The Hamas attacks and Israeli retaliation have shown that the ruling coalition is in office and has opposing positions on the Middle East. While the PSOE has joined the European position condemning the massacre with a “but,” Sumar does not even consider Hamas a terrorist group. However, it was the national differences in Madrid that attracted the most attention. Vox called the left “scum” and “garbage,” Más Madrid accused the PP of “supporting a genocide,” and President Isabel Díaz Ayuso managed to link Pedro Sánchez to the alleged beheading of babies in a single tweet (X ). Ayuso is setting the pace for the right and has turned the Community of Madrid into an ideological battering ram from which to fight. For some time now, the Jewish cause has been one of the pillars of its foreign policy. This Friday, his party rejected a minute’s silence for all the victims. In his words, it is a way of providing “protection” to terrorism.
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On the day the regional election campaign began in May 2019, when candidate Ayuso was still unknown to much of the electorate, she tweeted a photo of herself showing her ties to the Jewish state. “Today is the 71st anniversary of the independence of that great democracy of the Middle East that is Israel,” he wrote. Ayuso lost these elections to the PSOE, but became president thanks to Vox and Ciudadanos.
With a powerful gesture, he put the Jewish community in his pocket. Ayuso was nowhere to be seen in this photo. This was the Golan Heights, which the United Nations considered to be territory taken over from Syria. Five months after coming to power, in January 2020, as president, she ordered changes to the geography and history textbooks of Madrid high schools to include more content on Jewish history and culture. With this, “they will not only learn about the history of Sefarad, but also about the heritage and development of the Jewish people to this day,” he said on the day he made the announcement during an annual event held by the Madrid Assembly to commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Earlier this year, in February, Ayuso returned to Israel and this time it was much more formal: she visited the Western Wall, the Mount of Remembrance, a synagogue and met with the President of Israel, Isaac Herzog, and the Minister of Economy.
In keeping with this closeness, he responded to the Hamas attacks with messages of condolence, lighting the Postal Palace in blue and white, visits to the Jewish community and nine tweets between Sunday and Friday. In some cases these are expressions of condolence for the Israeli deaths, in others they are attacks on the Sánchez government. His most explosive tweet criticized Sánchez’s “equidistance” with a viral news report about beheaded babies, which Israel has contradicted itself about without providing any evidence.
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On his trips to the United States, the next of which takes place next week, Ayuso has brought Latin American investments and money with him. But on his trip to Israel he was interested in two things: health and safety. The president visited the Jerusalem control center, from which every corner of the Old City is monitored. The released press release states: “He was interested in Israel’s security system with more than 700 cameras connected in this area where Catholic, Muslim, Jewish and Armenian communities meet.” Ayuso linked it to Spain by saying, that Madrid is the only region “that has a comprehensive security strategy” that coordinates the various security agencies and will invest 300 million euros in local police by 2024. Paradoxically, the infallible Israeli system that Ayuso admired was at the center of criticism for security failures in predicting the Hamas attack.
As for health care, he was interested in the public system, which he described as “very interesting” because, through big data, it “is trying to make medicine increasingly more personalized, because each of us has a different genetic burden,” he said followed by a visit to the Hadassah Hospital in Ein Kerem. He also asked about ALS treatment with a view to the world’s first public residential center dedicated only to patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, to be opened in Madrid. In 2022, Israeli investments in Spain amounted to 19 million euros and 90% of them went to Madrid, mainly in the electricity, gas (64.9%) and construction (32.7%) sectors.
This affinity of Ayuso with Israel has attracted the attention of those who have been following the conflict and the evolution of positions in Spain for some time. In the second half of the 20th century, the right remained distanced from the Zionist cause. Franco’s policy of friendship with the Arab countries left its mark and was the People’s Alliance’s legacy of democracy. The change occurred around the Iraq War, when José María Aznar joined American positions, says Arabist Luz Gómez, a professor at the Autonomous University of Madrid. But Gómez sees Ayuso as a step further. “It is an extreme case of Trumpist politics in Spain and that requires a firm adherence to Israeli interests,” says Gómez, who also cites the Ultra Vox party as another example.
But Ayuso’s approach to the Hebrew land is not only related to the recent attacks, but is also a battleground with Barcelona and a way to point the finger at Barcelona. The February trip came seven days after then-mayor of the Catalan capital Ada Colau severed ties with Israel over “systematic violence against Palestinians.” Speaking from Israeli soil, Ayuso then said that Barcelona’s decision “does not represent the Catalans as a whole, let alone the whole of Spain”: “And even less Madrid, where we make positive policies, where no one is superfluous, where we cannot promote.” of boycotts in which we want plurality, faith and religious sensibilities of every individual to be respected.” This caused his popularity to skyrocket in the Jewish community. Holocaust History Museum director Dani Dayan highlighted Ayuso’s “courage” and said she was “an example to the world of her determination to fight anti-Semitism.”
This week, Ayuso called on Pedro Sánchez’s government to “immediately cut off economic access to anything related to Hamas,” a statement that puts her on the side of the hawks in Europe calling for an end to financial support for the Palestinians of Gaza, where 80% live on humanitarian aid. Politicians from all walks of life have taken positions in this major global debate and many have responded with nuance, but the Madrid president has chosen without hesitation to support Israel.
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