RACISTS, all of them!

Said Mahatma Gandhi: Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs...

By Nalini Ranjan Mohanty

Racial prejudice explains the Western attitude to Palestine:  a host of luminaries, from Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela to George Orwell, James Baldwin and Ali Shariati think that way

I recently wrote about the central question that author Pankaj Mishra has raised in his latest book The World After Gaza (published in 2025): why is it that the world’s richest and most powerful Western democracies look the other way while Israel is committing genocide in Gaza? 

Mishra’s unequivocal answer is: it’s on account of racism. He quotes several luminaries to buttress his point.

George Orwell is one of the first who had said that Palestine is a “colour issue” for the West. 

Gandhi had stridently critised the Zionist leaders and their imperialist backers for masterminding terrorist violence against Arabs. He said: “Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs... 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.” 

India, China and Indonesia had taken the lead in passing a resolution in UN General Assembly in 1975 declaring Zionism to be “a form of racism and racial discrimination”. 

Unaddressed racial inequities had weighed heavy on Mandela when he said that “South Africa’s freedom from apartheid is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians”. 

James Baldwin, the illustrious American author and civil rights activist, was bold enough to say that Israel, which sold arms to the apartheid regime in South Africa, embodied white supremacy and not democracy.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) spent more than $25 million in 2024 to defeat two African American Democratic representatives  — Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush — who had raised questions on the ‘pious silence’ around Israel’s behaviour.

The bottomline is this: certainly, the Palestinians are paying the price for being non-white; strangely, the darkest irony is that the Israeli-West’s genocide of Palestinians seems to be a brutal kind of retribution against the Nazi ethnic cleansing of Jews!

Iranian thinker Ali Shariati put the spotlight on the racist prejudice in a series of posers to the white Western Establishment. Read these memorable words:

“Why should the West and Christianity give up Islamic Palestine as payoff? Why shouldn’t they give up a part of Poland where they put the Jews under the most terrible torture? Why don’t they give one state of the Federal Republic of Germany as compensation of the Holocaust? Why should Christianity compensate for its torture of the Jews during the past two thousand years from the pocket of Islam? Why should the West pay for its crimes from the empty pockets of the Palestinians?”

Powerful poser indeed!  It calls out the racist West!

And, what a coincidence! The Hindu supremacists of India who had lionised Adolf Hiter and the gas chambers in which 6 million Jews were butchered, and while he was undertaking industrial-scale slaughter of Jews in Germany, are these days great votaries of Israeli Zionists who are systematically exterminating Palestinians in Gaza!

Indeed, they have always been.

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Nalini Ranjan Mohanty is former Resident Editor, The Times of India and Hindustan Times, Patna Edition, and former Director, Jagran Institute of Management and Mass Communication (JIMMC), Noida-Delhi. He is currently a social media influencer and commentator whose daily commentary on current affairs is widely read.