“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.”
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Source: "The Jews", Harijan (26 November 1938); The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. 74 (1938).
About this quote
From Gandhi's 1938 essay on the Jews, this applies his rule of self-determination to Palestine: a land, to him, belonged to the people already living on it, and settling one population on another's homeland by outside pressure was a wrong. It was a contested stand then and remains sharply disputed.
When to use it
- Longtime residents of a block resist a developer's plan to move a new population in over their heads without any say.
- A co-op insists a new member be accepted by the people already living there, not installed by an outside board.
- A village asks that any resettlement plan get the consent of current inhabitants rather than being imposed from a distant capital.