Considering the inadequate U.S. efforts to free its citizens being held by Hamas, Meir Soloveichik looks to the example of the great Victorian statesman Lord Palmerston:
In 1848, a series of anti-Semitic riots took place in Athens, and a Sephardi Jew by the name of Don Pacifico issued claims for damages to his property. Pacifico had never set foot in England, but he had been born in Gibraltar, and therefore submitted his case as a British subject to the government of Lord John Russell, in which Palmerston was serving as foreign secretary. Palmerston seized upon these claims, as he had already been angered by other purported grievances by the Greek government, and he ordered the British fleet to blockade Greek ports until Pacifico’s grievances were addressed.
This response, Soloveichik writes, reflected a general view of Britain’s role in the world that can “serve as a worthy polestar for the United States.”
The Don Pacifico affair is not the only aspect of Palmerston’s career worth rediscovering; his own approach to freedom and foreign policy has much to teach us today. Palmerston did not believe that free societies could be created overnight, but he did believe that British power ought to be used in celebration, and at times in the defense, of societies that sought to be free.
More about: Greece, Hostages, U.S. Foreign policy, United Kingdom