The Middle East is a region where nationalist struggle is a bloody undertaking, and the belief in the necessity of violence is especially fervid when it comes to the Palestinian cause which Egyptians, like all Arabs, have adopted as their own. Across the mud-brick slums of Cairo, imams proclaim the glory of martyrs who kill. Kiosks and shops stock a brand of potato chips decorated with a cartoon of native son Yasser Arafat, his eyes wild and mouth agape. Intercity buses entertain passengers by playing videos such as 48 Hours in Israel, featuring brave Egyptians who fight creepy, murderous Mossad agents. Hitch a ride in this country, and you are likely to be picked up by a trucker with a dashboard image of Jerusalem's Dome of the Rock, stabbed with a dagger and dripping blood.
Egypt, of course, is at peace with Israel, and the government has crushed its own Islamist movement, which until 1997 was mowing down tourists at hotels, museums, and ancient Pharaonic sanctuaries. Yet reminders of the threat still exist. Armed policemen guard every hotel and tourist attraction.
In March, eight Muslim Brotherhood members who said they had been trained as suicide bombers spoke to a pro-Palestinian rally at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, their faces covered and heads bound in bands that read, "Jihad is our way," the Lebanese daily Al-Mustaqbal reported. One would-be killer said he was "one of the first of the [Egyptian] martyrs to choose to die to defend the Muslim Palestinian people."
In such a context, it surprised me recently to pick up a Cairo English-language magazine called Pharaohs and encounter musings about Zionism by Mohandas K. Gandhi. The journal printed a bowdlerized version of a 1938 article in which, while rejecting calls for a Zionist state, the apostle of non-violent nationalism reflected sympathetically upon the Jews' historic burden as the untouchables of Christendom.
The article dismayed Zionists and their sympathizers, but an acknowledgment of the humanity of the Jews is absent these days in much of the Arabic press, where newspapers circulate vampirish blood libels and a government scientific journal asserted last year that AIDS-infected Jewish tourists are traveling in Africa and Asia with the intent of spreading the disease.
In Gandhi's article, which was originally published November 11, 1938, he states that his empathy for the Jews "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. 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?"
Pharaohs reprinted the article for one obvious reason: to rebut the rationale for Israel's existence, in the words of a man widely regarded as a modern saint. Yet the article unwittingly undermines the editor's intentions by drawing attention to the irrelevance of Gandhi's pacifism against the threat of extermination that European Jewry faced in Nazi Germany. On the eve of the Holocaust, the mahatma urged German Jews to embrace the very passivity that would eventually lead six million people to their death.
Paradoxically, the appearance of Gandhi's essay in an Arab magazine unintentionally raises another question: If non-violent resistance is indeed the virtuous path to liberation, why haven't the Palestinians adopted this strategy particularly since they, unlike European Jews of the Nazi era, are struggling against a democratic nation whose conscience might be roused by a movement like Gandhi's campaign against the Raj? And why didn't Gandhi use this occasion to urge Palestinians to wage such a struggle in the same clear and forceful manner that he would urge European Jews to embrace death?
These are not unfair questions, lobbed from the future by one with the advantage of post-Holocaust hindsight. Gandhi wrote five years after the opening of Dachau and three years after Jews had been stripped of their rights by the Nuremberg race laws. Just two days before his article saw print, mobs throughout Germany burned synagogues and smashed Jewish-owned stores in the kristalnacht pogrom, and the Gestapo rounded up 25,000 Jewish men and sent them to concentration camps.
Gandhi himself acknowledged that an unprecedented evil had arisen in his time. In a section not printed in Pharaohs, Gandhi wrote that "The German persecution of the Jews seems to have no parallel in history. The tyrants of old never went so mad as Hitler seems to have gone."
If war ever could be just, Gandhi agreed, a war against Germany would be. Yet to him, the evil of warfare outweighed all other considerations. Gandhi proposed, with unconscious condescension, that those being clubbed through the gates of concentration camps simply stand up for themselves, for a change: "If I were a Jew and were born in Germany and earned my livelihood there, I would claim Germany as my home even as the tallest gentile German might, and challenge him to shoot me or cast me in the dungeon; I would refuse to be expelled or to submit to discriminating treatment. And for doing this, I should not wait for the fellow Jews to join me in civil resistance but would have confidence that in the end the rest were bound to follow my example..."
George Orwell perceived the fatuity of this. In a 1949 essay entitled "Reflections on Gandhi," he wrote that during the late war, every pacifist had an obligation to answer the following questions: What about the Jews? Are you prepared to see them exterminated? If not, how do you propose to save them without resorting to war?
Gandhi answered honestly, but chillingly, in an interview recounted in Louis Fischer's Gandhi and Stalin: Two Signs at the World's Crossroads. "According to Mr. Fischer" [Orwell wrote], Gandhi's view was that the German Jews ought to commit collective suicide, which "would have aroused the world and the people of Germany to Hitler's violence." After the war he justified himself: The Jews had been killed anyway and might as well have died significantly.
GANDHI'S prescriptions appeared unacceptable in the wake of the Holocaust and World War II. Jews could no longer put their fate in the hands of an indifferent world. That is why they sought refuge in the one power that could have saved lives from Nazi Germany the establishment of a state with its own army and immigration policy.
Such arguments are familiar, and obviously they proved unpersuasive for the Arabs living in British Mandate Palestine. What is remarkable now, though, is the degree to which Gandhi, like the anti-war left in Europe and America today, was na ve about the determination of mass murderers to do evil (weeks after September 11, Alice Walker asked in The Village Voice, "But what would happen to his [Osama bin Laden's] cool armor if he could be reminded of all the good, non-violent things he has done? Further, what would happen to him if he could be brought to understand the preciousness of the lives he has destroyed? I firmly believe the only punishment that works is love").
Gandhi, at least, did not imply that a time out, followed by a big hug, would have led Hitler to scrap his final solution. And in fairness, Gandhi's world view was formed in a century before the machinery of state-sponsored genocide had been perfected. Born in 1869, he failed to comprehend the nature of modern totalitarianism, Orwell believed, and saw everything in terms of his own struggle against a colonial administration that regarded him with supercilious bemusement.
Whenever rioting broke out in India, Gandhi could be counted on to condemn it and fast to atone for it, and so the Raj provided him with a degree of indulgence that the Third Reich never allowed the Jews, marked as they were for death.
It goes without saying that Gandhi was a courageous man, and he had the last laugh when India won its independence in 1947. But this strategy of pleading one's case to a sympathetic court of world opinion could only work in circumstances where one can draft manifestos and organize rallies and possibly even win enough publicity to be named Time magazine's man of the year (as Gandhi was in 1931).
"It is difficult" [Orwell wrote] "to see how Gandhi's methods could be applied in a country where opponents of the regime disappear in the middle of the night and are never heard of again. Without a free press and the right of assembly, it is impossible not merely to appeal to outside opinion but to bring a mass movement into being or even to make your intentions known to your adversary.
Is there a Gandhi in Russia at this moment? And if there is, what is he accomplishing?... Moreover, the assumption, which served Gandhi so well in dealing with individuals, that all human beings are more or less approachable and will respond to a generous gesture, needs to be seriously questioned. It is not necessarily true, for example, when you are dealing with lunatics. Then the question becomes: Who is sane? Was Hitler sane? And is it not possible for one whole culture to be insane by the standards of another?" Today, when an entire culture believes that the noblest act of devotion before God is the mass murder of civilians, Orwell's question bears repeating.
Gandhi's pacifism raises paradoxical issues. While only war could stop Hitler, the Palestinians, however difficult their lot, possess an option that the Jews of Nazi Germany never had the ability to "arouse the world."
There is no denying that Palestinians are second-class citizens in the West Bank and Gaza (though they are not in Israel proper). But unlike German Jews of the 1930s, the Palestinians in the occupied territories can make themselves heard both at home and throughout the world, and they have succeeded in convincing many Israelis that a Palestinian state should exist in one form or another. In fact, the Israeli government offered them such a state in September 2000.
The Palestinian Authority has embassies and legations in every major capital, its cause is championed in parliaments and congresses throughout the world, and its people are interviewed and quoted daily in the newspapers and on the airwaves of every nation. Remarkably, Palestinians have benefited from an outpouring of international sympathy that rivals the support that the saintly, loincloth-wearing Gandhi enjoyed, even as they employ the most heinous conceivable tactics.
Would the Civil Rights movement have succeeded in the US if African Americans, rather than Klansmen, had been the ones who were blowing up children? Though suicide bombing has become widespread only recently, it is nevertheless unsettling to read Gandhi's muted rebuke of Arab violence: "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." Weighed against the mahatma's insistence that it was Jews' spiritual duty to go willingly to death camps, these words become unsatisfactory.
There is no doubt that Gandhi was consistent throughout his career in tamping the fires of violent nationalist passions while recognizing the justice of the root causes. At times, as he and Martin Luther King, Jr., so movingly demonstrated, a democratic people can be reasoned with and made to see the iniquity of its ways. But Gandhi was tragically deluded when he insisted that Nazi Germany was open to such persuasion. And today's Palestinians are victims of a different tragedy. In their addiction to self-immolating holy murder, they have never discerned that Israel is a nation where peaceful resistance could prove a more successful weapon than bombs in marketplaces.
(The writer is a freelance reporter
currently based in Cyprus.)