Spain’s current government has mistaken Israeli restraint for weakness. After years of insults, embargoes, canceled contracts, diplomatic downgrading, and Madrid’s moral inversion, Jerusalem should stop behaving as if the old relationship still exists.
If Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s regime continues escalating against Israel, then the Jewish state should answer with statecraft: recognize the right to self-determination of the Basque Country, Catalonia, and Galicia; recognize that Ceuta and Melilla do not fall under the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) Article 5 umbrella; impose an arms embargo on Spain; restrict Spanish access to Israeli technology; and cultivate direct ties with conservative pro-Israel forces inside Spain, rather than with actors who now serve Sánchez’s anti-Israel crusade.
A government that denounces Israel’s legitimacy while clinging to its own colonial outposts should have no standing.
This would not be an attack on Spain’s people or on its historical greatness, but it would be a consequential response to Sánchez’s regime. Spain is a serious nation with civilizational weight, important institutions, and millions of citizens who did not choose to turn their country into a staging ground for anti-Israel agitation. The problem is that the Sánchez regime has made hostility to Jerusalem its policy. Against this backdrop, Israel must either absorb humiliation or impose consequences.
The hypocrisy is glaring. Sánchez’s Spain lectures Israel about colonialism while still holding two imperial remnants across the Strait of Gibraltar: Ceuta and Melilla. A government that denounces Israel’s legitimacy while clinging to its own colonial outposts should have no standing. Israel should tighten that pressure point with discipline. It can state, clearly and formally, that Spanish sovereignty in Ceuta and Melilla is historically and morally contestable, and that Sánchez’s regime has forfeited any expectation that Israel will treat Spain’s territorial sensitivities as untouchable.
That pressure becomes even more serious once the strategic map is acknowledged honestly. NATO’s Article 5 long has been clouded by ambiguity regarding Ceuta, Melilla, and even the Canary Islands. That uncertainty matters because it exposes the bluff beneath Spanish rhetoric. Madrid talks like a power whose borders are fully guaranteed because of its NATO and European Union membership, but the legal and political realities are murkier.
That is precisely why Morocco is a leverage and the true ally Israel should defend in Northern Africa. A Spain whose most exposed territories sit under strategic doubt should think carefully before provoking a country like Israel into reassessing the assumptions that helped stabilize Spain’s wider security environment. Ironically, if all this is done, and Morocco supports it, Sánchez likely would remain quiet because of the “Pegasus affair.”
Sánchez’s disloyalty to his own people is so profound that, after Morocco spied on him using the Israeli-made Pegasus software, he reversed forty years of Spanish policy on the Western Sahara in barely two weeks—likely fearing that Moroccan intelligence had uncovered information he could not afford to have exposed.
The self-determination question strikes even deeper. Sánchez’s regime champions Palestinian Islamism abroad while denying comparable moral language to nations under its own flag. Thus, if Madrid insists on weaponizing self-determination against Israel, Jerusalem should answer by affirming that Catalans, Galicians, and Basques possess the right to determine their own political future. That would not amount to immediate recognition of statehood. It would be something more measured and more devastating: ending Israel’s automatic silence on Spain’s internal contradictions. Madrid cannot spend years invoking one people’s national rights while condemning the last real bastion of freedom in the Middle East.
If Sánchez wants distance, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government should make that distance real.
Simultaneously, the military answer should be immediate. Spain imposed an embargo on Israeli defense systems and disrupted up to nineteen contracts, including the Spike anti-tank missile and SILAM rocket launcher programs, together worth roughly $1.4 billion, even while continuing to indirectly rely on Israeli-linked technology through European channels. Israel should end the charade. No privileged access to advanced systems. No comfortable path to sensitive dual-use cooperation. No assumption that Spain can vilify Israel politically while still drawing on Israeli innovation when convenient. If Sánchez wants distance, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government should make that distance real.
Jerusalem also should stop romanticizing the wrong interlocutors. “Together for Catalonia” (Junts) supported an arms embargo against Israel, abandoning the pro-Israel instincts it once claimed to inherit. The Basque Nationalist Party is no answer, either, if its practical loyalty runs toward preserving Sánchez’s governing bloc. Israel instead should open public channels with actors who still understand sovereignty, borders, identity, and the Islamist threat—above all, Sílvia Orriols, the fastest–growing conservative leader in Spain, and Aliança Catalana.
Spain is bigger than Sánchez. That is exactly why Israel should act against the regime that has spent years humiliating the Jewish state while benefiting from the Western strategic order that Israel helped defend.