07 June 2025 Barcelona Envies Its Big Sister, Gaza.
In the name of “moral values” – it identifies with Hamas, in the name of “peace” – it supports terror. Barcelona succeeds in becoming Europe’s champion of anti-Semitism and hypocrisy.
In the same week that Israel distributed 3.4 million humanitarian food packages in Gaza, Barcelona’s city council also decided to dedicate a tribute to the humanitarian people living beside us, and voted by anti-Semitic majority to cancel the sister city partnership with Tel Aviv. “This is anti-Semitism disguised as political criticism“, the Jewish community in the city responded with the obvious. And I’m left with the easy part: to prove it.
First, despite Tel Aviv and Barcelona having many twin cities around the world, such a partnership never actually existed between the two. If we dig deeper, we find a 1998 agreement for trilateral cooperation between Barcelona, Tel Aviv and Gaza, but this never received practical expression. The absence of the partnership doesn’t stop Barcelona from violating it with a pompous declaration, and not for the first time. Even in February 2023, Barcelona declared, then under the leadership of Mayor Ada Colau – an enthusiastic BDS supporter, the cancellation of the non-existent partnership. Then, as we know, Israel had not yet “murdered Gazans,” and the Spanish excuse was: “apartheid policy.” Have you seen a greater absurdity? Tel Aviv, the city where I live, is one of the most tolerant and free cities in the world, unique in the Middle East, a city where Arabs and Jews live as equal partners – everything opposite from “apartheid.”
If Barcelona is so sensitive to injustice, it surely would have found something educational to say to its twin cities from Russia, Iran or Turkey. But no. The Catalan educational series are directed only at Tel Aviv, and not at Gaza for instance – a crazy dictatorship, clean of Jews, with a regime that shoots its citizens, sanctifies hate crimes and encourages them, throws LGBTQ people and political rivals from rooftops, oppresses its women, and invests humanitarian funds in tunnels and missiles instead of education and health. This – is a free zone from righteous moral preaching!
This shameful hypocrisy is nothing new for Barcelona, and there’s no need for war for that. A tenth of the city’s residents are Muslims who according to their religion Jews have no right to a state at all, joined by Catalan separatists whose dream of independence was crushed by the Spanish federal government. In an alliance of frustrated peoples, they didn’t even notice that Gaza was actually given full independence, and it chose to become a murderous terror nest living in misery and neglect. In Barcelona – they see and love it, someday they too will merit similar independence, with full right to shoot missiles at Valencia and rape the daughters of Andorra.
Meanwhile they can only gaze admiringly at the big sister from the opposite side of the sea, and express their aspirations through expressions of identification, and a kind of defiance against the West. In 2018 the city funded an official anti-Semitic festival under the title “70 Years of Nakba,” a year later the provincial council decided to recognize the State of Israel as an “apartheid state.” Since then, there’s hardly a week without a decision, event, or anti-Semitic statement, and on October 8, ’23 the masses took to the city streets, celebrating the massacre in the Gaza envelope with riots. Now they’re shocked by Gazan suffering. Surely shocked, and also disappointed, they were so hoping and excited to see the suffering on the other side.
Oh Barcelona, Barcelona. It’s comfortable for her to hide behind moral principles. But if these apply only to Jews, even a ceasefire in Gaza won’t solve them. It’s not any of the blood libels distributed fresh each morning by Hamas and reported worldwide as news facts, but something else, deeper, that was here before all the excuses and will remain after them. It’s simply called: anti-Semitism.
By: Anat Vidor, WIZO President
