The PP believed that the brutal terrorist attack by Hamas on Israeli soil and the subsequent disproportionate reaction of Benjamin Netanyahu's government could serve its cause against the coalition government, especially after the modest performance of the demonstrations against the amnesty called in Madrid. and Barcelona. There was concern in the executive, but in a very few hours, the positions were aligned in a range of nuances that was less wide than what the popular ones would have desired. Nothing to do with the mess that caused the invasion of Ukraine. Because the place is different and because the moment is also different.
Yesterday, Podemos leader and acting minister Ione Belarra promoted seating Prime Minister Netanyahu at the International Criminal Court in The Hague for crimes against humanity with the same naturalness with which she called Hamas' action on Israeli soil terrorist.
The ghost of the Ukrainian war – when internal tactical reasons made Podemos behave like an old anti-NATO party in the hope of narrowing Yolanda Díaz's room for maneuver and inciting the IU bases against Alberto Garzón – hovered over the coalition government for a few hours, but two things happened quickly: on the one hand, the distance between PSOE, Sumar, Podemos and the rest of the progressive forces, unlike what we have seen in other European countries, was evident. but of nuance, and on the other, that Spain, due to a singular combination of old Catholic-conservative anti-Semitism, with medieval roots, and historical commitment of all the left with the Palestinian cause, is a country more inclined to defend the rights of the Palestinian people than to bless the legitimacy of Israel's war actions.
The fact that the PP also went overboard again by wanting to identify Pedro Sánchez's executive with the terrorist organization Hamas, in terms similar to those in which the Madrid president Isabel Díaz Ayuso tried to turn Pedro Sánchez into an accomplice of ETA by promoting in In May, the slogan “let Txapote vote for you” helped derail the popular offensive, which sought to break up the coalition by highlighting its apparent contradictions, on the second day.
The Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, as a representative of the Spanish government, was one of the first to put his foot on the wall when the Commissioner for Neighborhood and Enlargement of the EU, Oliver Varhelyi – who agreed to the position at the proposal of the Hungarian Prime Minister , the far-right Viktor Orbán–, announced the end of EU humanitarian aid to the Palestinian people.
Since then, the official position of the Spanish executive has been to condemn the Hamas attack, but at the same time, to frown at Israel's revenge offensive. This has made it easier for the different pro-Palestinian positions within the Government to be interpreted within the general framework of a country whose public opinion has always been sensitive to the suffering of the Palestinians. Sumar's spokesman, Ernest Urtasun, condemned on the first day the Hamas attack against the Israeli civilian population while expressing his solidarity with the Palestinian people. With greater emphasis, Belarra has supported the Palestinian cause and denounced Israel for crimes against humanity, but the difference in accents between Podemos, Sumar and PSOE has not become a fissure. In part, because even the European People's Party, through the mouth of Manfred Weber – situated in the EPP very much to the right of the positions of the president of the commission, Ursula von der Leyen – has maintained a much more nuanced position than that of the Spanish PP. Weber issued a statement condemning the Hamas terrorist attack and recognizing Israel's right to self-defense, but in which he immediately added that the Palestinian civilian population cannot pay for Hamas' crimes. The title of Weber's post was eloquent: “Hamas must pay, not Gaza.”
