The Don Pacifico affair
I was at a dinner party this weekend and met a lovely couple. He was a management consultant and Greek, while she was a lecturer in modern history and Jewish. The odd way that my mind works put this information about them together and came up with a memory of a school history lesson that must have been about 1963. In this lesson, we learned about the Don Pacifico affair
The story was so odd that it has stuck in my memory all this time. David Pacifico was a Portuguese Jew born in Gibraltar (which made him a British subject). He had business interests in Greece where his home was was destroyed by anti-semitic rioters and the Greek Government refused to compensate him. So, in 1850, British Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston sent gunboats to Greece to enforce his claim.
You think I’m making this up? You can check out the facts here.
The Don Pacific affair was a terrible instance of ‘gunboat diplomacy’. The mentality still exists in international relations which explains why the Americans and British invaded Iraq.