Panelists at the Feb. 13, 2024 event at the Circulo de Bellas Artes in Madrid. L-R: Hania Faydi, Alejandro Pozo, Ana Sánchez, Agustín Yanel, Shir Hever. (Photo: John Collins/Weave News)

How can international governments justify continuing to maintain arms sales to and from Israel at a time when Israel is actively carrying out a genocide in Gaza? And what will it take in order to change this intolerable reality? These were the central questions animating a panel discussion held recently in Spain, where grassroots pressure for an arms embargo on Israel continues to grow.

Held at Madrid’s famed Círculo de Bellas Artes (CBA) and organized by the Red Solidaria contra la Ocupación de Palestina (RESCOP, a coalition of Spanish groups working in solidarity with Palestine since 2005 as part of the broader Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions framework), the event featured panelists with expertise in the arms trade and militarization, journalism, and activism. A packed room listened intently as the panelists systematically presented the case for an arms embargo as a key strategic step - and an urgent moral obligation - in response to Israel’s mass violence in Gaza.

Political context

In addition to Israel’s stated desire to wage an all-out assault on Rafah, where more than a million Palestinians are currently sheltering, a number of key recent events in Europe provided the backdrop for the panel. Most immediately in the Spanish context, there have been growing calls both from within the political system and from civil society for the Spanish government to cut off arms sales and diplomatic relations with Israel, particularly after the International Court of Justice’s recent finding that Israel’s actions in Gaza are “plausibly genocidal.”

Moderator Ana Sánchez speaks at the panel. (Photo: John Collins/Weave News)

In her introduction to the panel at the CBA, moderator Ana Sánchez argued that Israel “is able to do what it is doing because of the international support that it enjoys, because of silence and complicity, and because of a lack of concrete measures.” She repeated RESCOP’s call, issued in solidarity with the calls issued for years by Palestinian civil society, to “put an end to the arms trade with Israel, to end both the buying and the selling of arms and of military and security technology.”

Activists have been quick to point out that while Spain’s Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, has been more critical of Israel’s actions than most European leaders, his words have not been matched by tangible actions to reduce Israel’s capacity for genocidal violence. Spanish Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares has said on multiple occasions that the country had suspended arms sales to Israel following the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks and the start of Israel’s assault on Gaza. Recent media reports, however, have cast significant doubt on this claim.

On the morning of Feb. 14, just a few hours after the panel at the CBA, Prime Minister Sánchez and his Irish counterpart, Leo Varadkar, issued joint statements requesting that the European Commission urgently investigate whether Israel is complying with its human rights obligations.

The EU's commitment to human rights and dignity can have no exceptions.

Given the critical situation in Rafah, Ireland and Spain have just requested the @EU_Commission to urgently review whether Israel is complying with its obligations to respect human rights in Gaza.

We also…
— Pedro Sánchez (@sanchezcastejon) February 14, 2024

While not explicitly connected with the issue of arms sales, the statements followed two other recent decisions that have undoubtedly gotten Israel’s attention: a Belgian regional decision on Feb. 6 to suspend some ammunition exports to Israel, and a Dutch court’s ruling on Feb. 12 that the Dutch government must cease exporting parts for F-35 fighter jets, which are manufactured by US-based defense giant Lockheed Martin, with parts warehoused in the Netherlands, to Israel. (The Dutch government is appealing the decision.)

An obligation to stop weapons deliveries

At the CBA panel, Shir Hever provided useful context for why these decisions are so significant. Hever, an economic researcher and activist specializing in Israeli military technology and its global reach, grew up in Israel but subsequently renounced his Israeli citizenship. Echoing the arguments made by journalists and researchers such as Naomi Klein and Antony Loewenstein, he emphasized that when Israel carries out its brutal violence against Palestinians, this violence inevitably spills over into other contexts around the world:

They are testing the Israeli weapons, and they are testing the American weapons. The idea of turning the Palestinian society into a laboratory in which weapons are tested on people, of course without their consent, in a very illegal way, has turned the Israeli military industry from an industry which is focused on building a strong army and winning wars into something completely different. The military industry is focused on oppression. It’s a weapon that is designed to be used against civilians.

Hever emphasized that this is not a new process; on the contrary, Israel’s global security industry has been feeding state repression since the days when Israel supported the apartheid government in South Africa, the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, and the military regime in Guatemala during that country’s civil war. More recently, Israel has found eager clients in countries such as India, the United Arab Emirates, Hungary, and Brazil, not to mention the infamous “deadly exchange” between Israel and police departments in the United States.

Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, said Hever, has direct implications for the question of enforcing an arms embargo. While the debate over this question continues in Europe, he insisted that it should not be a subject of debate at all:

In a situation of genocide, it’s not a question of whether countries want to impose a military embargo or not. The military embargo is not a question of choice. The military embargo exists. It is the obligation of third states under the ATT, the Arms Trade Treaty, and under the International Convention for the Prevention of the Crime of Genocide that every state, every company, every worker in a dock or in an airport, is obligated to observe and to respect the military embargo that already exists. And they’re forbidden from selling weapons to the country that is suspected of committing genocide, of buying weapons from the country that is suspected of committing genocide, and from transiting weapons to countries that are committing genocide…The whole chain of the military supply creates responsibility for each and every person along the chain to respect the embargo. This applies also here [in Spain]...Everyone who is part of the chain of delivering the weapons has an obligation not to deliver them.

The Israeli government, Hever said, is fully aware of this reality, which may explain why Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is threatening to carry out a massive attack on Rafah that would involve the forced expulsion of the entire Palestinian population there. “That means,” Hever concluded, “that our responsibility to stop the weapons is very, very urgent.”

Violent technologies “combat-tested in Gaza”

Report co-authored by panelist Alejandro Pozo. (Centre Delàs, 2022)

In order to get a more detailed sense of where Spain fits into this picture, the panel also featured a presentation by Alejandro Pozo, a researcher who focuses on armed conflict, terrorism, and humanitarian action. Pozo is also the co-author (with Ainhoa Ruiz Benedicto) of Negocios Probados en Combate (Battle-Tested Businesses), a July 2022 report issued by the Delàs Center for Peace Studies on the export of Israeli military and security technology.

While acknowledging the importance of arms transfers from Europe to Israel, Pozo was quick to point out that many European countries are also directly implicated in Israeli violence as purchasers of Israeli technology used in areas such as border control.

Notwithstanding the public debate about “arms sales,” which implies a direct and straightforward transfer of weapons from one country to another, he said that these commercial-military relations are often camouflaged within a deliberately opaque web of joint ventures, subsidiaries, branding efforts, and other corporate and bureaucratic structures.

In their report, Pozo and Ruiz Benedicto provide considerable detail on how dependent Spain is on Israeli technologies of violence:

In Spain, as in other countries, the products and cutting-edge technologies [from Israel] are presented as combat-tested. Examples include Spike missiles from Rafael, drones from IAI and Elbit Systems, land vehicle turrets from Rafael, mortars from Elbit Systems, or tank ammunition from Israeli Military Industries, Ltd. These firms are among those profiting the most from the military occupations and tensions in the region, and all of these products have been advertised as “combat-tested” in Gaza.

The report also notes that numerous agencies and entities in Spain, from the Ministry of Defense to regional and local police forces, use Israeli technologies for espionage, intercepting communications, and other practices. These technologies include the notorious Pegasus spyware from the NSO Group - ironically, the same spyware that was reportedly used to extract data from the cellphones of Prime Minister Sánchez and his Defense Minister, Margarita Robles, in a major political scandal for the Spanish government.

Impact on journalists

Pegasus, of course, has also been used to target journalists, as was reportedly the case in Jordan between 2020 and 2023. The advocacy group Forbidden Stories reports that at least 180 journalists in numerous countries have been targeted by Pegasus since 2016.

Journalist Agustín Yanel speaks at the panel. (Photo: John Collins/Weave News)

The third panelist at the CBA event, journalist Agustín Yanel of the Federación de Sindicatos de Periodistas, referenced Pegasus when discussing the recent provisional agreement on approving the European Media Freedom Act (EMFA). While there had been efforts to include language allowing for governments to spy on journalists on “national security” grounds, such language was removed from the provisional agreement. Nonetheless, Yanel argued that the debate itself shows there will always be pressure to put national security before press freedom, and this often implicates the use of Israeli technologies.

Yanel also spoke passionately about how Israel’s assault on Gaza has included systematic attempts to control information and to attack journalists themselves. “The Israeli government doesn’t want the truth of what its army is doing in Gaza to be known,” he said, “and for this reason, they don’t allow the international press to enter.”

And for those journalists who are on the ground in Gaza - Palestinian journalists, for the most part - the work has been deadly. Yanel reminded the audience that Israeli attacks have killed over 100 journalists - an unprecedented number in the history of global war.

“We deserve justice and freedom”

To conclude the panel, Hania Faydi, a Palestinian diaspora activist based in Spain, spoke of how the effort to enforce an arms embargo connects with the century-long struggle for Palestinian liberation. She pointed to the current disconnect between elected governments and civil society in Europe on the question of Palestine, insisting that “Israel has the governments, but we have the people.”

Activist Hania Faydi speaks at the panel. (Photo: John Collins/Weave News)

Directly addressing the role of the Spanish government in particular, Faydi called out Prime Minister Sánchez for what she sees as a hypocritical stance. In November 2023, Sánchez described the violence in Gaza as “unbearable” as part of pointed remarks directed at his Israeli counterpart. “Then how can he continue selling arms to Israel?” wondered Faydi.

Extending the point, she argued that “the same countries that are maintaining Israel’s arms capacity are the ones that contribute the most to normalizing and whitewashing” Israel’s domination of Palestinians by constantly insisting on Israel’s “right to defend itself” - a right that is actually not available to countries maintaining belligerent military occupations.

Describing the Palestinian cause as “a struggle of many struggles” and movingly invoking images of a vibrant Palestinian society that was ripped apart in 1948 and remains under attack by the Israeli state, Faydi insisted that “we deserve justice and freedom, and we deserve for them to give back our land.”

Putting an end to the arms trade with Israel, she said, is an “essential” part of the ongoing effort to make Palestinian freedom a reality.

All translations by the author.