Jabotinksy advocated transfer as well:

http://www.democratiya.com/review.asp?reviews_id=57

It is only through detailed analysis – such as your articles – that the romanticism with which Gandhi is viewed by most Indians can be placed into context.

Yes, he did achieve, through non-violent principles, what countless other independence activists could not – publicity throughout the world of the atrocities carried out against Indians in the name of the Empire. (Jallianwala Bagh being an obvious example) He made the country proud and made the majority of Indians realise they could self-govern, not just the urban politicised elite. He did, many times, go on fasting for days in an attempt to achieve a political or social solution.

But the thoughts of Gandhi the man (like any human being I suppose) cannot all be praised 100% unquestioningly. There is no doubt that, in addition to the comments have noted above regarding Jews and Gandhi’s record of philandering with his nieces (detailed in EXPERIMENTS WITH THE TRUTH, I think it is called) tells me that this man probably enjoyed the pedestal that society placed him upon. Like many other leaders, he simply lost touch with reality.

Towards the end of his life, particularly when communal tensions in India began to rise – mainly between Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and Christians – he would regularly seek to try and solve problems by commencing a public fast. This was a man who would have loved to become a political leader of a united India but refused to be involved in the process once Muslims sought an independent homeland. (Although this issue is not black and white either and deserves further discussion)

I wish he could have engaged with the British once they had decided to partition India before leaving and use his influence to persuade them to respect the nuances of language and culture in the “new” India and Pakistan. Unfortunately, the British could not make a decision about Kashmir (still disputed) and proceeded to rule a straight line through Punjab (partly a province in Punjab and a state in India). Gandhi could have, had he wished, prevented these injustices by nudging the British to refine their partition idea. May that would have changed the Home Office memo that stated that the whole region would collapse into civil war by 1955 and that India and Pakistan would be begging the British to come back!

(By the way, who drew up the maps of Palestine, Transjordan etc etc after WWI?? Hhhhmmmm. And they want to send Tony Blair to help after he leaves office? hehehe)

Gandhi-ji will always have the respect of Indians for his sacrifices, passion and determination. Had he lived on, (he was shot dead in January 1948 about 6 months after India achieved independence) however, and continued his
publicity-seeking fasting at the drop of a hat, I wonder whether the world would have seen him in the same light.

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. If one Jew or all the Jews were to accept the prescription here offered, he or they cannot be worse off than now. And suffering voluntarily undergone will bring them an inner strength and joy […] the calculated violence of Hitler may even result in a general massacre of the Jews by way of his first answer to the declaration of such hostilities. But if the Jewish mind could be prepared for voluntary suffering, even the massacre I have imagined could be turned into a day of thanksgiving and joy that Jehovah had wrought deliverance of the race even at the hands of the tyrant. For to the God-fearing, death has no terror.

I think this speaks to one of the foundational Palestinian myths, a key point of their manufactured national narrative. The Arabs have always claimed that the so called naqba, catastrophe, of 1948 was that the Jews drove them out of the land with threats of war crimes like allegations about Deir Yassin. Zionists, responding to these charges say that Arab leaders encouraged the Arabs of Palestine to flee during the hostilities and return once the victorious Arab armies drove the Jews into the sea. While Zionists have been able to document radio broadcasts and loudspeaker trucks, the Palestinian narrative is believed by many.

But here we have Palestinian Arabs running away again.

So far, only two Israeli leaders have been assassinated by Palestinians or their supporters, Rabbi Meir Kahane and Rehavim Ze’evi. Both were pretty much on the extreme fringe of Israeli politics. In R. Kahane’s case, his Kach party was outlawed. Ze’evi was more fortunate and at the time he was killed his party was part of the coalition gov’t so he was Minister of Tourism, but Ze’evi’s party only had a few seats in the Knesset. So why kill these two guys who didn’t have much of a following? What R. Kahane and Ze’evi had in common was that they both advocated “transfer”, a population transfer that would evict most Israeli Arabs from Israel, and possibly Palestinians from the West Bank as well. Advocates of “transfer” insist, btw, that it isn’t ethnic cleansing but rather the completion of a population exchange that began when 750,000 Jews were expelled from Arab countries in the late 1940s and 1950s.

The Palestinian Arabs feared Kahane and Ze’evi precisely because they know they ran away in 1948, and they know some of them tried to run away in 1967 (only to be retrieved by the Israeli army who didn’t want even more “refugees”), and now we see that they want to run away in 2007. Just like they are running away today, they ran away in 1948.

BTW, Gandhi’s non-violent protest only worked because Great Britain is fairly moral. Also, he knew he was playing good cop to the bomb throwing bad cops.

Martin Luther King Jr., who was influenced by Gandhi, succeeded because he framed the civil rights movement as getting America to live up to it’s own values.