Arun Gandhi’s participation in On Faith has carried many of his grandfather’s values forward with eloquence and moral courage, a task to which he has dedicated his life’s work. So it was with great pain, sorrow, and surprise that I read with his historically and morally problematic posting on Jewish identity, eerily evoking his grandfather’s moral blind spot. As I was beginning to conclude I needed to respond, his apology was printed. With relief I opened it up only to be sadly disappointed and moved to feel that I must, now, respond.

Three things are most deeply troubling about his postings. The first is his description of the Holocaust as “the result of the warped mind of an individual who was able to influence his followers into doing something dreadful.” Rather than the result of a single manipulative leader, the Holocaust was, in fact, rooted in the pseudo-scientific racialism that swept Europe for 100 years, which flourished in the fertile field of bigotry and dehumanization of the Jews that was a tragic manifestation of Christian anti-Semitism for two millennia. It mobilized the entire apparatus of the state with the cooperation of segments of many conquered countries to do something that had never been seen before in human history: employ the structures of an entire state and new technologies to eviscerate the presence of an entire people from the face of the Earth. Indeed, as Mr. Gandhi said in his apology, “suffering of the Jewish people, particularly in the Holocaust, was historic in its proportions.”

Second, except for a general admonition to the Jewish people to remember the lessons of the Holocaust (“to forgive but to never forget”) neither the original posting nor the apology conveyed a single lesson from the Holocaust for the subject he discusses: Israel’s use of force. In contrast, one lesson most Jews, and many non-Jews, learned is that there are limits to non-violence, that when confronting an evil that utilizes violence with no moral constraints, peaceful resistance may prove futile. Had it been practiced by the world during World War II, there would be no Jews today. This evokes Mahatma Gandhi’s blind spot on the same subject. In a famous public exchange with Judaism’s leading philosopher and advocate of non-violence, Martin Buber, Mahatma Gandhi wrote:

“If the Jews, instead of being helplessly & of necessity non-violent, adopt active non-violence, i.e. fellow-feeling for the gentile Germans deliberately, they cannot do any harm to the Germans & I am as certain as I am dictating these lines that the stoniest German heart will melt. Great as have been the Jewish contributions to the world's progress, this supreme act of their will be their greatest contribution and war will be a thing of the past."

He offered similar advice to the British in his writings.

Contrary to Arun Gandhi’s assertion that the refusal of the Jewish people, and all people of conscience, to forget the Holocaust has locked them into a mindset that validates Israel’s use of violence, it is the need to secure Israel’s security and safety against those who would destroy her that drives her use of force (whatever criticism or support we might offer to particular policies). Mr. Gandhi’s refusal to even reference the formal state of war that most Arab nations still maintain against Israel, the persistence of terrorist attacks against Israel (terrorism notable for its almost exclusive targeting of civilian and not military targets), the current Gaza-based missile attacks on civilian centers, and the virulence of rabid anti-Semitism emanating from fundamentalist Muslim circles – all these failures reflect the moral blindness of his grandfather regarding Jews and deprives his moral analysis of the power it might otherwise possess.

A final note regarding the relevance of the Holocaust to world affairs. It is precisely the failure to evoke the lessons of the Holocaust which led to the world’s failures to confront genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda. In contrast, it was precisely when the Holocaust has been evoked to mobilize the conscience of the world, that it led to international efforts (of varying success) to halt the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Darfur. It is not surprising that Jews have played a lead role in all three of those latter examples.