Gandhi on the Holocaust

Though the British had declared their support for the idea of a Jewish state in the 1917 Balfour Declaration, progress was slow. They turned from ambivalent to hostile; in the 1930s, the British began blocking Jews from immigrating to Palestine, frustrating Zionism’s fledgling hope that it could create a viable state. Then, between 1939 and 1945, t

Genocide had been committed before the Holocaust, but never had it been so ruthlessly effective. The numbers are still staggering and seem to grow more abstract as time goes on and investigation of the horror deepens. Six million Jews in a few short years. One

The lesson of the Holocaust was that in the face of overwhelming concentration of power, acts of self-sacrifice and spiritual demonstration had little or no effect on the murderers. Classic moral traditions—martyrdom in Judaism, satyagraha in Hinduism, the cross and turning the other cheek in Christianity—were shattered in the Holocaust. Nor did th

these words and acknowledged that the Nazis, who had provoked a world war and were ravaging Europe, had committed one of the greatest crimes in history. It also put its finger on the variety of devices used to kill the Jews, from new technologies like gas chambers to the simplest methods of brutality such as starvation and whipping. Yet the story r

Holocaust didn’t happen because of a lack of love. It happened because entire societies abdicated responsibility for their own problems, and instead blamed them on the people who represented—have always represented, since they first introduced the idea of commandedness to the world—the thing they were most afraid of: responsibility.

If this change of thinking was the responsibility, even in part, of the Jewish people, that might be the greatest endorsement of Jewish action in world history. I can think of no greater moral accomplishment than persuading the world that mass murder is an abomination.