This letter is in response to the editorial titled ‘The Charade of Palestinian State Recognition,’ which ran in the Aug. 7 issue of Washington Jewish Week.
To me, the steady march of Israel’s and America’s supposed European allies toward recognition of a Palestinian state is more than a mere “charade” or a “surrender” to Islamist terror. Rather, it is a sinister echo of historical European perfidy against the Jewish people.
It seems the French, British, Spanish and Irish have never outgrown the primitive, pre-civilizational deficit of moral and cultural values of their barbarian ancestors — the Franks, Gauls, Anglo-Saxons, Celts/Gaels, Vandals, Visigoths, Vikings, etc. — who descended upon the collapsing Roman Empire. This brought on the Dark Ages of Europe, setting back Western civilization by centuries, and marked the beginning of brutal persecution of Jews throughout Europe, leading inexorably to the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition and, even in the 20th century, to the Holocaust.
Apropos, in 1835, Benjamin Disraeli, Britain’s first (and only) Jewish prime minister, when faced with an antisemitic taunt from Irish Member of Parliament Daniel O’Connell in the House of Commons, purportedly responded to the taunt with the words:
“Yes, I am a Jew, and while the ancestors of the right honorable gentleman [O’Connell] were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the Temple of Solomon.”
That ingrained antisemitic viral infection has continued unabated in Europe to this day, albeit with a few short periods of dormancy.
Is it any wonder, then, why many European leaders are so quick to recognize a fictitious Palestinian state supposedly belonging to yet another barbaric people, the so-called Palestinian Arabs, a people tainted by evil designs against the Jewish people and their ancient, indigenous homeland now known as the Jewish state of Israel?
Marc L. Caroff, Virginia Beach
