Spain Sanctions Israel — and History Fails to Laugh
Spain Sanctions Israel — and History Fails to Laugh
Yochanan Schimmelpfennig · September 8, 2025 · Jerusalem
Spain has just announced sanctions against Israel: a ban on arms exports, closure of ports and airspace to military shipments, and the withdrawal of its ambassador.
The Spanish government claims to be responding to a “genocide in Gaza.”
The vocabulary is absolute. So is the hypocrisy.
The inventors of ethnic expulsion dress in morality
Let’s be precise.
Spain was not merely a participant in Europe’s long history of Jew-hatred.
It was its architect.
In 1492, the Catholic Monarchs issued the Edict of Granada: forced conversion, exile, or death.
Between 1480 and 1834, the Inquisition operated not as metaphor, but as an institution dedicated to religious and cultural annihilation.
Long before the word genocide existed, Spain had perfected its techniques:
forced baptisms, genealogical purging, book burnings, public executions — all under the seal of law and the cross.
“Purity of blood” was not poetry. It was a bureaucratic system of exclusion.
Spain didn’t just eliminate Jews. It erased their descendants from civil history.
And today Madrid preaches human rights
Pedro Sánchez, leader of a country that never exhumed all its Civil War dead,
now presents himself as the world’s moral conscience.
A country that colonized, enslaved, and evangelized at the tip of a sword,
now speaks of humanitarian dignity with a theatrical solemnity.
The rhetoric is no surprise.
What stuns is the amnesia.
Where was this clarity when Syria collapsed?
When Iran hanged protesters?
When China locked up millions of Uyghurs?
No ports were closed then.
No words like “extermination” were uttered.
There is a pattern.
When Jews are involved, Europe finds its voice.
Not because it remembers Auschwitz —
but because it never digested Toledo.
Spain never faced itself
The transition after Franco included no Nuremberg.
No confession. No atonement.
Only a pact of silence.
Spain forgot its fascism. Its antisemitism. Its empire.
And in that void emerged a new gesture:
the cost-free moral performance.
Today, Sánchez condemns the only Jewish state —
not because he understands suffering,
but because Spain still doesn’t recognize its own reflection.
This is not about Gaza
Spain does not speak for the Palestinians.
It speaks against the Jews.
Let’s not confuse this with foreign policy.
It’s ancestral theatre:
the same Europe that once expelled the Jews now expels their moral sovereignty.
Gaza is real. Palestinian pain is real. The war is real.
But Spain’s performance is not part of the solution.
It is part of the disease.
The blood still stains the walls of your churches
In Córdoba, synagogues became Christian temples.
In Seville, Jewish children vanished without names.
In Toledo, Jews were stripped of citizenship and humanity.
Spain has not apologized.
Has not restored.
Has not returned memory.
And now it lectures on dignity?
A Note to Madrid
Do not speak of genocide while refusing to teach it in your own schools.
Do not accuse Israel while refusing to name your own ghosts.
Do not condemn Jewish sovereignty while denying what you did to Jewish life.
Israel is not above criticism.
But Spain is beneath conscience.
History does not applaud.
Post Scriptum
This is not a defense of a policy.
It is a defense of memory.
And Spain — of all nations — has no right to forget.
— Y. Schimmelpfennig