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Spanish foreign minister Jose Manuel Albares announced on Thursday that his nation would seek to join South Africa’s case in the International Court of Justice against Israel for the crime of genocide.
Spain, together with Norway and Ireland, officially recognized the state of Palestine in late May, but the pivot away from supporting Israel can be considered a new direction for the nation.
As recently as 2023, the mayor of Barcelona received much criticism, even from other senior national politicians, for breaking a town-twinning agreement it had with Tel Aviv, suggesting she did so for antisemitic reasons.
Along with both recognizing Israel, Spain and Ireland have also both applied to join South Africa’s case against Israel. On January 26th, the International Court of Justice sided with South Africa’s request for ‘provisional measures’—something akin to an injunction—which ordered Israel to comply with her commitments under the Genocide Convention, and take all available measures to avoid killing, harming, or performing actions intended to prevent births, among members of the Palestinian group.
The provisional measures also ordered Israel to make all necessary efforts to allow the unimpeded flow of aid into the Gaza Strip, but the court stopped short of outrightly ordering an end to all military operations, or labeling it a genocide.
“We made this decision in view of the continuation of the military operation in Gaza,” Albares said during a news conference. “Our sole goal is to put an end to the war and to advance on the road of applying the two-state solution.”
In line with Israel’s vitriolic public comments against any nation or figure that hasn’t supported her attacks against Gaza, Israeli foreign minister Israel Katz suggested that “if this ignorant, hate-filled individual wants to understand what radical Islam truly seeks, she should study the 700 years of Islamic rule in al-Andalus – today’s Spain,” a bizarre, a-historical reference that has also drawn sharp criticism.
Additionally, Katz announced his decision to ban Spain’s representation in Israel from being able to see or help Palestinians, and to prohibit the Spanish consulate in Jerusalem from providing services to Palestinians from the West Bank. The Spanish consulate for Palestinians, led by Consul-General Alfonso Lucini Mateo, is located in Sheikh Jarrah in occupied East Jerusalem.
The criticism hasn’t been a one-way street in Spain’s relationship with Israel. Spain, a country that doesn’t always follow in lockstep with NATO’s agenda, which up until this point has been almost total, unconditional support for Israel’s butchering of Gaza, has an internal rhetorical history against its own on behalf of Israel.
Antisemitism in Spain
Taken from an earlier story on World at Large…
In February 2023, El Pais described the Mayoress of Barcelona, Ada Colau, as coming to a decision to suspend a town-twinning agreement with Tel Aviv following a campaign by more than 100 rights groups, hundreds of journalists, and 4,000 residents in the city who in turn were organized under a group called Organisations for Global Justice.
They organized the petition after air strikes in Gaza killed at least 260 people in May of 2021 with “no apparent military target”.
Colau sent a letter to Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu explaining the temporary suspension of relations “until the Israeli authorities put an end to the system of violations of the Palestinian people and fully comply with the obligations imposed on them by international law”.
El Pais reports that the Catalan capital city has been deeply divided by the decision, and in an interesting journalistic exercise, the Spanish daily had two of their opinion writers publish a for-or-against editorial.
The in-favor-of piece simply states what the UN, Human Rights Watch, and B’Tselem reports say is happening, and quotes that Mayoress Colau’s decision was taken against a regime, not against a “nation, people, or religion”.
The in-opposition-of piece must be said to be profoundly snide, and instead of focusing on recent years’ accusations of human rights crimes, focuses on Israel’s foundation by Jews fleeing international socialism and the holocaust. Its point lies fundamentally in the author’s views that as a mayor, it’s “infantile” to take a foreign policy stance towards a government she dislikes since she has no power to make foreign policy decisions.
Similarly, Colau’s colleague and mayor of Madrid, José Luís Martínez Almeida, said he saw in the decision “an anti-Semitic stink”.
“It so happens that Israel is the only Jewish country in the world,” the Federation of Jewish Communities of Spain wrote in a statement. “Therefore, in our opinion, this decision has nothing to do with politics, human rights, or peace. This has a name and is called ‘Sophisticated anti-Semitism’”. (Capitalized in the original).
ACOM another pro-Israel Spanish group stated Barcelona was “becoming the most openly anti-Semitic city in Europe,” and added, “Colau and her accomplices have a problem and that problem is called anti-Semitism”.
The European Jewish Congress slammed the twinning decision as “motivated by deep-seated anti-Israel bias” and Israeli Foreign Ministry Spokesman Lior Haiat denounced it as giving “support to extremists, terrorist organizations and anti-Semitism”.
There was no disputing any of the facts cited in Colau’s decision, nor over her allegations of violations of international law. WaL
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PICTURED ABOVE: Spanish Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares at the U.S. Department of State in Washington DC on May 11, 2023. PC Dept. of State,
