A mural of Ghandi on the separation wall, West Bank, Palestine. Detail from Picture by Paolo Di Tommaso. Flickr.com / (CC BY-NC 2.0). Some rights reserved. Book review of Squaring the circle: Mahatma Gandhi and the Jewish Homeland. By Professor P. R. Kumaraswamy, New Delhi: Knowledge World Publisher, 2017. pp.234. ISBN: 978-3-87324-06-0
No doubt the Arab–Israeli conflict has dominated the horizon of global politics and international diplomacy for decades. It is possible to claim that the sympathy or antipathy to the cause of Palestine has become a litmus test for political ideology, political correctness, political wisdom and political pragmatism for many nations, and the same stands true for India.
When it comes to deciphering or defining India’s association with the cause of Palestine or its relationship with Israel, Mahatma Gandhi’s words from 1938 in Harijan still serve as a guide for many: “Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English and France to the French”.
