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Stuart Schoffman: Gandhiďż˝s Legacy
Stuart Schoffman

I don't know about your kids, but mine did not study Gandhi in school this fall. At the beginning of the school year, at the initiative of Minister of Education Limor Livnat, the ministry directed school principals to devote an hour of class time to the life and legacy of the late tourism minister, Rechavam Zeevy -- implausibly known to one and all as "Gandhi" -- on the occasion of the first anniversary of his murder by Palestinian gunmen. Strange male nicknames are legion in this country, and it is said that in his youth Zeevy was so skinny his buddies thought he resembled the emaciated Mahatma.

Gandhi, of course, is remembered above all as the nationďż˝s leading advocate of "transferring" the Palestinians out of the Land of Israel, a rďż˝sumďż˝ item that goes unmentioned in the teaching materials circulated by the Education Ministry. What is highlighted instead is his service in the Palmah and IDF; his founding of the Moledet ("Homeland") party in 1988; his deep dedication to the Land of Israel as evidenced by his service as director, from 1981 to 1991, of the Eretz Israel Museum in Tel Aviv. (The Education Ministry encouraged teachers to engage students in discussion of what "homeland" means to them.) Included was a collection of elegiac blurbs by such folk as Ehud Barak, longtime Meretz MK Amnon Rubinstein, actor Haim ("Fiddler on the Roof") Topol, and even journalist Eitan Haber, confidant of Yitzhak Rabin. "Of Gandhi it can be said that he was a man of a thousand faces," are Haberďż˝s words. "Gandhi the bitter political rival -- and good friend."

Livnat and like-minded people plainly see Gandhi as an alternative Rabin, a martyr to noble ideals. Indeed the image of Gandhi as iconic sabra plugs into a buried stratum of Israeli history that few of Zeevyďż˝s centrist compadres would wish to exhume, namely, the role of the transfer idea in mainstream Zionist theory and practice. In a recent essay in the Guardian, maverick Israeli historian Benny Morris not only asserts that Herzl, Ben-Gurion, Moshe Sharett and Chaim Weizmann supported the idea, but cites Arab statesmen in Iraq and Transjordan who in the 1940s advocated the orderly "exchange of populations." Morrisďż˝s ironic conclusion is that if transfer had fully come to pass back then, perhaps "the Middle East would be a healthier, less violent place, with a Jewish state between Jordan and the Mediterranean and a Palestinian Arab state in Transjordan."

Interested readers might wish to evaluate an exhaustively footnoted work by one Rabbi Dr. Chaim Simons, a British-born resident of the West Bank town of Kiryat Arba, entitled "A Historical Survey of Proposals to Transfer Arabs from Palestine, 1895-1947," which is posted by the author on the Internet, and updated periodically. Simons identifies dozens of Jews and gentiles as advocates of one form or another of transfer, ranging from Labor Zionist luminaries Nachman Syrkin and Berl Katznelson to American journalist John Gunther. He cites various instances where sympathetic references to transfer were expunged from memoirs and other sources. Yet such post-facto sanitizing, I think, underscores the recognition that the idea of transfer, whatever its history -- and dark, lingering appeal in times of trouble -- is today beyond the political and moral pale.

Which probably explains why my childrenďż˝s teachers, along with others across the land, ignored Limor Livnatďż˝s agenda. But Iďż˝ll bet that more than one Israeli educator took a look at the suggested syllabus and snickered, better they should learn about the real Gandhi. Itďż˝s certainly encouraging to hear of Palestinian public figures who advocate non-violent resistance in lieu of terrorism. As Father Raed Abusahlia, chancellor of the Latin Patriarchate, told The Reportďż˝s Isabel Kershner last winter: "The Israelis have the power of force, the army, but we have the power of truth and the strength of love, what Mahatma Gandhi called Satyagraha."

The Indian Gandhi famously developed his creed of passive resistance in the 1890s, while leading the struggle for the rights of the Indian minority in South Africa. But in November 1938, in his weekly publication Harijan, he wrote: "The cry for the national home for the Jews does not make much appeal to me ... 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." The Mahatma argued that the existence of a "double home" for the Jews would offer the Germans a justification for expelling them. He further advised the Jews, whose plight in Germany seemed to him to resemble that of Indians in South Africa, to practice Satyagraha against the Nazi regime. "If I were a Jew ... I would claim Germany as my home even as the tallest gentile German may, and challenge him to shoot me or cast me in the dungeon."

In February 1939, the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, in a lengthy, eloquent letter to Gandhi (that went unanswered), pointed out the myriad absurdities of the Mahatmaďż˝s argument. Was he unaware of the magnitude of anti-Jewish violence in Nazi Germany, which dwarfed the discrimination against Indians in South Africa? And how could Gandhi make a fair comparison between a dispersed people and a minority community that in the 1890s could draw upon the existence of "far more than" 200 million Indians living in their homeland to "nourish their souls?" But today, Gandhiďż˝s anti-Zionist legacy lives on, in more virulent form, in the cynical sophistry of post-colonial polemicists who deny the legitimacy of Jewish nationalism while touting the right of all other peoples to self-determination, and endures as well in the muddle-headed sloganeering of campus activists who traffic in bogus analogies and glibly lump Israel with all that is oppressive and unholy.

Israelďż˝s foes, of course, dine out on our misdeeds, real and imagined. Even as we speak, rumors abound that the impending Iraq war will provide cover for a transfer of the Palestinians. The school principals and teachers who resisted the call to canonize the Israeli Gandhi have struck a blow, in the spirit of Satyagraha, for decency and against sham -- and for Zionism as well.