Courtesy of JNS. Photo credit: Courtesy of Moncloa/José Manuel Álvarez
Spanish Defense Minister Margarita Robles walks through the gardens of Moncloa Palace, the official residence and workplace of the prime minister of Spain, in Madrid on Nov. 22, 2023
(JNS) — A prominent pro-Israel group in Spain on Dec. 31 accused the government in Madrid of being “anti-patriotic” after Cabinet ministers admitted that their plan to boycott Israeli technology could endanger “economic viability essentials” if fully applied.
Angel Mas, president of the Action and Communication on the Middle East (ACOM) organization, made the allegation in an interview with JNS on Dec. 31 after Spanish Defense Minister Margarita Robles on Dec. 29 defended her government’s decision to exclude aviation giant Airbus from a government plan for boycotting Israeli defense technology.
Airbus has production lines that provide employment to thousands of Spaniards at a time when the country’s unemployment rate is roughly 10% — about triple that of Germany and almost double that of Italy.
Robles was defending a Council of Ministers decision from last week, according to which the directive to drop Israeli products would not be applied to the SIRTAP drone project led by Airbus and several other projects, “which are considered economic viability essentials, and for the production lines and for preserving thousands of highly skilled jobs in Spain,” as the council stated.
When asked by the TVE state broadcaster — which has consistently pursued an anti-Israel editorial line — why this concession was granted, Robles downplayed the exemption and categorized it as commercial rather than military.
It serves “an industrial, commercial and export purpose, and is in no way related to the arms sector,” she told TVE. Spain’s parliament approved a government-led arms embargo of Israel in October.
On Dec. 30, Spain enacted a ban on the import of Israeli goods from Judea, Samaria, eastern Jerusalem and the Golan. On Dec. 29, it threatened seven real-estate property rental platforms with unspecified consequences unless they remove Israeli listings in Judea and Samaria.
On May 14, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez called Israel a “genocidal state,” and his country has intervened in favor of the genocide case that South Africa filed against Israel at the International Court of Justice in 2023.
The exemption of Airbus shows that “this attempt to boycott Israel is not only fake, not only empty, not only cynical — it is also profoundly anti-patriotic,” Mas told JNS.
The Airbus exemption is one of several made by Spain in its “supposed boycott of Israeli products, technology and defense equipment,” Mas added. “The truth is that Spain’s own intelligence services depend on Israeli software and technology. Our libraries run on Israeli systems — a fact so undeniable that even the Ministry of Culture, one of the most aggressively anti-Israel ministries in the entire government, has had to admit that key software operating Spanish libraries is Israeli.”
Israeli technology and products are present in medical equipment used daily in Spanish hospitals, pharmaceutical products essential to the healthcare system and in Spain’s motor industry, one of its strategic industrial pillars, Mas said.
This shows up “the Spanish government’s obsession with Israel [as a mere] farce. It is nothing more than political theater — empty gestures designed to appease its most radical supporters and a disturbingly infantilized public opinion willing to swallow any spectacle, no matter how absurd,” he said.
But the exemptions prove that “reality always wins. Spain is structurally dependent on technologies, scientific innovation and advanced systems that it does not produce domestically. Attempts to isolate Israel under these conditions are not only doomed to fail — they are self-destructive. They do not isolate Israel. They isolate Spain,” Mas said.
