28 mahatma gandhi and the jewish national homeJews.^11 He was familiar with the historic suff erings of the Jewish people.
Placing their plight within the context of his commitments to the uplift-
ing of India’s downtrodden, he saw the Jews as “the untouchables of
Christianity.” For him, the “parallel between their treatment by Chris-
tians and the treatment of untouchables by Hindus is very close. Reli-
gious sanction has been invoked in both cases for the justifi cation of the
inhuman treatment meted out to them.”^12 Their miniscule population in
India did not prevent him from frequently referring to Jews along with
other religious communities. One can fi nd innumerable references to
the Jews in the Mahatma’s speeches and writings.
The real problem was not Gandhi’s unfamiliarity with Jewish suff er-
ing but his failure, if not inability, to see the link between Jewish suff ering
and their po liti cal aspirations for a homeland. The infl uence of his Jewish
friends in South Africa upon his understanding of the Jewish struggle
for statehood was minimal, if it existed at all. Lamenting on this, Gideon
Shimoni suggests that not only were Polak and Kallenbach not “equipped
authentically to interpret Judaism” to Gandhi but that they were “also
alienated from normative Jewry, both in the religious and in the commu-
nal sense.”^13 Moreover, the Mahatma did not suggest any means of resolv-
ing the problems facing the “untouchables” of Christianity. In the ab-
sence of a link between Jewish suff ering and its resolution, Gandhi’s
position becomes unequivocal as presented by conventional scholarship
on the subject. It becomes easier and even inevitable to agree with his
statement that “sympathy” for Jews “does not blind me to the requirement
of justice.”^14
Long before the Zionists made a concerted eff ort to win him over, the
Mahatma had formulated his position on Palestine. He adopted a pro-
Palestinian position in the immediate aftermath of World War I, which
generated anti- British sentiments in India, especially among the Muslim
population. The dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire resulted in
Indian Muslims rallying around the caliph, who was viewed by the
believers as their temporal head. The Mahatma perceived the mass agita-
tion among the Muslim community, the Khilafat movement, as an op-
portunity to forge the necessary but conspicuously absent Hindu- Muslim
unity against the British.^15
In March 1921, the Mahatma categorically defi ned the Jewish rights in
Palestine. Repudiating the Balfour Declaration of November 1917, he
observed: