The City Hall of Barcelona and the Regional Government of Catalonia against Israel
Recently, a manifesto full of lies and defaming clichés against Israel has been put into circulation. Promoted by the City Hall of Barcelona, the campaign has the support of entities that depend on the government of Catalonia and 108 organisations, including trade unions and political parties. This serious initiative joins a resolution of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Catalonian Parliament (1) (a competency that, by the way, it does not have) that on 16 June denounced Israel for applying “the crime of apartheid against the Palestinian people”.
These facts refute part of the separatist propaganda that, during the unfortunate procés, insisted that an independent Catalonia would have privileged relations with Israel. A falsehood that today is impossible to maintain in light of the events, but which has allowed certain organisations and persons to exploit their position in terms of visibility and in others less presentable.
As always, the truth ends up coming out: as ACOM has been warning (2) these last years, Catalonian secessionism was and is basically anti-Israeli and antisemitic. In line with this conclusion is the damage produced by the intentional broadcasting of misunderstandings that, by means of fake news, predisposed against Israel a small part of the Spanish population who were against the secession of Catalonia. Misunderstandings that fortunately were completely set right with the official visit to Spain of the previous Israeli president Reuven Rivilin, who was unequivocal before King Phillip VI (3) with these two phrases: “Spain is a single country for us” and “His Majesty is the symbol of unity”.
Protagonists and partners of the illegal process that caused the cancellation of the Constitution in Catalonia and the declaration of independence (and which to this day they announce that “they will do it again”) are part, in Spain and abroad, of a left that mythicises the processes of national liberation and that cultivates with special commitment supposedly pro-Palestinian defamatory slogans that the independentist movement mostly assumes without criticism.
A democratic country such as Spain may have its differences with Israel and with any other state in the framework of its foreign affairs, but the eventual differences between democracies will never produce such an acute and lying hostility as is the case of the campaign we are dealing with (4), with more than a hundred entities insisting on breaking the twinning between Tel Aviv and Barcelona. Among them, public administrations, parties, and trade unions who when defining their objectives subscribe these terms: “…put an end to the violation of human rights of the Palestinian population and denounce the crime of apartheid against the Palestinian people”. All of this as well as declaring that the Palestinian people have been suffering “daily violence for more than sixty years” and that “Israel can only continue to impose a regime of apartheid (…) with total impunity thanks to international collusion”.
Whoever has not seen it until now should wake up: Catalonian separatism has never been a friend of Israel; the only thing it has done is to take advantage occasionally of the cause of Israel to advance in its own objectives.
(1) https://a-com.es/el-nacionalismo-catalan-contra-israel/
(2) https://a-com.es/tag/cataluna/
(3) https://cadenaser.com/ser/2017/11/06/videos/1510001170_745305.html
