J’Accuse…! Peace in our Time, Terror in our Synagogues
Historically Britain’s antisemitism had a certain dignified, institutionalized and even genteel factor to it. That façade collapsed on Yom Kippur when Jews were slaughtered in a Manchester synagogue. As the impact of this horrific attack seeped into our joint consciousness, there was a dreaded sense of historical inevitability for the Jewish community of the United Kingdom.
British citizens have become acclimated to the two-tier policing that allows almost daily hate-filled demonstrations to strangle its cities. Jews are inured to the taunts of genocide and baby killer that they are subjected to while going about their everyday lives.
The delusion of safety in the birthplace of liberal democracy was finally shattered under the unbearable weight of fundamentalism indulged and coddled. In a reverse Crusades, England has not conquered Islam abroad but surrendered to it domestically.
This heinous attack was not an aberration but rather the result of an environment that the British establishment has nurtured. While Britain has suffered dozens of acts of Islamic terrorism in the past, like 7/7, Lee Rigby, the Ariana Grande concert, and countless others, this one seems different.
A direct line can be drawn from Starmer’s “Chamberlainesque” attempt at appeasement to Muslim terror in recognizing a Palestinian state, to the Yom Kippur massacre. In recognizing a terror state under these conditions, the government formally sanctioned antisemitism and overtly capitulated to terror, both domestic and foreign. Historians will view this “peace in our time” act as the moment when the political class surrendered to Jihad. Ironically, that was both the action and the terrorist’s given name.
Prime Minister Starmer defended his Palestinian recognition loquaciously in a twisted rationalization of achieving peace. The tragedy is that Middle East peace was nearly a reality. As outlandish as this claim might sound, the region was destined to achieve such a peace until this seemingly unstoppable trajectory was halted in its very tracks by the English.
With colonial cunning and duplicitous diplomacy, they betrayed their own allies with a stroke of the pen. The kicker is that I am not referring to their recent reckless theatrics but to a crime that transpired over a century ago.
For 400 years, the Middle East belonged to the Ottoman Empire, but the “sick man of Europe” made a calamitous decision to back the Germans in WWI and ended up forfeiting their empire. Divvying up the spoils of war became a tug-of-war between France and England, who traded countries and regions like school kids swapping baseball cards during recess.
This was all done in secret because, as it turns out, like any good Ponzi schemer, England had already promised these lands to others and sometimes more than once.
England was struggling with a multi-front war, and in an effort to strike a blow to the Germans and tie up the Ottoman troops, it did a deal with the Hashemite family. The broker for this transaction was T.E. Lawrence, otherwise known by his nom de guerre “Lawrence of Arabia.” Under the terms of this agreement, Sharif Hussein bin Ali and his sons would lead an uprising against the Ottomans and, in exchange, would be given an independent Arab state in the vacuum of the Ottoman Empire.
Shortly thereafter in 1917, England signed the Balfour Declaration, which recognized the Jewish homeland. This ignited a tension between the Jews and Arabs, who both had documented English validation that prima facie conflicted.
The matter was resolved by Chaim Weizmann, head of the British Zionist Federation and future first President of the State of Israel. Weizmann negotiated a monumental peace agreement with the Hashemite family.
On January 3rd, 1919, the Weizmann-Faisal agreement was signed, and it encapsulated the last and best comprehensive treaty between Jews and Arabs. Mutual political recognition, cultural rights respected, technical and economic cooperation, and Jewish immigration were enshrined as a foundational premise.
This should have been the bedrock of a Middle East that would have seen legitimate peace based on respect and strong economic ties. The Middle East we know today would have been an entirely different landscape, and at the risk of seeming overly quixotic, the world would have been a better place in which to live.
Imagine if the Holocaust had never happened because the Jews had a homeland to escape to. Imagine the countless territorial wars over the past century that could have been avoided. Imagine the economy that would have blossomed from a region acting in harmony as a financial powerhouse. Except this was not to be.
The British had no intentions of following through on any of their wartime commitments and were double-dealing in a geopolitical Ponzi scheme from the start. In spite of their deal with the Hashemites, simultaneously they sat down in secret with the French and literally began drawing lines across the region.
In 1916, they signed the Sykes-Picot agreement to divide up the region into spheres of influence between them. Post-war, at the Paris Peace Conference, they formalized this betrayal and disclosed the agreement to the shock and amazement of the Arabs and Jews alike.
The result was the nullification of the Weizmann-Faisal peace treaty, the gutting of the Balfour Declaration, and a century of strife to follow. Chaos ensued with the fracturing of the region into seemingly random protectorates under French and English mandates. It was so random that legend has it that one strange curve in the map of Jordan was traced around Churchill’s drinking glass, which he had accidentally left on the map.
The Arabs and the Jews were not the only parties betrayed in this process because the Kurds and the Armenians were also made promises of independence by the British that were ultimately discarded on the scrap heap of British integrity.
On Yom Kippur, the Jews paid the price of Britain’s duplicity once again, this time in Manchester. A century ago, England betrayed the Jews to carve up an empire; now, it sacrifices its Jewish subjects to appease an electorate. History repeats: only this time, instead of the sand dunes of Arabia, it is the synagogues of Britain.
