ABSTRACT
Gandhi was relatively silent on the Palestine issue after his remarks in 1938 and this was partly due to the domestic situation in India. The rationale through which he articulated his support for the continuation of the institution of Caliph, namely, Palestine being an integral part of the Jazirat-ul-Arab, was firmly established in India despite the fact that the nomenclature merely means Arabian Peninsula. For Gandhi and the other Khilafat leaders, ‘external’ denoted non-Muslims and mainly British imperialism. The Khilafat movement was a great disappointment not only for Gandhi but also for the leaders of India’s Muslim population and their representatives in the Congress Party and Muslim League. The struggle exposed the limitation of the exalted importance that they attached to the largest Muslim community in the world at that time, as demography alone was insufficient to bring about a change in the British peace terms toward the post-war Ottoman Empire.
