*3.2. Gandhi, Israel and Palestine*

I showed the limits to Gandhi's *satyagraha* when it comes to the situation of Jews in Palestine and in Germany in the 1930s, but *satyagraha* contains positive challenges for the present. What would Gandhi say today in the situation of Israel and Palestine, in a time of new anti-Semitism? Anti-Semitism reappears today in the form of radical anti-Zionism that makes an equation between Israeli Jews and Nazis and inverts the Holocaust. Gandhi would not have supported the idea of the creation of a Jewish State, but it is questionable whether, in his pragmatic approach, he would agree with the dismantling of such a state, once established. He would perhaps have pled for the coexistence of a Palestinian state alongside the Israeli one, or for a binational state that cares for the welfare of all. In India, he opposed partition and pleaded for unity, regardless race or creed. Would he think today, like Buber, that the land was large enough for Jews and Arabs?

Sure, we live in quite different times than Gandhi. Gandhi's view on Zionism in 1938 was much influenced by the situation in India, a situation that changed with the establishment of Pakistan. Moreover, Israel is not Great Britain and the Palestinians are not Indians. However, the answer to the question on the relevance of Gandhi's thought in Israel/Palestine is not without importance. As Margaret Chatterjee writes, Gandhi believed "that the most urgent struggles against injustice can be humanized, so to say, by the persuasive and creative power which is released when men of goodwill band together, with enmity to none, in order to better their lives and those of their neighbours". (Chatterjee 1983, p. 6).

Jews are back in Israel and the Jewish state is a fact. At the same time, demonization, delegitimization, double standard thinking and black-white morality concerning the state of Israel are very much present, also and foremost in the BDS movement. The Star of David is compared with the swastika and Israel is compared with Nazism and South African apartheid. I think that it is questionable whether Gandhi would continue to say that Palestine belongs to the Arabs. I guess he would rather adopt a pragmatic standpoint and suggest what he calls "the beauty of compromise" in order to advance the peace process and to create a more peaceful situation. (Gandhi 2011, p. 178) He would oppose the Israeli occupation of the West Bank as well as the Palestinian armed resistance and the recourse to terrorism. In line with his peaceful thinking, he would disapprove of any form of fanatic nationalism, hatred and demonization, in an attempt to create a more peaceful society by melting the hearts of people from both sides.

Gandhi's voice continues to be heard and interpreted in different ways. Revisiting Gandhi, the Australian scholar John Docker, for instance, presents the historian Flavius Josephus as a Jew, who resisted armed rebellion of Jewish nationalists and became a prolific diasporic writer and author of the historical tract *The Jewish War* (75–79). Docker links Josephus's position to that of Daniel Boyarin, who contrasts the "masculine" Zionism with the "femminized" (sic) Talmudic narrative about Johanan ben Zakkai, a Tanna of the first century CE, who escaped besieged Jerusalem in a coffin, pretending to be dead. Johanan ben Zakkai negotiated with Vespasianus, saving Yavne and its sages. (Talmud Bavli Gittin

56a–b) Boyarin opposes the non-violent diasporic Jewish culture to a patriarchal Zionism. Docker concludes that Boyarin comes close to Josephus' vision of the importance of nonviolence in the Jewish tradition: "In a world still marked by national and religious violence, nonviolence as argued for by Josephus in antiquity and Gandhi in the first part of the twentieth century—and by Daniel Boyarin in his musings on rabbinic Judaism, Josephus, and the Zionist myth of Masada—remains the only hope for humanity in a disastrous world". (Docker 2007, p. 217) Following Daniel Boyarin and identifying Zionism with mere violence, Docker himself became an anti-Zionist Gandhi *redivivus*, who was unable to see Zionism as a legitimate expression of Judaism.

For Shamir Hassan of the Aligarh Muslim University, Gandhi's disapproval of Zionism was the result of some basic attitudes. First of all, Gandhi could not conceive a state of European migrants in Asia. Second, he disagreed with "the Zionists' demand that the whole world must share in, and pay for, the guilt of Nazi Germany's persecution of the Jews". Finally, he rejected the almost total dependence of the Zionists on political and financial aid from Europe and America. Hassan concludes: "To these attitudes the Zionists did not, and still do not have an answer". (Hassan 1993, p. 751) In Hassan's rereading of Gandhi, there is no place for Zionism; it is fundamentally rebuffed.

In contrast, P.R. Kumaraswamy of Nehru University, author of a book on Gandhi and Israel (Kumaraswamy 2017), contests the assumption that the lack of normalization of relations between Israel and India was Gandhian, whereas normalization in 1992 was un-Gandhian. (Kumaraswamy 2018, p. 147) He writes that those who venerate Gandhi's "consistent" opposition to Zionism "carefully avoid not only Gandhi's duality over Arab violence but also do not contextualize Bose's Nazi-imperial linkages". (Id., p. 162)38.

Apparently, other re-readings of Gandhi than that of Docker and Hassan belong to the possibilities. Gandhi is more than the traffic circle in Kiryat Gat that bears his name. His counsel to the Jews in Palestine to contribute to the creation of a peaceful society is congruent with the profoundly Jewish idea that the land of Israel remains always "promised" in a Holy History. In the Hebrew Bible it is written that the land belongs to God (Lev. 24:23).<sup>39</sup> Several Gandhian steps in Israel/Palestine are imaginable. Jews and Arabs could say, as Gandhi said against the landowners in India that "the land belongs to the Lord of us all". (Fischer 1984, p. 563) Jews and Arabs could take care of securing buildings, just as Gandhi who decided in 1946,—when violence between Hindus and Muslims erupted,—that one had to choose one Moslem and one Hindu in each village in order to guarantee the safety of all. (Id., p. 559) Like Gandhi we could fast when iniquities are committed or as a means for social action. We could step in Gandhi's path, who desired not only to liberate his own people, but others as well. Israelis and Palestinians could march together in peaceful marches. One of Gandhi's profound insights was that *moksha* was not purely individual, it had to be interpreted in a collective way: liberation was liberation of all. (Chatterjee 1983, pp. 155–73) One does not have to wait for leaders to act; one may start from the bottom, even with very few lovers of peace. Gandhi himself started the famous Salt-March in 1930 against the British Empire's salt monopole with less than one hundred people.

The Mahatma influenced peace activists globally, among the most famous Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, Albert Luthuli, Vaclav Havel and Martin Luther King Jr. In Israel and Palestine, we should not stop to envision a better future, given the present situation in which violence frequently turns lethal. One does not have to necessarily suspect all peace initiatives as unacceptable foreign influence and undermining the existing social fabric. Dissidents, who protest against an unjust regime are the ones who most care for social cohesion. The parties involved could stop seeing themselves as victims and blaming the other and, instead, approach the other as a real partner, with whom coexistence is possible and necessary. Self-interest may be transcended in view of the liberation of all. Douglas Allen of Maine University writes that we can learn from the action-oriented *karma yoga* of Gandhi. (Allen 1997, p. 10) In his interpretation of the Gita, Gandhi sees a way of overcoming attachment, ego-desires and cravings. The selfless action, which treat friend

and foe alike, was a path to become one with the Divine. Following Gandhi's will to communicate, notwithstanding everything, could be dangerous. Gandhi himself paid with his life, as did Martin Luther King and Yitschaq Rabin, another "soldier of peace". But it is a courageous alternative to the existing violence.

Gandhi's lofty position implies that violence and injustice have to be actively resisted. Conscious of modern man's and modern states' temptation of violence, he proposed a way that one can still adopt progressively, if the situation allows. Violence as relational reality could be diminished in a positive, non-violent way. Justice always has to be pursued by just means. The biblical command: "Justice, justice shall you pursue" (Deut. 16:20) implies that justice has to be realized justly. In Gandhi's parlance: the relation between means and end is like the seed and the tree. However, religions have been hospitable as well as hostile. In the name of religions, unholy wars have been waged. (Sacks 2005) We could become neighbor religions, in positive interaction with others. Religious reconciliation could bring about a hoped for more peaceful coexistence. Hans Küng has said that there will be no world peace without the peace between religions. (Küng 2005, p. 890) If religions start relating to each other, violence can be reduced.

The Norwegian founder of peace studies Johan Galtung wrote about different forms of violence: direct violence, but also structural and cultural violence. (Palaver 2020b, pp. 3–4) The newest form of violence is frequently cultural. (Strømmen and Schmiedel 2020). "Transdifference" in which distinctiveness, mutual influence and communication go together, could avoid cultural isolation and cultural relativism and promote interculturality. It could bridge between religions and at the same time emphasize the specificity and embeddedness of the religious other.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflict of interest.
