Pedro Sánchez, the Prime Minister of Spain, was on the floor of the Madrid Regional Assembly when Isabel Díaz Ayuso turned to face him. “The only ones who called for genocide,” she said, “are you and your boss, when you called to destroy Israel ‘from the river to the sea.’ When genocides occur — like in Africa, where in Nigeria alone 10,000 Catholics were murdered — you remain silent. You have one problem: antisemitism.”
Calling your own prime minister an antisemite to his face, in public, on the record, takes courage anywhere. In Spain, it is almost unheard of.
Ayuso is the president of the Community of Madrid, the most powerful regional leader in Spain, and widely considered the most likely future prime minister. She has lit up Madrid’s city hall with Israeli flags, banned Palestinian flags from public institutions, met repeatedly with Israeli diplomats and politicians, and set up a hotline for reporting antisemitic incidents in the city. On the day the bodies of the Bibas family were returned from Gaza, she illuminated the building in orange. She has called Sánchez an antisemite — to his face, in public, without apology — at a moment when the rest of Europe’s political class is competing to be the loudest voice against Israel.
To understand why any of this matters, you have to understand the country she’s operating in.
A Country That Never Came to Terms With Its Past
Spain did not merely participate in the long history of European Jew-hatred. In many ways, it invented its modern form.
In 1492, the same year Columbus sailed under the Spanish flag, the monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella issued a royal decree expelling every Jew who refused baptism from the Iberian Peninsula. Three hundred thousand Jews were given four months to leave or convert. Those who converted and stayed faced the Inquisition, a church tribunal that hunted Jewish converts suspected of continuing to practice Judaism in secret, often torturing them into confessions and burning them at the stake. Spain developed a legal doctrine requiring subjects to prove they had no Jewish ancestry before they could hold public office, enter the clergy, or join professional guilds. Jewishness was not a religion you could simply abandon — it was a stain in your bloodline, permanent and disqualifying.
By the time Francisco Franco came to power in the 1930s, he had centuries of tradition to draw on. His propaganda framed his regime as a crusade against what he called the “Jewish-Masonic conspiracy” threatening Catholic Spain. He aligned with Hitler and Mussolini. When World War II ended, Spain provided safe passage for Nazis fleeing justice while blocking any serious reckoning with its own history. Spain was the last country in Western Europe, apart from Vatican City, to formally recognize Israel, doing so only in 1986, under heavy international pressure, as a condition of joining the European Economic Community.
None of this was ever seriously confronted. There were no trials, no national apology, no public reckoning. The ADL’s most recent global survey places Spain as the Western European country with the highest rate of antisemitic attitudes — 26 percent, well ahead of Belgium, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. In the city of León, residents still drink lemon juice mixed with wine in a tradition called matar judíos, “killing Jews.” During Holy Week in Málaga, an effigy representing evil was recently given the face of Benjamin Netanyahu and publicly burned.
The cruelest part is that most Spaniards don’t even notice. There are no Jews left to object. After five hundred years, Spain had effectively emptied itself of its Jewish population, and with it, any living memory of what Jewish life there had looked like.
Sánchez and the Politics of Hatred
Since October 7, 2023, Sánchez has attacked Israel at nearly every opportunity: over operations in Gaza, strikes in Lebanon, settlement construction in Judea and Samaria, statements by Israeli officials. He recognized Palestinian statehood against Israel’s wishes, imposed a military embargo on Israel, and banned weapons-carrying ships bound for Israel from Spanish ports. On Holocaust Remembrance Day, he declared that Israel was the only country in the world violating international law. When the United States and Israel struck Iran’s nuclear program, Sánchez called it illegal. He showed up at a political rally wearing a keffiyeh and announced he would escort a pro-Palestinian flotilla to Gaza with a Spanish warship.
By Ministry of the Presidency. Government of Spain (via Wikipedia)
None of this was primarily about foreign policy. Sánchez’s approval rating has collapsed to 25 percent, his wife has been indicted on serious corruption charges, and his governing coalition has been falling apart. Three quarters of Spaniards hold unfavorable views of Israel, and sympathy for Palestinians has surged since October 2023. There is a long tradition of Jew-hatred in Spain for a demagogue to tap into, and Sánchez has tapped into it with both hands.
He has had almost no serious opposition. Almost none.
A Lonely but Powerful Voice
What motivates Ayuso to stand so publicly and so alone?
She has explained it herself: she frames support for Israel as a civilizational fight, not a policy position. Israel is not a foreign-policy file for her; it is a test of whether Europe still believes in something worth defending.
Her position is not the product of a national awakening. It is the product of one person with strong convictions deciding to say what almost everyone else has chosen not to say. That is not nothing. In a country with five hundred years of continuous tradition of treating Jews as a threat, a conspiracy, or a ghost — and in a political moment when the government is weaponizing that tradition for electoral gain — one politician with a megaphone and the courage to use it makes a genuine difference. Jewish community leader Moshik Bibi, who runs a tour company in Madrid, put it plainly: “As a Jewish Israeli citizen, I feel much better knowing that the city is run by a pro-Israel figure.”
Five hundred and thirty-three years after Spain expelled its Jews, and three years after October 7 turned much of the continent against us, the most powerful regional leader in Spain is calling her prime minister an antisemite on the floor of the parliament, lighting up the capital with Israeli flags, and refusing to be quiet.
In Spain, of all places, that is not politics. That is courage.
This is the second in a series of articles exploring the surprising international friendships Israel is building at a moment when much of the world has turned its back on the Jewish state.
