The twisted wreckage was still being cleared near Toledo when the accusations began. A collision on Spain’s railway network on Wednesday, October 28, reportedly killed at least 69 people and injured more than 100. Within hours, social media users had found someone to blame: Israel.

Posts spreading across Spanish and international social media accused Israeli intelligence of sabotaging Spain’s railways in revenge for Madrid’s hostile policies toward the Jewish state, World Israel News reported. One user cited by Spanish media declared that the stench of an Israeli-origin attack was overwhelming. Another claimed Israel had threatened Spaniards with consequences for supporting the Palestinians and was now following through.

There is no evidence of Israeli involvement. Spain’s Transportation Minister Óscar Puente pointed to a failure in a computerized safety system, compounded by possible human error. Investigators are still examining the collision and have found no sign of foreign sabotage.

The Toledo crash is the latest in a string of disasters, riots and terror attacks that antisemites around the world have pinned on Israel and the Jews in the past three months, each time within hours.

A fake Netanyahu threat

At the center of the train conspiracy is a fabricated warning attributed to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, supposedly telling Spain to expect sudden power outages and train accidents. Netanyahu never said it.

The invented quote was attached to an authentic April video in which Netanyahu condemned Spain’s diplomatic campaign against Israel and warned that any country waging diplomatic war on Israel would pay an immediate price. The price he was referring to was diplomatic: Israel had removed Spanish representatives from an international coordination center overseeing Gaza. Spanish fact-checkers at Newtral, EFE Verifica and RTVE all confirmed that Netanyahu never mentioned trains or attacks on Spanish infrastructure. The fake warning circulated in several languages anyway, reportedly amplified by pro-Russian disinformation networks.

Other posts accused Israeli companies of hacking Spain’s railway safety systems, naming the cybersecurity firm Cylus, Israel Aerospace Industries and the security company ICTS. The Spanish fact-checking group Maldita.es found no link between Cylus or Israel Aerospace Industries and Spain’s railways. An ICTS subsidiary held contracts with the national rail operator Renfe, but none involved train control or safety systems.

The Federation of Jewish Communities of Spain condemned the accusations, noting that they single out only one country. The federation compared them to the medieval charges that Jews poisoned wells, spread plague and caused droughts.

“All of this recalls very dark times, when Jews were blamed for poisoning wells,” the federation said.

The European Jewish Congress also condemned the use of a national tragedy to spread antisemitic conspiracy theories.

The accusations land amid a sharp deterioration in relations between Jerusalem and Madrid. Under Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, Spain has recognized a Palestinian state, joined South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice and imposed an arms embargo on the Jewish state.

Israel blamed for Spain’s migrant crisis

Spain was the target of an earlier Israel conspiracy theory just three months ago. In late July, nearly 80,000 migrants surged from Morocco into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta over four chaotic days, and an estimated 100 migrants died. Spanish and Moroccan officials attributed the crisis to Moroccan economic desperation, confusion over a Spanish court ruling and human trafficking networks.

According to the ADL, voices on both the far right and the far left converged on the same culprit. Tucker Carlson told Holocaust revisionist Darryl Cooper on his podcast that the surge was not organic and that Israel was using mass migration as a weapon against a Spanish government it disliked. The episode drew more than 2.5 million views within days. Leftist streamer Hasan Piker told his audience that Israel and America had gotten Morocco to send some 40,000 people into Spanish territory, falsely claiming The New York Times had reported it.

Spanish actor Javier Bardem told his 1.5 million Instagram followers that Israel benefits from a destabilized Spain. Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones claimed Israel had launched an Islamic invasion of Spain. The ADL traced much of the supposed evidence to a 2019 tweet by Yair Netanyahu, the prime minister’s son, who holds no government role.

A ‘false flag’ in 67 minutes

On September 30, a terrorist copilot attempted to crash Tel Aviv-bound flydubai Flight FZ1073, and Israeli passengers helped thwart the attack. The conspiracy theories arrived before the plane was on the ground.

The Combat Antisemitism Movement’s Antisemitism Research Center (ARC) found that posts blaming Israel appeared on X within 67 minutes of the aircraft’s first distress signal. Within five hours, researchers had documented 1,000 hostile posts. Over 12 hours, they identified 2,963 posts attributing the attack to Israel, the Mossad, Netanyahu, Zionists or Jews. About 72% of the 4,136 posts tracked using the phrase “false flag” blamed Israel or Jews. Within four days, the conspiracy posts had drawn 85.9 million views.

The “false flag” narrative held that Israel had staged the hijacking attempt itself, and conspiracy accounts produced fake evidence to support it. One fabricated report, dressed up to look like a BBC story and alleging a joint India-Israel plot, was viewed more than 300,000 times before X attached a warning label, Breitbart reported. Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz called the incident what it was, an attempted jihadist terror attack.

“Sixty-seven minutes is all it took,” ARC researcher Oliver Marks told Breitbart.

Tal-Or Cohen Montemayor, CEO of the watchdog CyberWell, described the claims as part of a long antisemitic pattern accusing Jews of staging attacks against themselves to manipulate public opinion. She also warned that the flood of conspiracy content risks poisoning the artificial intelligence systems that train on it.

‘Mossad is burning France’

When anti-government riots tore through France over the weekend of October 16-18, the same machinery switched on. CAM’s research center identified 1,384 posts from 816 accounts linking Israel or Jews to the violence, using 25 search terms in seven languages. Researchers found posts describing the unrest as a civil war orchestrated by Jewish elites, linking President Emmanuel Macron to the Rothschild family and declaring that the Jews had done this to France.

“Mossad is burning France right now,” one influential account declared, according to the Jerusalem Post.

The accusations reached beyond France to the wider unrest spreading across Europe. One post cited in the report accused Israel of “feeding the chaos and punishing Europe,” according to All Israel News. Others claimed the Jews benefit from every revolution, or blamed the turmoil on the Rothschilds and “ZOG,” the white supremacist acronym for a supposed Zionist Occupied Government.

The hatred came from several directions at once. According to the Times of Israel, 30% of the posts came from Islamist accounts, 21% from far-right and white nationalist accounts, 14% from conspiracy-focused accounts and 4% from the far left. Seven posts called outright for violence against Jews or for the expulsion or extermination of French Jews. CAM found that paid, blue-check X Premium accounts were among those spreading some of the most extreme messages. The riots themselves included the ransacking of a synagogue in Paris’s 19th arrondissement.

CAM editor-in-chief Barney Breen-Portnoy described the episode as yet another case of antisemites rapidly and systematically exploiting a news event, according to the Algemeiner.

Israel’s election and the ‘bloodthirsty ethnostate’

Israel’s October 27 Knesset election, which drew an estimated 78% turnout, produced its own wave. The ADL Center on Extremism found that the most common antisemitic themes in English-language posts about the election were tropes of Jewish or Zionist control, including claims of “false flags.”

The most prominent example came from Carlson. His October 28 episode, titled in part “World’s Most Bloodthirsty Ethnostate,” featured economist Jeffrey Sachs, who claimed that Netanyahu and his “American Zionist allies” engineered the wars in Iraq, Libya, Syria and Iran. The ADL noted that Carlson averages more than 841,000 views per episode and has 35.7 million followers across social media.

The ADL has documented a growing alliance between far-right and far-left influencers built on a single shared belief: that Israel secretly runs America. Carlson, Candace Owens, Hasan Piker, Ana Kasparian and Jimmy Dore have spent the past year hosting and amplifying one another.

“I can prove to you that Israel controls our country,” The Young Turks co-creator Cenk Uygur posted on X this month, according to the ADL.

A lie with a thousand-year history

The conspiracy theories filling X today follow scripts written centuries ago.

The blood libel, the charge that Jews murder Christian children to use their blood in religious rituals, first appeared in Norwich, England, in 1144, after the death of a boy named William. The accusation spread across Europe and the Middle East, surfacing in Damascus in 1840 and in the 1913 Kiev trial of Menachem Mendel Beilis, and it triggered massacres for 800 years. It survives today in the claim that Israel harvests the organs of Palestinians.

When the Black Death swept Europe in 1348 and 1349, killing roughly a third of the continent, Jews were accused of poisoning the wells. Pope Clement VI pointed out that Jews were dying of the plague like everyone else. The mobs ignored him. In Strasbourg, some 2,000 Jews were burned alive on a single day in February 1349, and hundreds of Jewish communities across the German lands were wiped out.

In the early twentieth century, agents linked to the Russian secret police produced The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a forged record of a secret Jewish plan for world domination, much of it plagiarized from an 1864 French satire aimed at Napoleon III. The Times of London exposed it as a fraud in 1921. Henry Ford’s newspaper spread its claims to hundreds of thousands of American readers, the Nazis taught it in German schools, and Hamas cites it in its 1988 founding charter.

The details change with each generation. The well becomes a railway signal system, the secret Elders become the Mossad, and the poisoned village becomes a burning French city. The accusation stays the same: the Jews are the hidden hand behind every catastrophe.

The same old lie, spreading faster

The pattern now repeats with mechanical precision. A train crashes in Spain, migrants storm a border, a terrorist tries to bring down a plane, rioters burn French cities, Israelis go to the polls, and within minutes, accounts on the left and right are blaming the Jews.

CAM’s researchers concluded that the flydubai campaign mirrored the influence operations hostile states use to destabilize Western societies, with Russia foremost among them: exploiting breaking news, sowing division and casting Israel and the Jews as the hidden hand behind every disaster.

The Spanish Jewish federation reached for the right comparison. The well-poisoning libel of 1348 took months to travel from town to town along the trade routes of Europe. Today the same lie crosses continents in an hour and reaches tens of millions of people before investigators have even begun examining the wreckage.