For decades after the fall of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship, Spain prided itself on having learned the lessons of Europe’s darkest century. Holocaust education was introduced, antisemitism was publicly condemned, and in 2020, Spain formally adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism.
Yet since Oct. 7, 2023, Spain has taken a disturbing turn. What began as street-level hostility toward Jews has metastasized into something far more dangerous: the normalization of antisemitic and anti-Zionist rhetoric at the highest levels of government.
Today, Spain is becoming the first EU member state where antisemitism is no longer merely tolerated, but politically legitimized.
That shift is measurable. According to Spain’s Observatory of Antisemitism, antisemitic incidents rose by 321% in 2024 compared to 2023, and by 567% compared to 2022. The Spanish Interior Ministry simultaneously reported that 2025 saw the highest number of jihadist-related arrests in the country’s history, a coincidence Jewish leaders view with growing alarm.
However, numbers alone do not explain the pervasive sense of fear in Spain’s small Jewish community of roughly 50,000 people. The deeper problem, activists warn, is the tone set by political leaders.
Spain today faces a reality few would have imagined even a decade ago. What is unfolding is not merely a rise in antisemitic incidents, but a deeper erosion of democratic responsibility, in which hostility toward Jews and toward Israel is treated as a permissible, even virtuous, political position.
For many, Spain is now crossing a line that no other EU member state has yet crossed: the transformation of antisemitism from a social problem into a state-enabled phenomenon.
Esteban Ibarra has spent his life fighting intolerance. Born in Madrid in 1954 under the dictatorship of Generalissimo Francisco Franco, he describes himself as “a man of the left, the social and progressive left that fought for human rights.”
As a teenager, he was active against the regime, arrested at 17, and imprisoned until the dictatorship collapsed. Like many Spaniards of his generation, he had no connection to Judaism and barely any awareness of the Jewish community, which remained largely invisible during Franco’s rule and the early decades of democracy.
Despite Spain’s rich Jewish history, until the expulsion of 1492, and the slow rebirth of Jewish life in the 20th century, Jews were absent from the national consciousness. Even today, he notes, the community of roughly 50,000 Jews, rebuilt largely through immigration from North Africa and Latin America, remains unseen by most Spaniards.
Ibarra’s awakening to antisemitism came through the story of Holocaust survivor Violeta Friedman. Born in Transylvania in 1930, Friedman survived Auschwitz-Birkenau while her entire family was murdered. After the war, she settled in Madrid, where she found that Spain, which had protected many Jews during the Holocaust and served as a refuge for many Nazi collaborators, was unwilling to confront Holocaust denial.
In 1985, she sued Léon Degrelle, a former Belgian SS officer living in Spain, for publicly denying the Holocaust. Spanish courts initially rejected her case, defending Degrelle’s statements as free speech. Only after six years of legal struggle did Friedman prevail in 1991, setting a precedent that forced Spain’s judiciary to acknowledge the boundaries of historical truth.
It was Friedman’s battle, Ibarra recalls, that introduced him to the reality of antisemitism. In 1993, he founded the NGO Movement Against Intolerance and began publicly denouncing antisemitism and xenophobia. He admits that he never imagined the personal cost.
Sitting in his heavily secured office in Madrid’s El Rastro neighborhood, today home to many immigrants from Africa and the Middle East, with Palestinian flags hanging from balconies, he says quietly that he has become the target of relentless hatred “simply because I stand with the Jews and denounce antisemitism in my country.”
In 2009, together with the Federation of Jewish Communities in Spain, Ibarra helped establish the Observatory of Antisemitism to systematically monitor antisemitic incidents.
Since the Hamas-led massacre of October 7, 2023, the data have been staggering. Those statistics mentioned above are just the tip of a growth in hatred towards Jews that is not abating. The figures for 2025 have not yet been fully published, but Ibarra says early indicators suggest they may surpass even those record-breaking numbers.
Statistics, however, tell only part of the story. For Ibarra, the decisive factor behind the surge is political.
Responsibility, he argues, lies primarily with the left-wing government of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez. In recent months, he says, senior members of the governing coalition have made statements that cross the line from criticism of Israeli policy into classic antisemitic tropes.
Sánchez himself publicly described Israel as a “genocidal state” in parliament in May 2024, a claim rejected by international legal bodies and Holocaust scholars alike.
Shortly afterward, when discussing ways to pressure Israel, Sánchez remarked that Spain “does not have nuclear weapons,” a statement that Jewish leaders interpreted as a deeply disturbing and reckless insinuation when directed at the world’s only Jewish state.
In addition, Deputy Prime Minister Yolanda Díaz, leader of the radical-left Sumar alliance, publicly endorsed the slogan “from the river to the sea,” a call that, under the IHRA definition Spain has formally adopted, constitutes antisemitism because it denies the Jewish people the right to self-determination.
According to Ibarra, these declarations did not occur in a vacuum. They reinforced an already existing campaign by leftist and pro-Palestinian movements that has only intensified in the months following October 7, even during periods of ceasefire in Gaza.
Unfortunately, official hate from Spanish officials has stretched beyond the Iberian Peninsula, particularly through the conduct of Josep Borrell, the EU’s former High Representative for Foreign Affairs, and a former Spanish foreign minister.
Since October 7, Borrell has repeatedly accused Israel of deliberately starving Gaza, of committing war crimes, and of acting in a manner he compared to historical aggressors, often while omitting any reference to Hamas’s use of human shields, its systematic embedding in civilian infrastructure, or the massacre that triggered the war.
On several occasions in 2024 and 2025, he asserted that Israel was violating international law while simultaneously opposing or watering down EU statements condemning Hamas with equal force. Jewish leaders have warned that Borrell’s language goes beyond legitimate criticism of Israeli policy and enters the realm of delegitimization, presenting Israel as a uniquely malevolent actor among nations.
By portraying the Jewish state as inherently criminal while applying no comparable moral framework to terrorist organizations or authoritarian regimes, Borrell has contributed to a climate in which hostility toward Israel becomes a proxy for hostility toward Jews themselves, a dynamic the IHRA definition explicitly identifies as antisemitic when it denies Jewish collective rights or applies double standards not demanded of other states.
It is this climate that appears to make Spain unique.
“It is a growing cycle of hatred,” Ibarra says about antisemitism. “Instead of stopping it, the government legitimizes it.” The consequences, he adds, are visible across every sector of society, sports, culture, education, and the economy.
In Barcelona, an online map was recently published identifying businesses and institutions “linked to Israel.” Among those listed were Jewish schools, kosher restaurants, Jewish lawyers’ offices, and even non-Jewish companies with Israeli ties.
Ibarra describes this as a criminal act that singles out Jews for being Jewish, warning that such targeting could easily trigger violence. He points to the Interior Ministry’s own data showing that 2025 saw the highest number of jihadist-related arrests in Spain’s history, warning that an atmosphere of normalized antisemitic speech creates fertile ground for terror.
The contradiction between Spain’s official policies and its political behavior has become increasingly stark.
The Sánchez government adopted the IHRA definition of antisemitism in 2020 and published a national strategy to combat antisemitism in 2023 in line with EU guidelines. Yet Jewish leaders argue that the actions and rhetoric of the current coalition undermine those commitments.
In its 2024 Country Report on Human Rights Practices, the US State Department explicitly noted concerns raised by Jewish organizations over politicians’ use of slogans widely regarded as antisemitic. The report referenced a June 2024 event held within a government ministry by former Podemos leader Ione Belarra, where speakers praised the October 7 massacre and declared that Israel had no right to exist.
For Ibarra, the implications are clear. The IHRA definition, he explains, makes explicit that denying the Jewish people the right to self-determination is antisemitism. From this perspective, he argues, anti-Zionism is not separate from antisemitism.
He notes that Spanish socialists once supported a two-state solution but have now adopted the radical left’s position that Israel itself is illegitimate. Accusations of genocide against Israel, he adds, apply collective guilt to an entire nation, “from the bus driver to the prime minister.” Even Germany, he points out, has never been labelled a genocidal state.
Oct. 7, he says, exposed the bankruptcy of Spain’s current approach. Despite having councils dedicated to discrimination against women, racial minorities, and other groups, Spain has no governmental body focused specifically on antisemitism. This absence, he argues, amounts to institutional discrimination.
“We demand the formation of a council to fight antisemitism,” Ibarra says. “Without it, all strategies are empty words.”
While in many Western European countries antisemitism is primarily associated with radicalized segments of immigrant communities, in Spain it is the radical left that plays the leading role.
This was evident during the visit of Maccabi Tel Aviv’s basketball team to Madrid in January, when more than 250 organizations called for the game against Real Madrid to be cancelled and organized mass protests outside the Movistar Arena. Authorities ultimately barred spectators entirely, citing security concerns. Outside, demonstrators waved Palestinian flags, wore keffiyehs, and held signs comparing Israelis to Nazis.
In October, the Hapoel Jerusalem basketball team had to switch hotels in Barcelona in the middle of the night, sneaking out the back door, due to large pro-Palestinian protests surrounding their original accommodation, forcing them to relocate under heavy police escort, a move compounded by earlier hotel cancellations in the area because of security concerns for their EuroCup game.
David Obadia, president of the Federation of Jewish Communities in Spain, observes that antisemitism across Europe has a common denominator: hostility toward Jews and toward Israel as the collective expression of Jewish identity.
In Spain, he says, most citizens have never met a Jew, yet a highly visible minority on the ideological far left has driven a campaign of targeting Jewish sites, students, businesses, and institutions, as well as non-Jewish entities connected to Israel. These groups, he notes, enjoy disproportionate media amplification.
Obadia is careful in assigning responsibility. He does not accuse the central government as a whole of orchestrating antisemitism, but he acknowledges that members of Sumar and Podemos have, at best, shown indifference and, at worst, actively applauded actions that carry antisemitic undertones. These include promoting rallies, endorsing extremist slogans, cancelling sporting events, and singling out Jewish schools and businesses.
Despite this, he expresses cautious hope that antisemitism can still be addressed more effectively through dialogue and education, emphasizing that Spanish Jews are not a threat but an integral part of society.
For younger Jews, however, hope is increasingly fragile.
David Benatar, 25, decided to pursue a PhD on antisemitism in Spain but struggled to find academic supervisors. When he finally did, both warned him that such a topic would likely end any academic career in the country.
Benatar now works within the Jewish Federation on antisemitism issues and describes October 7 as a personal turning point. Experiencing discrimination pushed him toward the Jewish community and synagogue life, even though he had never been particularly religious. “We who suffer from antisemitism should not be the ones solving it,” he says. “We are smoke detectors.
We warn of the fire, but we cannot extinguish it.”
Educated at Madrid’s Complutense University, now a hub of radical-left activism, Benatar says
he routinely concealed his Jewish identity, claiming Moroccan origins to avoid hostile interrogations about Israel. When he once admitted to being Jewish, a fellow student accused him of fascism and shame. He has lost friendships and relationships, he says, because of his origins. Although politically left-wing himself, he found that his Judaism made him inescapably suspect.
Benatar also notes that ignorance plays a central role. At the Madrid regional assembly, a Podemos representative who criticized Zionism later asked him privately what Zionism actually meant.
At his university, administrators allowed a so-called “people’s tribunal” to accuse Israel and Jewish institutions of genocide, without understanding the implications. Even senior officials, he says, often do not know that for Jews, Zionism simply means self-determination after centuries of persecution.
PATRICIA WEISZ, daughter of Violeta Friedman, continues her mother’s legacy through a foundation dedicated to Holocaust education.
Each year, thousands of Spanish students meet Holocaust survivors and learn firsthand about genocide. Despite the Holocaust’s inclusion in the national curriculum, she says, many schools teach the bare minimum and avoid addressing antisemitism altogether. As a result, terms like genocide and Holocaust are stripped of meaning and misused in political discourse.
Weisz, who grew up in Spain without experiencing antisemitism until adulthood, says the current climate deeply worries her. Politicians, she observes, are more focused on fighting one another than on safeguarding the future. Her message to young people remains rooted in her mother’s example: stand up for truth and resist injustice. But the urgency is unmistakable.
Dr. Moshe Kantor, president of the European Jewish Congress, the democratically elected body representing European Jewry, has warned that when senior officials adopt delegitimizing language toward Israel, they are not merely expressing political criticism but undermining Jewish security.
“Spain is a strong test case for other parts of Europe,” said Kantor. “It has one of the oldest and strongest Jewish histories, and we saw many Spanish governments embrace that with Jewish tourism and the Red de Juderías de España, the Spanish Jewish Red Route, and even a path to citizenship for those with Sephardic ancestry.
However, these examples of goodwill are being massively harmed because of the uptick in outright animosity from the most senior levels in Spain. This downward spiral should alarm the entire European Union, because it demonstrates how quickly antisemitism can move from the margins to the center when democratic and moral responsibility erodes.”
FOLLOWING THE publication of the map of Jewish institutions in Barcelona and the growing evidence of planned attacks against Jewish leaders and their communities in Europe by Hamas-aligned networks, as detailed in the Security and Crisis Center (SACC) by EJC report “Strategic Pivot: Hamas Targets European Jewry,” the European Jewish Congress convened an urgent emergency meeting with Jewish leaders.
During the meeting, it was decided to establish a taskforce to explore all possible measures to protect Jewish leaders and coordinate efforts to raise awareness of member states’ duties to safeguard their citizens, urgently calling on European governments to take concrete and effective action to guarantee the safety of European Jews in the face of these very real and imminent threats.
The mission of the taskforce will be to systematically collect and analyze data related to threats, including antisemitism and terrorism, across the continent. It will work in close coordination with European institutions, local governments, and law enforcement agencies to strengthen intelligence sharing and improve the security posture of Jewish community leaders and institutions.
The task force will draw on existing tools and proven mechanisms, adapting them where necessary to meet current conditions. This includes established analytical methods, coordinated response strategies, and the application of the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism as a common reference framework.
All of this is necessary across the continent, but probably nowhere more urgently than in Spain.