On 11 June 1947, Albert Einstein made an extraordinary intervention in global geo-political affairs by writing to then prime minister-designate of India, Jawaharlal Nehru. He implored India’s leader to endorse the “Zionist effort to recreate a Jewish Homeland in Palestine”. Appealing to Nehru’s moral sensibilities, he focused on the ethical question of whether the Jews should be allowed to have a homeland in the “soil of their fathers”.

In his letter, Einstein described the historical wrong done to the Jewish people, who had been “victimized and hounded” for centuries. He wrote that millions of Jews had died not only because of the Nazi gas chambers but also because “there was no spot on the globe where they could find sanctuary”. Zionism was the means to end this anomaly of history, he wrote, and a solution for this persecuted people to settle in a land to which they had “historic ties”.

The pertinent question then was, would the arrival of Jewish refugees from across the world displace the local Arab population? The answer, according to Einstein, was a strict no, and he gave two reasons for it – one legal, and the other economic.

1. The Jewish migrants bought “every inch of the land on which they settled” from the local people per the “international agreements”. No Arab locals were forcefully uprooted from their home to make way for Jewish settlers.

2. The Jewish settlers converted this sparsely-populated, marshy and semi-arid land into one of most fertile regions of the Middle East, and the resulting prosperity had not only been shared by the Jews but also the Arabs. And all this new-found prosperity had not come about due to the “exploitation of native workers” but by the “heroic toil of Jewish pioneers”. He buttressed this fact by writing that the Arab population of Palestine had doubled in the last 30 years while the Arab population of the adjoining land had remained static.

Then Einstein delivered the coup de grâce. He wrote that after the Allies had freed the Arab lands from Ottoman rule, 99 per cent of this “vast, under populated territories” were set aside to create five independent Arab nations, namely Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, and “only 1% of it was reserved for the Jewish people in the land of their origin.” He requested Nehru to consider “in the august scale of justice” which side had more moral weight.

Nehru, uncharacteristically, did not respond to this letter for almost a month. Perhaps his mind was already made up, or perhaps he did not want to wade into this difficult issue with none other than Einstein. He wrote that India had the “deepest sympathy” for the plight of the Jewish people, and promised to help them in any way the country could. However, he wrote that any “national policies” were essentially “selfish policies”.