A relative of Mahatma Gandhi has resigned from a peace institute after drawing condemnation for comments he made in an online forum that Israel and Jews "are the biggest players" in a global culture of violence.

Arun Gandhi, the fifth grandson of the revered pacifist, said yesterday the board of the M.K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence based at the University of Rochester had accepted his offer a day earlier to step down as president.

Gandhi co-founded the institute with his wife, Sunanda, at Christian Brothers University in Memphis in 1991 and relocated it to the University of Rochester in Rochester, N.Y., campus in June, a few months after her death.

Gandhi was on a panel of scholars, writers and clergy who discuss a new topic weekly on the Washington Post's "On Faith" page and his comments, posted Jan. 7, drew a torrent of criticism.

He wrote that Jewish identity "has been locked into the holocaust experience - a German burden that the Jews have not been able to shed. It is a very good example of (how) a community can overplay a historic experience to the point that it begins to repulse friends."

Describing Israel as "a nation that believes its survival can only be ensured by weapons and bombs. . . .Would it not be better to befriend those who hate you?"

"Apparently, in the modern world so determined to live by the bomb, this is an alien concept," he wrote. "You don't befriend anyone, you dominate them. We have created a culture of violence (Israel and the Jews are the biggest players) and that Culture of Violence is eventually going to destroy humanity."

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By BEN DOBBIN

The Associated Press