Tag Archives: Spain

What Would Be The Rights Of Palestinian Jews?

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Ireland and eight other countries decided to recognize Palestine in 2024. Should the borders of Palestine follow the contours of the 1949 Armistice Lines that Israel agreed to with Transjordan and Egypt, there would be roughly 720,000 Jews inside Palestine, of which 220,000 would be in “East Jerusalem” and 500,000 in communities east of the 1949 lines, commonly referred to as the “West Bank.”

What do Ireland and the other countries think should be the rights of these 720,000 Palestinian Jews?

  • Should they be allowed to become full Palestinian citizens with all relevant rights? Should they be allowed to take on permanent residency status? Should they be forced to renounce their Israeli citizenship?
  • Should they be allowed to live in the homes they purchased and live in? To keep the schools and synagogues open for education and prayer?
  • Should Palestinian Jews have their guns confiscated? Should the protective fences around their communities be dismantled?
  • Should they be forced to abandon their homes and property in East Jerusalem? Should they be evicted from the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem?
  • Should Jews be allowed to pray freely on the Jewish Temple Mount? To rebuild their holy Temple?

On December 28, 2016, departing US Secretary of State John Kerry said “Does anyone here really believe that the [Jewish] settlers will agree to submit to Palestinian law in Palestine?” He made it sound like there was no way Jews could accept Palestinian rule because Palestine would be ruled as a radical Islamic state which would subjugate Jews.

Are Ireland, Spain and Norway recognizing a radical jihadist State of Palestine which will subjugate and torment Jews? A government which will support October 7-type massacres again-and-again against Palestinian Jews inside its new borders?

When Norway recognized the Palestinian unity government which included Hamas in 2007, it urged “Palestinian authorities to respect basic international standards as regards compliance with previously concluded agreements, renunciation of violence and recognition of Israel’s right to exist.” Will it similarly demand that all Palestinian Jews be afforded every basic human right?

When Spain voted in favor of United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334 in 2016 making it illegal for any Israeli Jew to live in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem, did it support ethnically cleansing all Jews from the Old City or did it imagine that all of the Jews would be free to live there and worship on the Temple Mount under Palestinian rule?

When countries vote in favor of a Palestinian State, they should make clear what rights – if any – nearly three-quarters of a million Palestinian Jews should have in such new country. If they deny Jews the right to live and pray everywhere in this new Palestine, their recognition of Palestine in the shadow of the October 7 slaughter is a noxious endorsement of jihad. If there is any justice in the world, that jihad should swallow their countries first.

Related articles:

Palestinians View Jews Like The French Viewed Nazis (August 2023)

Palestinian Jews and a Judenrein Palestine (December 2016)

Hamas Supporters In Barcelona

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Sunday morning is a time for protests in Barcelona, Spain. Advocates for Peru took their customary spot on top of La Rambla. About ten people listened to a woman yelling into a megaphone.

Just ahead of the small gathering were thirty people protesting Russia’s war on Ukraine. They held placards and then marched together through Catalunya square of people feeding pigeons.

Further ahead were 2,000 people marching with Palestinian flags down the main street of Pg. de Gracia. Led by a ten people wearing kaffiyehs on a truck, they marched with signs calling to “Free Palestine” and “Boycott Israel.”

Thousands marched for Palestinians in Barcelona, Spain on February 25, 2024 (photo: First One Through)

Many of the marchers wore kaffiyehs and held signs “it did not start with Hamas.” They chanted in Spanish about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and blamed the United States for “Genocide.”

There were no counter-protestors.

The Jews of Spain have long since been vanquished. Once the greatest center of Jewry in the 1400s, Spain is amongst the dozens of countries which now have fewer than 25,000 Jews. By way of comparison, there are 27 cities in the United States with over 25,000 Jews.

But Muslims have returned to Spain. After the Arab Spring and Syrian Civil War brought thousands of Muslim refugees and immigrants to Europe, many have once again settled in the Iberian peninsula.

Consequently, the street narrative – populated by many local Catholics – was neither nuanced nor balanced. There was no mention of the Israeli hostages or Hamas burning families alive. No demand for the Hamas rapists to face justice. Just for Israel to be replaced “from the River to the Sea.”

Pro Palestinian protestors in Barcelona

Catholic religious fanaticism routed Jews from Europe 500 years ago. Today, Muslim jihadi extremism is attempting to do the same in both Europe and the land of Israel.

Related articles:

Slavery, Colonization AND THE INQUISITION (April 2023)

Hamas’s Willing Executioners (July 2021)

The Beautiful and Bad Images in Barcelona (March 2019)

Watching Jewish Ghosts (March 2018)

The Antisemitism Of Adjacencies

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It surprised no one that attacks against Jews around the world spiked after the Hamas political-terrorist group invaded Israel and butchered and slaughtered around 1,200 people. The bold and not-so-out-of-the-closet antisemites had reason to cheer the death and mutilation of Jews and took to the streets to swear allegiance to the atrocities’ actors.

Slightly more moderate and less gleeful were those who adamantly declared they didn’t hate Jews, just the Jewish State. Francesca Albanese, whose title is “UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories,” rebuked French President Emmanuel Macron who had decried the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. She wrote “The ‘worst antisemitic massacre of our century? No, Mr. President. The victims of 7/10 were killed not because of their Judaism, but in response to Israel’s oppression.” Perhaps she thinks that Gazans would have raped and burned alive Ottoman Turks and British civilians too when they ruled in Palestine.

Many people are calling for Albanese’s resignation, not because she’s pro-Palestinian but because she’s sanitizing antisemitism to the world. People can read, and the virulently antisemitic Hamas Charter is online.

Antisemitism continues to inch beyond the borders of Israel and the confines of self-declared Jew-haters. Even those who have historically done outreach to Jews are turning away from them now, while Jews around the world pray for the dead, the injured, the hostages and their families.

There is a restaurant in Barcelona, Spain called Xerta. It is a Michelin-starred restaurant since 2016, and once a week it makes its kitchen kosher so it can accommodate the dietary restrictions of Orthodox Jews. Jews around the world have come to dine at the famous restaurant, the only kosher Michelin restaurant in the world.

Until recently.

due to the current situation in Middle East, the Management Team has decided to interrupt the service, so no Kosher service is scheduled, at least at the moment

Xerta Restaurant, February 2024

What does kosher food in Spain have to do with a war between Hamas and Israel? Why should Jews in Spain suddenly lose the opportunity of dining in a fine restaurant? The establishment clearly made an effort of outreach to the Jewish community in the past, so why the shift in stance?

Possible reasons include:

  • Penalizing Jews for the actions of the Jewish State
  • Demonstrating to fellow Spaniards that they are so against Israel, that they would deprive Jews service even though they have nothing to do with Israel
  • Out of fear that the restaurant would be attacked by antisemites who make no distinction between Jews and the Jewish State

The managers of the restaurant are clearly not antisemites or would not have historically offered kosher food. But they have taken action specifically against local Orthodox Jews at this time because of activities 2,200 miles away.

Xerta Restaurant in Barcelona, Spain. Emptied of Orthodox Jews

The restaurant managers know that Spain is not like other western countries and Barcelona has a radical streak. While almost every western country stopped making voluntary payments to UNRWA after it was shown that many of its employees participated in the October 7 pogrom against Israeli Jews, Spain decided to INCREASE its donations. Just last year, the mayor of Barcelona severed the ceremonial “sister city” relationship with Tel Aviv because she said Israel committed “apartheid.”

Perhaps Xerta’s management watched the news about the spike in antisemitism everywhere with chants to “gas the Jews” and attack Zionists everywhere. Maybe they feared that their neighbors’ hatred for the Jewish State would come for Jews dining in its establishment, so it kept the kosher patrons away.

Martin Niemoller (1892-1984) would be ashamed. He knew his silence was complicity for Nazi atrocities.

Cold-blooded antisemites are killing Jews, and friends of Jews are abandoning them in the cold.

It’s an old lesson for this generation. Jews are being schooled on the fragility of allies and the antisemitism of adjacencies.

Chumming For Antisemites (December 2023)

The They Keeps Growing (November 2023)

First the Attackers Were Radical Islamic Extremists (August 2019)

The Beautiful and Bad Images in Barcelona (March 2019)

Watching Jewish Ghosts (March 2018)

The Selfishness, Morality and Effectiveness of Defending Others (December 2016)

The Beautiful and Bad Images in Barcelona

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The museum housing the works of the 20th century painter Joan Miro (1893-1983) is found in Barcelona, Spain sitting high in the hills of Montjuic, or “the Jewish Mountain,” so named for the historic Jewish presence there in medieval times, before the Spanish Inquisition and expulsion of the Jews in the 15th century. The museum contains many beautiful works by Miro including paintings, sculptures and tapestries.

The Beautiful

Many of the abstract paintings have no titles, but one beautiful painting does, called “The Gold of the Azure,” painted in 1967.

The painting shows the planet Earth as a large blue oval surrounded by a white halo. It is set against a gold sky along with other planets as smaller black blobs, a distant red smear of a sun, and large but faint black stars represented by four intersecting lines. Across the middle of the painting is a soft black line, the sole element that cuts against the dominant blue image of the painting.

Despite the dominance of the blue orb, the painting is balanced like a mobile by one of Miro’s contemporary artists, Alexander Calder (1898-1976). However, unlike Calder’s physical mobiles that needed to operate in gravity, Miro’s painting of the solar system needed no practical constraints. The thin black line is wavy and did not attach to any objects as opposed to Calder’s taut black wires connecting the objects of the art. Miro’s connective element floated against the gold sky just like the 4-lined stars. The work presents harmony of suspended disparate elements in the universe as visualized by a man who despised the fascism that dominated his country from the Spanish Civil War (1936-9) through the Nationalist government led by Francisco Franco (1939-1975).

The Bad

Adjacent to The Joan Miro Museum is a small tranquil park called Jardines de Laribal. The pretty garden is a quiet place for a nice short stroll.

The garden has just a few entrances, each flanked by two columns. On a sunny day in February 2019, one of the columns to enter the park contained a large black swastika.

Entrance to Jardines de Laribal
(photo: FirstOneThrough February 28, 2019)

The crude image on the right column was balanced by a large green map on the left welcoming visitors to the garden. A harmony of hatred for those pleased that the garden was built atop Jewish cemeteries. Spain, happily Jew-free since 1492.

The symbol of Nazism, fascism and racism may bear passing resemblance to the simple stars in the paintings of Joan Miro located a hundred meters away, but the message could not be more different. In the art inside the museum, the faint images of the smaller and different bodies coexist peacefully with the dominant orbs. But outside the museum, in the real world built atop the graves of Jews, European racism and antisemitism still demands a purely Catholic order.

Related First.One,Through articles:

Watching Jewish Ghosts

Your Father’s Anti-Semitism

“Tinge” Two. Idioms for Idiots

Delivery of the Fictional Palestinian Keys

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Watching Jewish Ghosts

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Holy Thursday arrived in Seville, Spain on March 29, 2018 with the traditional pomp and circumstance. Donning capes and tall conical hoods (the capirotes), the nazarenos marched through the streets of the city to the central Cathedral as they have done for hundreds of years.

Holy Thursday procession in Seville, Spain March 29, 2018
(photo: First.One.through)

But the hundreds of men in white hoods held a very different meaning for some people in the crowd. While the nazarenos may have focused on their penitence during holy week (Semana Santa in Spain), the scene meant something quite different to the lone American Jew watching the march.

As an American

Americans have long associated people dressed in white robes and hoods as belonging to the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), a racist and anti-Semitic group that continues to have some support in parts of the country. The Southern Poverty Law Center considers the group to be both the most infamous and oldest hate group in the USA. The group epitomizes hatred and violence.

As such, most Americans instinctively cringe when they hear about the group or see their members in the infamous hoods.

It is hard not to have the same immediate reaction when seeing that attire in a very different situation.

Marcher in Seville, Spain March 29, 2018
(photo: First.One.through)

As a Jew

Jews cannot come to Spain and not consider how few Jews remain in the country. The expulsion of the Jews in the summer of 1492 is marked in collective memory, much like the Holocaust of 1939-1945.

The cleansing of the Jews in Spain had an earlier start in Seville, as it was in that city that the Spanish Inquisition really got its start. In 1391, a preacher by the name of Don Fernando Martinez lectured his congregants that Jews were evil and were infiltrating Spanish society. While the riots that broke out in March were put down, the mob gathered strength and plundered the Jewish Quarter of the city in June. Roughly 4,000 people were killed. The synagogues in the city were either destroyed or converted to churches and the Jewish community was decimated.

Within two years, King Henry III of Castile (1379-1406) passed judgement on the preacher and the city itself for what had transpired. Few Jews returned and the city. That year, in 1393, the first brotherhood (hermanad) appeared called Las Negras. As a sign of penance during Semana Santa, the members donned white robes and capirotes, and have continued to do so until this day.

In time, other brotherhoods would cover the city. They would wear their own colors of Black-and-white, all purple or green. Over holy week, they would carry large candles and march towards the cathedral, many handing out candies to the children who would normally be scared of such scene.

There were no longer Jews in the city to care or remember.

Nazareno walking in Seville, Spain March 29, 2018
(photo: First.One.through)

This American Jew

I have no doubt that the Catholics celebrating Holy Week in Seville have no idea that the origins of their processions stemmed from their massacre of Jews. I do not even think that they ponder why their region of Spain uniquely uses this custom. The area of southern Spain is known as Andalusia, and is the part of Spain that was under Muslim rule from the 700’s until the Catholics expelled them in 1248. In all, I believe that today’s Catholics’ desire to seek purity is self-reflecting, and does not consider that their ritual comes from evicting all other religions from the province.

But this American Jew observes too many things. Like someone attending a funeral service at a cemetery who looks off in the distance to see cars go by without a care, I do not blame the Catholics for their indifference to my plight as they go about their own day. However, I cannot help see the ghosts of the Jews of Spain as I watch their procession during Semana Santa in Seville.

Related First.One.Through video:

1001 Years of Expulsions (music from Schindler’s List)

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