Is Madrid (or Barcelona) really on a par with Tel Aviv?

In the Chueca neighborhood, the liberal Madrid hang-out par excellence, there is a restaurant that from the outside could be any other. A modern and bright place, with large windows facing the street, like so many others in this area of the capital. However, upon entering to ask for a table, it quickly becomes apparent that you are actually in one of the few kosher restaurants in the city. It is important to clarify that it is not the only one, although I do not know of any with such a youthful atmosphere, in which it says on a blackboard, "Welcome to Tel Aviv", as if to remind you that its cultural reference is the open, diverse, multicultural, tolerant and secular life of the Israeli city. While trying what must be the best hummus in Spain along with a delicious aubergine dish, the question popped up, could Tel Aviv be in Madrid?

Madrid stands as a cosmopolitan beacon, boasting an autonomous government that aligns itself as a staunch supporter of Israel. This contrasts with the central government's approach, which appears to balance its stance to appease its far-left partners. Despite attempts by some to negate this, Spain historically has seen a significant decline in its Muslim and Jewish populations.

Spain acknowledges a historical obligation to these communities, having exiled them in the same year it embarked on its American adventures. Recent efforts to redress this have been directed towards Sephardic Jews through an invitation to acquire Spanish nationality, albeit in a restricted manner due to stringent eligibility criteria.

Drawing parallels to Israel's establishment as a sanctuary for Jews and Arabs alike, one might be drawn to envision Spain evolving into a spiritual homeland for the descendants of the Sephardim and Berbers, reconnecting them with their ancestral lineage.

Certainly, the notion presented is more hypothetical than practical. Present-day Spain finds itself, according to some metrics, among the European nations grappling with anti-Semitic sentiments, and it also seems to lack the collective will or means to assimilate a substantial Muslim demographic. This observation serves as a pointed critique aimed at both the anti-Semitic factions of the left and the Islamophobic elements of the right.

The historical tapestry of Spain is rich with intrigue, notably its celebration of the "Reconquista" - the transformation of an Arab dominion into a Christian kingdom. This was achieved through the efforts of the Catholic Monarchs who either expelled or converted the Islamic and Jewish inhabitants. These events, which unfolded over five centuries ago, have left an enduring imprint. In contemporary Spain, a mere 2 percent of the populace adheres to non-Christian faiths. In retrospect, Ferdinand and Isabella's legacy in establishing a Christian stronghold endures to this day. 

Today's Spain emerged from a tumultuous history of expulsion, while Israel was born from the aspirations of those fleeing persecution, securing land through legitimate means and establishing a nation under the auspices of the United Nations on territory previously under British rule. The onset of violence was a response to aggression from neighboring Arab states intent on the new state's destruction.

Paradoxically, despite the historical connections, many Spaniards find it perplexing to witness the flourishing of a Jewish state on lands that had been taken from them many centuries ago. This mirrors the situation in Spain, where, by similar reasoning, the land is steeped in a complex history of ownership. This reality resonates with radical Islamist factions who harbour ambitions of reclaiming Al Andalus, echoing the stance of groups like Hamas that lay claim to the expanse from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

It is conceivable that the Spanish reluctance to welcome back Jewish communities stems from a concern that it would precede a similar return of Muslim populations, potentially altering the religious demographic balance significantly. Critics of Israel may overlook the irony in deeming it anti-Islamic, given its diverse society, which stands in stark contrast to Spain's less varied religious landscape. The threat of extremism is not unique to any one nation, and the challenges faced by Israel today could be mirrored elsewhere tomorrow. The key is not opposition to Islam but the cessation of extremist factions like Hamas and the current Iranian regime, paving the way for peaceful coexistence among Jews, Muslims, and Christians in the Middle East.

Spain, in contrast, does not stand out as a paragon of religious openness. There is a journey ahead for the country to match the level of inclusivity and tolerance found in Israel, and to merit a city with the vibrant and welcoming spirit of Tel Aviv.

Sepharad-washing - Spain's official attempts to "recover" its Jewish past are barely reflected in the country's modern day reality

In Spain since the transition to democracy there has been a conscious effort to recover the country's Jewish past. The result of this is the network of  medieval Jewish quarters which can be visited in cities as diverse as Toledo, Alcalá de Henares, Córdoba  and Granada. Besides restoring ancient synagogues such as El Tránsito in Toledo, the streets have been landscaped with Jewish symbols even on the cobble stones as a means of attracting tourism.

This is however little more than a Disney World of Jewishness. A previous government established the Centro Sefarad in Madrid, where exhibitions, round tables and other events are held to discuss the country's Jewish past and present. I've been to one of these events and while there was a very big audience of people defining themselves as "allies of the Jews" or "allies of Israel", there was a distinct absence of Jews. Despite that,  you had to arrive early to get past the airport type security to get into the building. Even gentiles seem to need security to discuss matters Jewish in Spain.

Madrid's Sephardi synagogue is a closed affair. The building has a permanent police presence and to even get on the community's mailing list, you need to send them your official ID and then make an appointment on a specific date or time to formally register yourself . This isn't just for security. So little is known about the Jewish community that journalists often try to turn up to research their customs and traditions and the resulting coverage can often be ill informed, patronising or both. I read an article a few years ago in El País, in which the reporter seemed to be more interest in how Jewish people got their children circumcised. So few people even have knowingly met a Jewish person and a lot of myths still abound. 

It seems a large part of the current Sephardi community in Madrid is of Moroccan origin, however there are also an increasing number of secular Argentinian Jews in Madrid and Barcelona. Immigration in recent years has led to liberal, reform and conservative synagogues springing up, however these are entirely hidden, in appartments, and in one case meeting up almost secretly at a cultural centre on Shabbat. A growing number of Spanish people are converting and there is a Jewish school in the suburbs of the city. However most Jewish people one meets don't practice and few keep the halakha.

Judaism is still very much a mystery in Spain, and its past is a quaint tourist attraction. Interestingly, when in 2015 Spain introduced a right of return for the historic Sephardic community, scant attention was given to how their culture and traditions were wiped not just from Spain's present but also from the country's memory. One of the conditions of acquiring nationality was to demonstrate some kind of cultural or social affinity to modern Spain. Clearly, many potential candidates nowadays have little connection to the country or the much confected history of the place that is in modern Spaniards' collective imagination. Spanish embassies and consulates in countries like Turkey are trying to reestablish a connection with the Ladino community, however much of this is a Jewish equivalent of greenwashing. Nowadays few Jews consider emigrating to Spain and many who claimed nationality did it more to get a passport to Europe than as a means of moving to Spain.

Modern day Sepharad is barely a work in progress.

Why labelling events in Gaza a "holocaust" is fake news and terribly offensive to Jews

We continue to contemplate horrific images from the battlefield, as Israeli troops advance in their mission to wipe out the Hamas terrorist organization. That these images affect us is what makes us human. We cannot look the other way when we see the suffering of so many people who have lost their homes and livelihoods and who are trapped, unable to escape the strip, either in the direction of Israel or even towards Egypt, a country of which, until 1967, Gaza was a part.

To observe this suffering and to respond by calling on Israel to stop this war is not anti-Semitic. I can’t recall any war this century, in which Western countries have intervened, in which there has not been a significant part of society opposed to the intervention. Even in the most recent case of the war in Ukraine, many, especially on the left, opposed and continue to oppose sending weapons to the victim of Russian aggression. And while such a stance seems to me highly misguided, it is a reasonable manifestation of an intransigent pacifism. And calling for peace is not a crime. Quite the opposite.

Nor can we turn a blind eye to the numerous objective reasons to criticise the current Israeli government, led by Binyamin Netanyahu, for its own contribution to this situation. One needs to go no further than read Israeli opposition newspapers such as the prestigious Haaretz to see that such criticism is not the exclusive preserve of voices from outside Israel and to appreciate that opposing this war is not the same as wishing for the extermination of the Jews. The Israeli prime minister bears a clear responsibility for failing to protect the country from the October 7 pogrom, in which 1,200 Israelis were killed and 242 kidnapped; for courting the far right in the country; and for sowing discord in society thus providing the enemy with a pretext to believe this to be the most suitable time to launch an attack.

Furthermore, we are undeniably witnessing a humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza that is difficult to quantify, and that will have long-term consequences for the region and the world. The images show us that the territory has been razed to the ground. The civilian population lacks houses, basic supplies, schools, hospitals... in an endless succession of tragedy and despair.

However, despite all this horror, and the natural instinct to use language to try to describe the indescribable, talking about a "holocaust", as I see every day on social networks, is not only fake news but also a horrendous offence, both to ordinary Israelis, as rightful citizens of their country, and to the wider Jewish community. The reasons are many, and I will try to enumerate some of them here:

First, let's try to define what we mean when we use the word, "holocaust." The term refers to Adolf Hitler's partially successful attempt to exterminate the entire Jewish population from the face of the earth. The Jews posed no threat to anyone. Not to Germany, nor to any other country in the world. As in so many other moments in history, the Jews were used as a scapegoat, blamed in this case for all the ills suffered by Germany in the 1930s, after the hardships suffered by the country following the Treaty of Versailles.  and later by the impact of the Great Depression. The extermination of six million Jews—about half of those living in the world at the time—was not based on any reason beyond the deranged ideology of the author of Mein Kampf.

The suffering of the Jews in the Holocaust was by no means an isolated event in history. Since the Middle Ages, numerous pogroms have been documented against the Jews, who were cruelly murdered, expelled from their countries, as happened in Spain at the hands of the Inquisition, and accused of absurd blood libels, such as having "killed Christ". Such slurs were often used in retaliation when they sought to recover the loans they had granted, in a perfectly legitimate way,  to people of power. And the guilt felt by Germans and Europeans after the end of World War II and the creation of the State of Israel as the national home for Jews was not the end of it either. It is worth reminding that when Israel had not even finished counting the dead of the October 7 attack, and had not launched a single missile into Gaza, the number of violent attacks on Jews in the capitals of much of the Western world skyrocketed.

When analysing the Israeli response in Gaza, clearly it does not bare even the slightest resemblance to the Nazi Holocaust. Let's document some facts:

1.      While the Nazis' "justification" for the Holocaust was based on fiction, the actions of the Israeli Defence Force are in retaliation for an attack that aimed, like others in the second half of the last century, at destroying the state of Israel. Funded by Iran, and with allies such as Hezbollah in Lebanon or the Houthis in Yemen, this has been its clearly stated goal. The justification for the reaction is therefore based on fact. It is about defending Israel, a country in which 50% of the world's Jewish population lives today, and whose population is increasing even now when it is under threat, because Jews who lived in other parts of the world feel more in danger in the countries in which they live, where anti-Semitism and violent attacks on their homes and businesses are on the rise.

2.      When comparing Israel's response with other retaliatory actions for terrorist or military actions over the last century, it would appear to be perfectly proportional. The September 11 attack in New York did not pose an existential threat to the United States, but it did lead to the invasion of Afghanistan and the Iraq War. These two conflicts were highly questioned by international public opinion, and neither was resolved satisfactorily. As dramatic as those attacks were, the death toll was 2,996 people in a country of 331.9 million. In Israel, lest we forget, 1200 people died out of a population of just over 9 million. The vast majority of the world's Jews knew either directly or indirectly someone who was viciously murdered, raped, kidnapped, or all three together, on that fateful day in 2023. It was, without a doubt, not only a heinous crime but also an existential threat to the country.

3.      The justification for wiping out Hamas terrorists is not only based on the events of October 7. The mere presence of a neighbour who promises to put an end to your existence, who indoctrinates children in their schools and colleges in hatred of the Jews, who launches missiles daily at Israel, and who sows its territory with an immense labyrinth of tunnels whose length is greater than the sum of the Parisian subway and the London Tube,  in order to hide its forces and weapons and enter Israeli territory, creates a situation of daily terror in Israel that has barely been touched upon in the Western media. Unsurprisingly, more than 23 percent of adult Israelis suffer from post-traumatic stress from living continuously amid the Hamas rockets. Little is said about it because the Israeli defence system is so effective against missiles - the Israelis, unlike the Gazans who have no shortage of aid money and have received billions from the Israeli Government itself - invest in their own defence. However, waking every morning in the knowledge that you are still alive thanks to an air defence system is not sustainable over time in any democratic country.

4.      As reprehensible as the Netanyahu government and its coalition partners are, and they are for many reasons, the strategy in Gaza is being executed by a capable war cabinet, following the formation of government of national unity, in which yes, there are extremist voices, but those who call the shots are people with great knowledge of conflicts and who are complying with standards they have always upheld. It took several days for the intense bombardment to begin, during which time they maximized the pressure on the Gazan authorities, -aka Hamas-, to return the hostages peacefully. In fact, it would perhaps have been sufficient for Hamas to accede Hamas to these demands for us to have avoided the situation we are in now. And Israel, when it bombs, warns the civilian population like no other army in the world by dropping leaflets from the air and other measures that, while those so far away from the horrors of war, may not think count for much but which do, in fact, make a difference. Reputable data – in contrast to the figures provided by Hamas.  suggest that the number of civilian casualties as a proportion of the total is considerably lower than the figures for other comparable conflicts.

5.      No civilian casualties in Gaza have been intentionally caused by Israel. Such is not the case, however, of the Hamas terrorists, who use civilians as shields in tunnels, and build "hospitals" whose use is anything but to care for the sick. It is striking that a country that many Western media define as an open-air prison 32 hospitals for a population of 1 million. Well, many of them were used only as a base to hide weapons, as a refuge for terrorists and as a very useful public relations tool to unleash a fierce international reaction every time Israel - or Hamas itself, as in the case of the al-Ahli hospital, in whose courtyard a Hamas missile fell on October 17 - entered one of these supposed health centres with its troops.

6.      The main culprit for the catastrophe is Hamas, which aims to achieve as many casualties as possible to delegitimise Israel. And its strategy is working, as was to be expected from the start. Israel is losing support in the international community and has had to bow to European and U.S. pressure, first agreeing to a truce last November and now showing greater caution in the final weeks of the conflict. These measures do not always aid them in the pursuit of their objectives and could even prolong the conflict. Israel allows all necessary humanitarian aid into Gaza. It is another matter for Hamas not to allow this aid to reach the civilian population. Now they are trying to launch the aid from the air. Of course, as good or bad as it is as a strategy, these are not the kind of tactics you would expect a country seeking to obliterate the population of Gaza.

Israel, like any other democratic country, and even more so given the current state of the world, has its virtues and its defects. Netanyahu is not a prime minister I would even wish on my worst enemy, and his many shortcomings are compounded by his willingness to make deals with whomever it takes, and if necessary, with the Devil himself, as a means of staying in power. In this sense, he is somewhat reminiscent of a prime minister that we have closer to home, even if the latter is from the left. Gaza is suffering from a terrible humanitarian crisis, and if Netanyahu had done away with Hamas earlier by other means, perhaps we would be in a very different situation today.

Wars are always horrific. There is no humanity in war, no matter how much one tries to minimise the suffering. However, if this war were not fought now, it is hard to imagine where we would be a few years down the line, with a nuclear Iran and terrorist infrastructures in Gaza even more complex to navigate. The aim of this post is not to defend or convince anyone that one strategy or another is the right one, or what other tactics could have mitigated the suffering of the Palestinian people the most. Jews and Arabs need to learn to live together. Today it is even more difficult than ever to imagine such a result, although just in the days leading up to the Hamas massacre in southern Israel, the rapprochement between Israel and Saudi Arabia seemed to offer a glimpse of such a scenario. Today, peace is farther away than ever. It’s important to understand that reality. But resorting to anti-Semitic language and to weaponise the word "holocaust" against Israel and the Jews in the context of the Gaza war is intolerable and shows an unbearable level of ignorance of the situation in the Middle East and Israel's role in the conflict.