SOAS, University of London (The School of Oriental and African Studies)

Gandhi, Nehru and the binational Zionists: Palestine, religious pluralism and national identity

The paper examines the attitude of independent India’s foremost founding figures, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, to Zionism to illuminate aspects of their attitudes towards nationalism. Both men enjoyed long and sometimes close personal relationships with progressive anti-imperialist European, American and South African Jews friendly to the Indian nationalist cause and were moved by the plight of European Jews in the 1930s and ‘40s. Although some of their Jewish associates were Zionists, both Gandhi and Nehru, faced also with the question of the future of India’s Muslim population and the emergence of the demand for Pakistan, firmly opposed the Zionist project to settle and achieve political dominion over Palestine in the face of the opposition of its Arab inhabitants. The paper considers their attitude in relation to the small but intellectually prominent group of liberal and humanist Zionists who for quarter of a century before the emergence of Israel unsuccessfully sought a bi-national solution to the Jewish-Arab conflict. Several, including Judah Magnes, the first Chancellor of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the philosopher Martin Buber, looked to the Indian nationalists for sympathy and understanding, Magnes and Buber both writing to Gandhi on the eve of the Second World War.