Where Tutu (and Gandhi) got it wrong

Two great disciples of Mohandas Gandhi -- Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. -- absorbed the moral and strategic power of his nonviolence credo and courageously applied it to change history in South Africa and the United States. Today, in a world still challenged by violent conflict, wars and terrorism, many look to Gandhi's vision as the prototype to solve these challenges. But Gandhi was not always right.

Tutu, a longtime critic of Israel, recently again unloaded on the Jewish state. The scene was Israel's security fence in the Arab community of Bilin, in the West Bank. It is there that activists gather every week to protest a barrier that deeply inconveniences and disrupts Palestinian life. Tutu said the activists reminded him of Gandhi, who managed to overthrow British rule in India by nonviolent means, and King, who took up the struggle of a black woman too tired to go to the back of a segregated bus. No mention was made of the hundreds of deadly Palestinian suicide bombings that led to the erection of the barrier, or that this nonlethal defense has thwarted multiple attacks, saving Jewish and Arab lives.

Tutu then added this admonition: "The lesson that Israel must learn from the Holocaust is that it can never get security through fences, walls and guns."

Because Tutu invoked the Holocaust, it would be instructive to learn what Gandhi, in his own words, thought about the Jews, Nazis and Palestine. In 1938, just after Kristallnacht, when the Nazis systematically destroyed Germany's and Austria's synagogues, Gandhi wrote these shameful words:

"The German persecution of the Jews seems to have no parallel in history. ... [Hitler] is propounding a new religion of exclusive and militant nationalism in the name of which any inhumanity becomes an act of humanity to be rewarded here and hereafter. ... If there ever could be a justifiable war in the name of and for humanity, a war against Germany, to prevent the wanton persecution of a whole race, would be completely justified. But I do not believe in any war. A discussion of the pros and cons of such a war is therefore outside my horizon or province.