Attending a conference in Johannesburg on solidarity with Palestine, I said, “Let me begin by clarifying that I am not here on behalf of my government….” Thunderous applause greeted that opening line. It reflected the extent to which the “Arab street” has been grievously alienated by Narendra Modi’s declaration of “total solidarity” with Israel, a 180-degree turn from our rock-solid stand with the Palestinians for most of the past century.
To understand the Arab shock, we need to go back to the view that Mahatma Gandhi expressed in 1938 even as the question of Jewish settlement in Palestinian lands began to assume proportions that threatened the very lives and livelihood of the indigenous Palestinian people and even their existence in their traditional homeland. Gandhiji wrote in his magazine Harijan (November 26, 1938) with reference to the racial and religious discrimination the Jews had faced for millennia and the vicious pogroms in Europe, east and west, climaxed by Hitler’s “final solution”—the liquidation of the entire community—that, “My sympathies are all with the Jews, but my sympathy does not blind me to the requirements of justice. The cry for the national home for the Jews does not make much appeal to me….They can settle in Palestine only by the goodwill of the Arabs. They should seek to convert the Arab heart. The same God rules the Arab heart who rules the Jewish heart.” He formulated his basic position in a famous aphorism: “Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense as England to the English and France to the French.”
This story was originally published in theweek.in. Read the full story here .
