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Mohandas Gandhi ‘fostered a death cult’ in which courage, not nonviolence, was the supreme virtue, headed an authoritarian movement in which ‘to doubt Gandhi was to doubt God’, and ‘had a party line, not just on sexual abstinence and vegetarianism, but also on “idle jokes” (opposed), “innocent pleasantries” (perhaps)... and pencils and fountain pens (opposed).’

Moreover, though he denounced both property damage and trespass as ‘pure violence’, he was not a pacifist in the conventionally understood sense of the term, supporting the idea of ‘calling on the army and having a handful of men shot’ to stop inter-communal rioting among Indians, and backing the deployment of Indian troops after partition to prevent Kashmir’s secession.

Thus writes Norman Finkelstein after a close reading of roughly half of the one hundred 500-page volumes of Gandhi’s Collected Works, though much of this information will come as no surprise to readers who attended the Gandhi workshop at PN Summer Camp 2010!

Norman Finkelstein has read deeply in Gandhi's collected writings as part of his exploration of how the longstanding conflict between Israelis and Palestinians might be brought to an end. He has found that some of what we think we know about Gandhi's views is incomplete, if not incorrect. Finkelstein's new book is an attempt to clearly lay out the basic principles of Gandhi's approach. A fuller appreciation of Gandhi's message will be of interest to those concerned about the Middle East as well as the more general struggle for peace and social justice worldwide.

Norman Finkelstein received his doctorate in 1988 from the Department of Politics at Princeton University. He is the author of six books besides this one on Gandhi.