Homeland conflict: Promised land and the betrayal of Palestine

Pascal Alan Nazareth

Mahatma Gandhi’s views about the Jews and Palestine were as clear as they were prophetic. In his journal, Harijan, Gandhi wrote in November 1938: “My sympathies are all with the Jews. They have been the untouchables of Christianity. The tyrants of old never went so mad as Hitler. If ever war could be justified in the name of humanity, it would be against Germany. But I do not believe in any war. Besides, my sympathy for the Jews does not blind me to the requirements of justice. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs. What is going on in Palestine today cannot be justified by any moral code of conduct. The mandates have no sanction but that of the last war. The nobler course would be to insist on a just treatment of Jews wherever they were born and bred.”

Many reputed Jewish scholars have since acknowledged that these “requirements of justice” have not been met in Palestine. 

Tom Segev, in One Palestine Complete, dismantles the myth of Palestine as “a land without people for a people without land”, quoting British General Walter Congreve: “We might as well declare that England belongs to Italy because it was once ruled by the Romans.” 

Avi Shlaim, in The Iron Wall, stated: “Conflict accompanied the Zionist enterprise long before Hitler came on the scene… There is no denying that the establishment of the State of Israel involved a massive injustice to the Palestinians.”  

Gerald Kauffman, former British Labour Minister, writing in the Spectator in April 2004, said: “What the Egyptian Pharaoh did to the Jews, the Jews have now done to the Palestinians, who have no Moses to save them, and no Red Sea will part for them”.

United States President Jimmy Carter, architect of the 1978 Camp David Accord, in his Peace Not Apartheid, wrote: “Since the 1979 Israeli–Egyptian peace treaty, much blood has been shed, and repeated efforts for a negotiated peace between Israel and its neighbours have failed. Peace will come to the Middle East only when the Israeli government complies with international law, with the roadmap for peace, with official American policy, and accepts its legal borders. The United States is squandering its international prestige and intensifying global anti-American terrorism by abetting Israel’s colonisation of Palestinian land”.

In sharp contrast, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, addressing the US Congress in May 2011, declared: “In Judea and Samaria, Jewish people are not foreign occupiers. We are not the British in India or the Belgians in the Congo. This is the land of our forefathers to which Abraham brought the idea of one God, where David confronted Goliath. No distortion of history can deny the 4000-year-old bond of the Jewish people to this land”.

Today, Gaza and the West Bank resemble the Warsaw Ghetto of 1943, though on a larger scale. The Jewish armed uprising in that Ghetto — supported with arms by the Polish resistance —-was hailed worldwide as an act of great heroism. Yet Hamas’ October 7, 2023, uprising against seven decades of Israeli repression, mass incarceration of Palestinians in the “world’s largest open-air prison”, the destruction of homes and livelihoods (over 500,000 olive trees have been uprooted or burnt by its ‘settlers’), and the killing of over 60,000 Palestinians is denigrated as “outrageous terrorism.” 

No UN member state has been as consistently belligerent, or as scornful of the UN Charter, international law and the sovereignty of other nations, as Israel. Yet it has never been censured by the UN Security Council because the US has cast 57 vetoes to shield it. 

Columbia University Professor Jeffrey Sachs, writing in The New York Times in January 2024, observed: “The Israeli government claims it is in an existential struggle for survival and must take every measure to prevent its destruction. This is false.

There is no ethical, legal or strategic justification  for killing thousands of civilians, and uprooting two million of them to protect Israel. Hamas has ruled Gaza since 2007. It has never captured Israeli territory, nor threatened its existence. It has neither an air force nor a navy. Israel has both and a 600,000-personnel ‘Defence Force’. Hamas only has 30,000 fighters.”  

Supporting Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Sachs warned, is not only unethical but also “antithetical to Israel’s long-term security and perhaps even its survival. The Arab and Islamic States have repeatedly declared their readiness to normalise relations with Israel within the context of a two-state solution.”

The great tragedy for the Jews is that, after centuries of wanderings and massacres (six million in Nazi Germany), when they finally secured a homeland, their leaders built it on the exclusionary and racist ideology of Zionism, rather than on the ennobling tenets of Judaism. 

When I visited Israel from Egypt, where I was India’s ambassador, in April 1992, I was struck by Jerusalem’s sacredness to the world’s three great religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Their holy sites lie within walking distance of each other. I remember thinking that if only Israel would discard its Zionist ideology and embrace the precepts of Judaism’s Prophets— particularly Hillel the Elder and Isiah — Jerusalem could become the world’s foremost site of pilgrimage and inter-religious harmony. I continue to hope that such a future will one day become a reality.

(The writer is a retired diplomat)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.