Spain’s Israelophobia Has Reached New, Deranged Heights

Spain is threatening to throw yet another temper tantrum over Israel. Spanish government officials have warned that the national football team may pull out of the World Cup in 2026 if Israel qualifies and is allowed to compete in the tournament. Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez, of the Socialist Workers’ Party, announced earlier this week that Israel should be treated in the same way as Russia, banning it from various international competitions. “Israel cannot continue to use any international platform to whitewash its image,” Sánchez said. Minister of Sports Pilar Alegria echoed this, saying, “Sport is not, and cannot be, an island independent of what happens in the real world, especially when that real world tells us that human rights are being destroyed.” 

It’s not just the sporting world that Spain wants to exile Israel from. The country has also threatened to boycott next year’s Eurovision Song Contest in Vienna. The national broadcaster, RTVE, says that Spain will withdraw from the competition if Israel is allowed to take part. This makes Spain the fifth country to issue such a warning, behind Ireland, the Netherlands, Slovenia, and Iceland. It is also the first of the ‘Big Five’ countries—the five permanent entry nations that make the largest financial contributions—to make the threat. On Monday, Culture Minister Ernest Urtasun stated very clearly that Spain must “ensure that Israel does not take part in the next edition of Eurovision.” 

Spain is one of many Western nations that seems to have gone completely insane over the Gaza conflict. Spanish cities have seen extensive and disruptive pro-Palestine protests ever since Hamas’s massacre on October 7th,  2023. Just last weekend, protests in central Madrid got so out of control that the final stage of the Vuelta a España cycling race was forced to be aborted. Protestors knocked down barriers and blocked the road, forcing the cyclists to abandon the stage with 60 km of the race left to go. The disruption also meant there could be no ceremony for the winners. One of the teams, Israel-Premier Tech, had even been forced to race wearing modified jerseys, which did not display the team name. For Madrid’s mayor, Jose Luis Martinez-Almeida, this was a huge embarrassment, and he called it “the saddest day since I became mayor of this great city.” For Sánchez, though, the fact that pro-Palestine demonstrators had managed to hijack one of professional cycling’s top races was a point of pride. He gave his “respect and recognition for the athletes and our admiration for the Spanish people who are mobilising for just causes like Palestine.”

In a similar vein, seven Israeli chess players withdrew from a tournament in Spain last week after the organisers told them that they would not be able to compete under their national flag. Initially, the players were informed they would not be allowed to enter at all, but organisers backed down from this when the Israelis appealed to the International Chess Federation (FIDE). They were then told they could either play under a neutral FIDE flag or not compete at all. 

Many Spanish institutions, including the government itself, have adopted an official policy of isolating Israel by any means. That includes turning cultural forums, sports federations, and even transport corridors into instruments of punishment. Over the past year, Madrid has recognised Palestinian statehood, asked to intervene in South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, and banned ships and aircraft carrying weapons or military fuel to Israel from Spanish ports and airspace. Spain is determined to push Israel out of as many international arenas as possible. 

But even all this is apparently not enough for the virulently anti-Israel Spanish government. In fact, Sánchez wishes he could do much more to contribute to the Jewish State’s annihilation. Upon announcing an arms embargo on Israel, he lamented that “Spain, as you know, doesn’t have nuclear bombs … We alone can’t stop the Israeli offensive.” Presumably, if Spain did have nuclear weapons, it would be quite happy to use them to wipe Israel off the map. 

All of this hostility has inevitable consequences for Jews in Spain. At a restaurant in Vigo in July, the owner was filmed throwing out a dozen Israeli customers, yelling, “You’re killing Palestine; you’re going to eat in Gaza.” That same month, 44 French Jewish children and their eight adult guardians were removed from a Vueling flight from Valencia to Paris. It’s not entirely clear why such a commotion took place—the airline claims that the children were causing enough of a disturbance for them to be disembarked, while the adults accompanying the children say they had simply been briefly singing. In any case, the French government condemned the use of “excessive force,” and Jewish groups raised the possibility that the incident was sparked by antisemitism. 

Just a few weeks later, another, definitively antisemitic episode occurred in the air. Jewish passengers travelling on a transatlantic flight to Madrid were appalled to discover that the kosher meals they had been served were covered in stickers that read “Free Palestine.” The airline, Iberia, apologised and launched an investigation, as well as promising “specific training on antisemitism for all crew members.” Although, you would expect that whoever did this doesn’t need to be told that defacing food meant specifically for Jews is a clear act of anti-Jewish discrimination.  

Then there is direct targeting of Jewish sites. In Girona, the Jewish community centre/synagogue façade was splashed with pro-Palestine slogans accusing Israel of committing a genocide. And it goes much further than vandalism. In Madrid in April of this year, police revealed they had foiled a plot to bomb the city’s largest synagogue, a case they described as the first planned terrorist attack against Jewish interests in Spain. 

The data match the mood. Like in plenty of other European nations, antisemitism has skyrocketed since 2023. Spain’s Observatorio contra el Antisemitismo reports a 321% year-on-year surge in antisemitic incidents in 2024—a 567% increase versus 2022. The war in Gaza is cited as an accelerant. 

The Spanish government can insist all it wants that it is only isolating Israel. But when the state dedicates so much time and energy into punishing the world’s only Jewish state, it’s only a matter of time before some people will take the hint and punish the nearest Jews they can find. Such vitriolic hostility towards Israel is bound to normalise hatred towards Jews at home. Spain has well and truly been decimated by Israel Derangement Syndrome.