palestinians and repudiation of the Zionist
demand for a Jewish national home fi gures prominently in Indian dis-
courses on the Arab- Israeli confl ict.^2 It is almost impossible to locate any
discussion on the Middle East without a reference to this quotation. For
example, meeting in Calcutta (now Kolkata) in August 1997, the plenary
session of the All- India Congress Committee (AICC) passed a resolution
on the international situation. Coming more than fi ve years after the
normalization of relations with Israel, it observed: “The Congress recalls
that it was Mahatma Gandhi who said Palestine belongs to the Palestin-
ians as En gland belongs to the En glish or France to the French.”^3 Even
the communists, who once accused the Mahatma of being an agent of
British imperialism,^4 do not hesitate to rely on him to explain, justify,
and rationalize their stance toward Israel.^5 One could go the extent of
suggesting that this is the Mahatma’s most widely quoted statement on
international aff airs.
No exception can possibly be taken to the natural desire of the Jews to found a
home in Palestine. But they must wait for its fulfi llment till Arab opinion is
ripe for it. —Mahatma Gandhi