Spain has succumbed to Palestine mania

About a year ago, I went to an exhibition opening at the Design Museum of Barcelona. It was the usual kind of contemporary exhibition, which is to say that it had very little to do with design and quite a lot to do with the alleged ‘structural racism’ and ‘settler colonialism’ of the West. Ordinarily, I would not put myself through the existential boredom of such an offering, but exhibition openings in Barcelona come with free beer.

The exhibition had the jargonised title, ‘The Production of Alterity’. One of the ways in which this ‘alterity’ was shown to have been produced by our supposedly rotten culture was by Microsoft Word’s red spell-check line, which was printed under several of the names of the curatorial team – the implication being that Microsoft’s programmers, or the dictionary they were using, must be racist for failing to recognise foreign names.

But what really struck me, as I looked around the room, was that all of the museum staff were curiously adorned in keffiyehs. This got me thinking along the themes of the exhibition. I wondered whether their rejection of ‘othering’ would motivate them to welcome, for instance, a colleague with other political opinions. This thought was dispelled when I read in the exhibition brochure that Zionism is one of the most flagrant producers of ‘alterity’, and that this alterity, in turn, produced the ‘genocide’ happening in Gaza. I had a strong suspicion that any would-be curator who leaned towards a different interpretation of the war in Gaza would find themselves ‘othered’ – that is to say, unemployed and friendless – if they dared to voice it.

Back then, at least, one could extract oneself from a gallery and breathe once more the indifferent air of a city with a thousand more pressing concerns. Alas, no more. Palestine activists’ obnoxious takeover of every facet of Spanish culture is now complete.

This summer in Spain, there was hardly a single public event that wasn’t dedicated, in whole or in part, to the cause of Palestine. In August, during Barcelona’s famous Festes de Gràcia, the council erected three flags. One of them, uncontroversially, was the flag of Catalonia. On either side of it, the Pride flag and the flag of Palestine – an incongruous little union, given that the people celebrated by the former are in mortal danger in the territories of the latter. In Barcelona, you see, the people are so tolerant that they celebrate both homosexuals and a culture that preaches that homosexuals should be put to death.

Sport, too, succumbed to Palestine activism. In March, the Vuelta, the Spanish version of the Tour de France, was trying its best to take place. But protesters targeted it because Israeli riders were competing, and started throwing themselves in front of the bikes like the suffragette Emily Davison. Someone might easily have been seriously injured.

Instead of condemning this dangerous and irresponsible stunt, Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez was proud. Speaking at a rally in Malaga, he praised the anti-Israel activists. As he did, the screens behind him projected giant Palestinian flags as his partidarios howled in approval. Emboldened by Sánchez, protesters swamped the finish line, causing the final stage in Madrid to be abandoned.

If you tuned into the coverage of the San Sebastian Film Festival last month, you will have heard mostly about Palestine and briefly about a couple of films. Even before the festival began, organisers put out the obligatory statement denouncing Israel. The festival also had a badge, a watermelon with the words ‘stop genocide’ emblazoned on it, which appears to have been distributed to every participant. It was a classic case of ideological coercion masquerading as moral righteousness.

It is Barcelona, however, that has been the epicentre of Israelophobic hysteria. A pro-Palestine demonstration took place in the city on 4 October, the Saturday just before the two-year anniversary of Hamas’s 7 October massacre. It was from Barcelona, a few weeks ago, that Greta Thurnberg’s anti-Israel flotilla also began its journey. The flotilla was supposed to be an effort to deliver aid to Gaza, but its organisers rejected several offers – including from the pope – to unload their aid at a safe port so that it could be actually taken into Gaza without them. Instead, up until the IDF intercepted the flotilla, they were intent on heading into a warzone. Tellingly, the Spanish government decided that this was a sensible idea, and deployed its navy to protect their passage.

The pro-Palestine protests have turned increasingly violent and disruptive recently. As part of planned protest against ‘the genocide in Palestine’, activists set vehicles alight, blocked major roads in and out if Barcelona’s commercial port and attacked stores which they said were ‘complicit in genocide’ – all this despite a ceasefire in place between Israel and Hamas.

This is only a snapshot of this year in Spain, but it should be enough to show that there is now almost nothing that happens – culturally speaking – that isn’t mainly about Palestine. Exhibitions, film festivals, bicycle races, public holidays, education and political rallies – none of it can resist the pull of the Palestine obsession.

Spain is an enchanting country, but this will soon cease to be the case for Jews and Israelis – and many others who see through the myth of the Gaza ‘genocide’. We can only hope the country recovers from its bout of intolerant Israelophobia.

Oscar Clarke is a writer based in Spain.