Gandhi on the Separation Wall (Photo: AP / Muhammed Muheisen)
Palestine News and Information Agency (WAFA) reports:
“An Israeli plan to build a statue for the late Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi on an East Jerusalem plot is actually a pretext to seize Palestinian land, the Jerusalem Center for Social and Economic Rights (JCSER) said in a statement Sunday.”
That Israel would erect a statue in honor of the great indigenous nationalist, anti-colonialist, and practitioner of non-violence speaks to either its complete lack of self-awareness and blindness to the appalling irony of its proposal or to its profound sense of humor. Recall not only what Director of Policy and Political-Military Affairs at the Israel Ministry of Defense, Major General Amos Gilad, told U.S. officials that “we don’t do Gandhi very well” when discussing peaceful West Bank demonstrations and anti-occupation protests, but also what Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi himself had to say in 1938 (in part) about the imposition of Zionist colonization of Palestine:
The cry for the national home for the Jews does not make much appeal to me. The sanction for it is sought in the Bible and the tenacity with which the Jews have hankered after return to Palestine. Why should they not, like other peoples of the earth, make that country their home where they are born and where they earn their livelihood?
Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French. It is wrong and in-human 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. Surely it would be a crime against humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews partly or wholly as their national home.
The nobler course would be to insist on a just treatment of the Jews wherever they are born and bred. The Jews born in France are French in precisely the same sense that Christians born in France are French. If the Jews have no home but Palestine, will they relish the idea of being forced to leave the other parts of the world in which they are settled? Or do they want a double home where they can remain at will? This cry for the national home affords a colourable justification for the German expulsion of the Jews.
I am not defending the Arab excesses. I wish they had chosen the way of non-violence in resisting what they rightly regarded as an unwarrantable encroachment upon their country. But according to the accepted canons of right and wrong, nothing can be said against the Arab resistance in the face of overwhelming odds.
Israel’s Gandhi was a fascist
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rehavam_Ze'evi
Rehavam “Gandhi” Ze’evi (help·info) (Hebrew: רחבעם “גנדי” זאבי, 20 June 1926 – 17 October 2001) was an Israeli general, politician, and historian who founded the right-wing nationalist Moledet party, mainly advocating population transfer.[1]
In 2005, he was voted the 7th-greatest Israeli of all time, in a poll by the Israeli news website Ynet to determine whom the general public considered the 200 Greatest Israelis.[
Amazing to think that was from 3/4 of a century ago. With only a few exceptions it sounds like it could have been written today.
Even more amazing is that this is still ongoing.
It reminds one of the Museum of Tolerance built upon a Muslim cemetery. If Israelis are that blind, there really is no hope for them. I wonder if they would put a plaque on this statue containing the quotation by Gandhi cited above?
Why would the Zionists erect a statue of the man that rejected them over and over during 20 years? The man was an anti-Zionist, has been dead for 63 years and they are still trying to make a Zionist out of him with a silly statue that has no meaning for them. They never quit. They can put up 100 statues of Ghandi in 100 Israeli towns and they will still lack legitimacy.
Dr. Ramakrishnan at Mahatma Gandhi University, Kottayam, Kerala, India, wrote:
“… Gandhi withstood almost all Zionist attempts at extracting a pro-Zionist stance from him. G.H. Jansen wrote about the failure of Zionist lobbying with Gandhi:
“His opposition [to Zionism] remained consistent over a period of nearly 20 years and remained firm despite skilful and varied applications to him of that combination of pressure and persuasion known as lobbying, of which the Zionists are past masters.”
Apart from responses to Gandhi’s anti-Zionism from Jewish pacifists such as Buber, Magnes and Greenberg, Jansen points out at least four separate instances of Zionist attempts to get a favourable statement from Gandhi. At first, Hermann Kallenbach, Gandhi’s Jewish friend in South Africa, came to India in 1937 and stayed for weeks with Gandhi trying to convince him of the merits of the Zionist cause. Then, in the 1930s, as requested by Rabbi Stephen Wise, the American pacifist John Haynes Holmes, tried “to obtain from Gandhi a declaration favourable to Zionism”. In March 1946, a British MP from the Labour Party, Sydney Silverman, an advocate of Indian independence in Britain, attempted to change Gandhi’s mind. At the end of their heated conversation, Gandhi stated that “after all our talk, I am unable to revise the opinion I gave you in the beginning.” The fourth Zionist attempt to change Gandhi’s mind was by Louis Fischer, Gandhi’s famous biographer, to whom Gandhi reported to have said that “the Jews have a good case.”
Later, Gandhi clarified in one of his final pieces on Zionism and the Palestine question on 14 July 1946 that “I did say some such thing in the course of a conversation with Mr. Louis Fischer on the subject.” He added, “I do believe that the Jews have been cruelly wronged by the world.”
Gandhi went back to his initial position by categorically stating that “But in my opinion, they [the Jews] have erred grievously in seeking to impose themselves on Palestine with the aid of America and Britain and now with the aid of naked terrorism… Why should they depend on American money or British arms for forcing themselves on an unwelcome land? Why should they resort to terrorism to make good their forcible landing in Palestine?”
There were an influential number of Jews who thought that force, only force, could ensure the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine. They adopted terrorism as the method to achieve their national goal. This policy of subjugation of the Palestinians by Zionist terror was totally rejected by Gandhi in no uncertain terms. ”
http://www.twf.org/News/Y2001/0815-GandhiZionism.html
Wouldn’t it be cool if someplace near the statue displayed Gandhi’s words quoted in this article?