In 1938, as the world watched Nazi persecution intensify in Europe, Mahatma Gandhi wrote a controversial statement that would echo through the decades of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Writing in his journal Harijan, Gandhi expressed deep sympathy for the Jewish people while declaring that Palestine belonged to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English. His words challenged the moral foundations of the Zionist project in Palestine and proposed an alternative path based on his philosophy of Satyagraha, or non-violent resistance.
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Gandhi speaks on Palestine in 1938
Gandhi’s statement came at a critical juncture. The British Mandate in Palestine was entering its second decade, Jewish immigration was accelerating, and Palestinian resistance was mounting. Gandhi acknowledged his sympathy for the Jewish people, whom he compared to untouchables in Hindu society. He knew them personally from his time in South Africa and understood their historical persecution. Yet sympathy, he argued, could not blind him to justice.
Gandhi questioned the fundamental premise of Zionism: why should Jews not make their home where they were born and earned their livelihood, like other peoples? He asserted that Palestine belongs to the Arabs and that imposing Jews on the Arabs was wrong and inhuman. Most provocatively, he declared that if Jews sought Palestine as their national home, it would be wrong to enter under the shadow of British guns, for religious acts cannot be performed with bayonets or bombs.
From ancient homeland to British mandate
To understand Gandhi’s position, we must trace the historical roots of the conflict. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 was Britain’s public pledge to establish a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine. This declaration came during World War I when Britain sought Jewish support for its war effort and began planning the post-war division of Ottoman territories.
The Jewish connection to Palestine dates back over three thousand years, but after Roman dispersions between 70 and 700 AD, Arabs settled in the region. By the late 1800s, the Ottoman Empire controlled Palestine, but its collapse during World War I created opportunities for European powers to reshape the Middle East. Britain made conflicting promises during the war, assuring Arab leaders of independence while simultaneously promising a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
After World War I, the League of Nations assigned Palestine to Britain as a mandated territory in 1922. The mandate incorporated the Balfour Declaration, making Britain responsible for establishing a Jewish national home while supposedly safeguarding the rights of the existing population. This contradictory mission would prove impossible to fulfill.
The partition that divided a land
By 1947, Britain, exhausted from World War II and unable to reconcile Jewish and Arab demands, handed the Palestine question to the United Nations. The UN General Assembly proposed Resolution 181, partitioning Palestine into separate Arab and Jewish states, with Jerusalem under international administration.
The partition plan was deeply controversial. It granted Jews over 56 percent of the land despite them owning less than 7 percent and constituting only one-third of the population. Palestinian Arabs, who owned the vast majority of the land and comprised two-thirds of the population, desperately opposed the plan. Many Arab leaders might have accepted Jewish settlement elsewhere in the region, but Palestinians living in Palestine could not accept losing their homeland.
On May 14, 1948, the State of Israel was declared, and war immediately erupted. By the war’s end, Israel controlled 77.4 percent of Palestine’s territory, far exceeding even the generous UN partition allocation. This moment marked the beginning of what Palestinians call the Nakba, or catastrophe.
The Nakba: A people displaced
The 1948 war’s human cost was staggering. Approximately 750,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled from their homes, becoming refugees in neighboring Arab countries, the West Bank, or Gaza Strip. This mass displacement was not accidental but resulted from deliberate military actions, including massacres and expulsion orders.
The consequences were profound. Palestinian villages were systematically destroyed to prevent refugees from returning. Communities that had existed for centuries vanished. Families were scattered across borders, carrying only memories and keys to homes they would never reclaim. The approximately 150,000 Palestinians who remained inside Israel found themselves a minority in their own land, subject to military rule until 1966.
The displacement continued beyond 1948. The Six-Day War of 1967 brought more catastrophe. Israel occupied the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem, bringing all of historic Palestine under Israeli control. Another 300,000 Palestinians were displaced, many of them refugees for the second time.
The Intifadas: Stones against occupation
Palestinian resistance took many forms over the decades, but the Intifadas marked turning points in the struggle. The First Intifada erupted in December 1987 after an Israeli truck driver killed four Palestinian workers in what was perceived as deliberate revenge. This sparked a sustained uprising in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
The First Intifada was largely characterized by civil disobedience, mass demonstrations, and stone-throwing against Israeli forces. Palestinians used tactics including commercial strikes, tax refusal, and other acts of non-violent resistance alongside more violent confrontations. The Israeli response was severe. Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin infamously ordered soldiers to break the bones of protesters. Israeli forces killed more than 1,100 Palestinians during the uprising, including 250 children.
The First Intifada created immense international sympathy for Palestinians and led to the Oslo Accords in 1993. However, these accords failed to end occupation or halt Israeli settlement expansion. The Second Intifada began in September 2000 after provocative visits by Israeli politician Ariel Sharon to Jerusalem’s holy sites. This uprising was more violent than the first, characterized by suicide bombings, military operations, and harsh Israeli repression. The death toll was far higher on both sides before hostilities ended around 2005.
The Gandhian solution: Satyagraha for Palestine
What would Gandhi have said about these developments? His 1938 message remains startlingly relevant. Gandhi counseled Jews to offer Satyagraha to Arabs not under British guns but based on their own moral strength. He suggested they seek to win Arab hearts rather than conquer Arab land. A contemporary Gandhi would likely have told Palestinians to abandon violent methods in favor of sustained civil disobedience and non-violent resistance.
Some observers have noted this path. Paul Wolfowitz suggested that if Palestinians had adopted Gandhian methods, they could have achieved enormous change quickly. The First Intifada’s largely non-violent early phase drew unprecedented international support for the Palestinian cause. When the movement became more militarized in the Second Intifada, that support diminished, and fundamentalist groups like Hamas gained credibility through violence.
To Israelis, Gandhi would likely have preached a different form of Satyagraha: discarding dependence on Western military support, genuinely listening to Palestinian grievances, and seeking true friendship rather than domination. He would have asked both sides to recognize their common humanity and the futility of solving political disputes through force.
Gandhi’s vision was radical in 1938 and remains radical today. He proposed that Jews prove their claim to being a chosen people by choosing non-violence. He suggested that every country could be their home through loving service, not aggression. Most provocatively, he insisted that settling in Palestine under British military protection violated the very spiritual ideals that made Palestine sacred.
What do you think? Could Gandhi’s principles of Satyagraha offer a path forward in the Arab-Israeli conflict today? How might sustained non-violent resistance from both sides transform a conflict that has now lasted over a century?
References
- https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/lsquo-the-jews-rsquo-by-gandhi
- https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2018/11/2/more-than-a-century-on-the-balfour-declaration-explained
- https://www.un.org/unispal/history2/origins-and-evolution-of-the-palestine-problem/part-i-1917-1947/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandate_for_Palestine
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Partition_Plan_for_Palestine
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Palestinian_expulsion_and_flight
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakba
- https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2017/5/23/the-nakba-did-not-start-or-end-in-1948
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Intifada
- https://www.britannica.com/topic/intifada
- https://imeu.org/resources/resources/explainer-the-first-intifada/240
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Intifada
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