Spain and the Absurdity of Its Genocide Accusations Against Israel

It should have been the easiest moral stand in the world. On October 7, 2023, Hamas murdered, tortured, raped, and kidnapped Israeli civilians in a rampage that shocked every corner of the globe. If ever there was a moment for democracies to rally behind a fellow democracy under attack, this was it. And yet, in a move that defies reason, Spain’s government responded not with solidarity but with sanctions — implementing a de facto arms embargo on Israel just days after the bloodshed.

Think about that: while families were still counting their dead and the hostages had only just been dragged into Gaza, Spain decided the problem wasn’t Hamas’s barbarity but Israel’s right to defend itself. That decision revealed not only bias but also a disturbing readiness to treat the Jewish state by rules applied to no one else.

The charge most often leveled against Israel is “genocide.” The word is repeated in headlines, chanted at protests, and, remarkably, echoed by officials in Madrid. But when one bothers to look at the numbers, the accusation collapses under its own weight. In World War II, civilian casualties outnumbered combatants ten to one in cities like Dresden and Tokyo. In Vietnam, the majority of the dead were civilians. When the U.S.-led coalition retook Mosul from ISIS in 2017, thousands of civilians were buried under rubble, with ratios running as high as five civilians killed for every one fighter. Russia’s campaign in Aleppo? Unspeakably worse.

Now compare that to Gaza. Even using the Hamas-controlled Health Ministry’s inflated figures — which fail to distinguish between fighters and civilians — independent assessments still show that 40 to 50 percent of those killed have been combatants. That means a ratio of roughly one-to-one, in the most densely packed urban battlefield on earth, against an enemy that wears no uniforms and embeds itself in schools and hospitals. Put bluntly: Israel has achieved the lowest civilian-to-combatant casualty ratio in the history of urban warfare.

And that’s before accounting for the extraordinary measures Israel takes: dropping leaflets, making phone calls, sending texts, even performing warning strikes on rooftops to signal civilians to evacuate. No other army telegraphs its moves to both civilians and enemies alike. No other army pauses mid-battle to open humanitarian corridors. No other army feeds the population under the control of the very terrorists it is fighting.

Yet in Spain, within days of October 7, officials were more concerned with tying Israel’s hands than condemning Hamas’s tactics. By February 2024, Spain was bragging that no new arms licenses had been approved since the attack. By mid-2025, it went further, formalizing a full embargo: banning Israeli-bound ships and aircraft from Spanish ports and airspace, barring even third-party weapons transits. This wasn’t a measured response to a long war. It was an instinctive, almost reflexive act of bias — punishing Israel at the very moment its people were still burying the dead.

The question is why. Is the world misinformed? Undoubtedly. Most people see rubble and headlines, not ratios and context. Is the world manipulated? Absolutely. Hamas has perfected the art of narrative warfare, where every civilian death it engineers is turned into global ammunition against Israel. But is there also a deeper bias? History suggests yes. Israel is held to impossible standards, its very right to self-defense questioned in ways no other nation faces. When Spain embargoed Israel after October 7, it wasn’t merely a policy decision — it was an admission that for some, Jewish lives lost to terror matter less than the optics of Jews fighting back.

If genocide means anything, it cannot mean precision strikes against combatants who hide among civilians while taking Herculean measures to spare the innocent. And if moral clarity means anything, it cannot mean sanctioning the victim within days of a massacre. Spain chose bias over principle, optics over truth, narrative over numbers. That isn’t foreign policy — it’s being a puppet on Hamas’s strings.

Vergüenza. Shame.