Anti-Zionism is a confession
Pedro Sánchez’s former transport minister and right-hand man, José Luis Ábalos, has spent months in a cell, and prosecutors want to put him away for twenty-four years. The man who ran the Socialist party machine as its number three, Santos Cerdán, was jailed too, released only weeks before the law would have forced it. The prime minister’s wife has been indicted on four separate counts. His brother went on trial last week. His predecessor and political mentor, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, is under investigation over a murky airline bailout. And a businessman named Víctor de Aldama has gone before the Supreme Court and testified, under oath, that the man at the top of the whole operation — number one, above the minister and the minister’s bagman — is Pedro Sánchez himself.
On the 27th of May, the Civil Guard walked into the Socialist Party headquarters in Madrid and started carrying out boxes. They were after evidence of illegal financing, of bribery, of an organized effort to derail the corruption cases already bearing down on the party. A crowd gathered on the pavement and chanted a single word up at the windows. Chorizos. Thieves.
That is Pedro Sánchez at home. Now look at what he does abroad.
For two years, he has been the loudest anti-Israel voice in Western Europe. He recognized a Palestinian state in the middle of a war that Hamas started. After that came the demands for an arms embargo, the genocide accusations from one podium after another, the months-long effort to get the Jewish state barred from every gathering with a television camera nearby. Any time there was a chance to lecture Israel in the rented vocabulary of human rights, Sánchez took it. He was doing precisely that, as it turned out, while the Civil Guard was busy photographing his wife’s files.
This is seldom an accident. I’ve come to think it’s the most reliable rule we have in politics.
Where a man stands on Israel is the single most useful thing you can learn about him. Israel isn’t the only thing that matters, obviously. But hostility to it keeps very particular company, and it almost never shows up by itself. Find me a Western politician who built his brand on hating Israel, and I’ll show you, nine times out of ten, a country that came out the far end of his time in office poorer and more dangerous than he found it, with a fair slice of the public money gone missing on the way.
Let me be exact about this, because the rule only runs in one direction. Being pro-Israel doesn’t make a man good. There are pro-Israel politicians who are fools and grifters and worse — a soft spot for Jerusalem has never cured anybody of stupidity. So the test tells you nothing comforting about the people who pass it. Its whole force is in the ones who fail. The moment a politician makes anti-Zionism his public identity, you can bet the mortgage he is the worst option on the ballot, and that whoever stands against him, whatever that person’s flaws, is the safer thing for the country. It won’t point you toward a hero. It points, dead reliably, at the man you most need to keep out.
Sánchez is just the freshest case. He is not a one-off. The same thing is unfolding in the open across two continents right now, and you can nearly set a watch by it.
Slovenia, for one. Three years under Robert Golob’s leftist government, and a republic of two million people somehow remade itself into one of the most aggressively anti-Israel states in Europe, jostling Ireland and Spain for the lead. Palestinian statehood, recognized. The first total arms embargo in the entire European Union. Trade with Israeli towns in Judea and Samaria, banned. Israeli ministers sanctioned and declared persona non grata, Netanyahu barred from entry, Slovenia’s signature added to South Africa’s sham genocide case at The Hague. A remarkable amount of energy for a small Alpine country with no stake at all in the conflict to spend on hating the one democracy in the Middle East.
In March, Golob faced his voters. He scraped through the vote and then couldn’t assemble a majority. The man who managed to build one instead, sworn in just last month, was Janez Janša — three-time prime minister, friend of Orbán, about as openly pro-Israel as a European leader comes. Janša had called Golob’s recognition of Palestine illegal and never blinked once on Israel’s right to defend itself. The most anti-Israel government on the continent fell, and a pro-Israel one moved into its offices. I doubt the average Slovenian gave Jerusalem a second’s thought when he voted. He had simply decided his government had everything upside down, and the Israel obsession was the brightest flag flying over the wreck.
Then there’s Latin America, where this same film plays reel after reel for years.
Argentina spent two decades under the Kirchners, drifting steadily toward Tehran. This is the country where Alberto Nisman — the prosecutor digging into the 1994 bombing of the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, eighty-five dead — was found shot in his apartment in 2015, the night before he was to testify that Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s government had buried Iran’s role in the attack. A decade on, Kirchner has finally been ordered to stand trial for that cover-up.
That was the old Argentina. The new one belongs to Javier Milei. He studies Torah, keeps a mezuzah on his office door, and means to convert to Judaism the day he leaves office. He stood at the Western Wall and called Israel’s fight “the cause of the West,” and he has said, in as many words, that Israel is what keeps Western civilization standing. Since taking office, he has moved to relocate the embassy to Jerusalem, flipped years of Argentine votes against Israel at the UN, ordered the Nisman files opened, and signed a new set of accords with Jerusalem in April. He swept the October midterms with about forty percent of the vote, the Peronists trailing at thirty-one. And the inflation the Peronists drove to 211 percent? Down in the low thirties now and still falling, the lowest since 2018 — the recovery his critics swore his chainsaw could never deliver.
Bolivia is the same tune in a different key. Twenty years of socialism under Evo Morales and Luis Arce, who cut ties with Israel and somehow produced fuel lines and bread shortages in a country sitting on top of gas and lithium. Last year, Bolivians threw the entire machine out and elected Rodrigo Paz, and relations with Jerusalem were back within weeks. Down in Chile, four years of Gabriel Boric’s seminar-room Marxism ended with the presidency handed to José Antonio Kast by sixteen points — the most right-wing government the country has had since it climbed out of dictatorship. Honduras elected Nasry Asfura, whose party had put the Honduran embassy in Jerusalem back in 2021. Ecuador returned Daniel Noboa to office while he wages an open war on the cartels his predecessors let dig in.
And then, three days ago, Colombia. Gustavo Petro — who cut relations with Israel in 2024, likened Gaza to the Nazi camps, and ran his foreign ministry as a press shop for Hamas — is barred by the constitution from a second term. His handpicked successor, Iván Cepeda, had led every poll for a year. Then they voted on Sunday, and the man who came out on top was Abelardo de la Espriella, a tough-on-crime outsider cut from the same cloth as Milei and Bukele, who has put the restoration of ties with Israel at the dead center of his campaign. He has promised to move the embassy to Jerusalem and bring Israel and Washington in against the cartels, all of it cast as a defense of the West. He forced Cepeda into a runoff on the 21st of June. Petro, naturally, has already announced he doesn’t accept the result. That by itself tells you which way the wind is blowing.
So the shape of it is hard to miss. The governments that hoisted the hatred of Israel as a banner are being pulled down, one country after another, by their own electorates. Not because anyone in Santiago or La Paz or Bogotá lies awake worrying about the safety of Jerusalem — most of them never think about it. They are worrying about the price of bread. About the bodies in the streets and the savings that vanished and the children who emigrated because there was no work left at home. They are throwing these governments out because the governments failed them, flatly and comprehensively. The Israel-bashing was never the disease. Think of it as the rash — the thing that lets you name the sickness from clear across the room.
The link between the two is not luck. It runs deeper than that. A man who hates Israel has signed on to a whole story about the world. In that story, the West is history’s great criminal. A small democracy defending its children is somehow the oppressor, and the dictatorships and the death cults assembled to wipe it out are the injured party. Swallow that about Israel, and you’ll swallow it about everything. The same man looks at his own country’s police and sees an occupying army. The criminals they arrest? Victims. Borders are cages to him, taxpayers are exploiters, and a regime that hangs women from cranes turns out, the moment you press him, to have a perfectly reasonable grievance. Hating Israel grows straight out of hating your own civilization — and a man who hates his own civilization is never going to govern it well. He pours his energy into pulling it apart. Then he calls the rubble justice.
That is the engine of the thing, and there is nothing mystical about it. Cause, then effect. The same broken instrument that reads Israel as the villain reads every other question backwards, too, and a country steered by a man whose every gauge points the wrong way is a country aimed straight at the rocks. The corruption, the inflation, the crime, the capital and the people streaming toward the exits — none of it sits beside the anti-Zionism by chance. It all grows from one root.
Israel ends up at the center of this for a plain reason. It’s the West with the volume turned up — a free country, a working economy, an army that wins its wars, an ancient faith, all of it surrounded by enemies who want it gone and flatly refusing to die. If you still believe the West was worth building, Israel is your proof it can be done. And if you’ve decided the West is a crime scene? Then Israel is something worse than an enemy. It’s a reproach you have to look at every single morning, a standing reminder that a nation can choose strength and self-respect and live through the choosing. They can’t bear it. So they reach for the language of human rights, aim it squarely at the Jews, and persuade themselves that no one can hear the confession underneath.
People can hear it, though. The Spaniards on the pavement outside Socialist headquarters, shouting chorizos up at the windows — they can hear it. The Argentines and the Bolivians who threw the whole rotten arrangement out and felt their countries start to breathe again. The Chileans. Before June is out, I’d lay money, the Colombians.
Tell me how a man talks about Israel, and you’ve told me how he will treat everything else put in his hands. Pedro Sánchez walked up to the microphone certain he was prosecuting the Jewish state, and confessed.
He won’t be the last. The people screaming loudest against Israel are convinced they are living through the moment the West finally turns on it — that the campus tents and the genocide chants are the leading edge of history. They have it exactly backwards. The governments built on hating Israel are being thrown out one by one, by voters who got sick of being broke and unsafe, because the man who hates Israel is the man who can’t run a country. That is the rule these last two years keep hammering home, from Ljubljana to Bogotá: you can hate Israel, or you can deliver for the people who put you in office. You cannot do both.
