Is Spain Fueling the BDS War Against Israel?

by Soeren Kern • August 22, 2015 at 5:00 am

Spain's center-right government under Mariano Rajoy continues to pursue policies that are antagonistic towards Israel — policies that are virtually unchanged from the government of former Socialist Prime Minister of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero — policies that largely coincide with the objectives of the BDS movement.
Although Spain's Foreign Minister has repeatedly said that the government does not support a boycott against Israel, under his watch the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID), the Foreign Ministry's primary aid-giving agency, has continued to subsidize organizations that work to delegitimize Israel.
Between 2009 and 2011, the Zapatero government funneled more than €15 million of Spanish taxpayer funds to Palestinian and Spanish non-governmental organizations that are among the leaders in campaigns aimed at delegitimizing Israel via BDS, lawfare and other forms of demonization, according to a comprehensive analysis published by the Jerusalem-based NGO Monitor.
The Rajoy government continues to fund NGOs that are involved in anti-Israel activities.
According to the Official Gazette of the Spanish State, for example, NOVA-Centre per la Innovació Social, a Barcelona-based NGO with a history of anti-Israel activism, is slated to receive more than €200,000 in 2015... AECID awarded €200,000 in 2014 to the Catalan Association for Peace, a group that has co-organized a three-year project to "raise awareness" for the BDS movement against Israel.
"The EU calls our ambassadors in because of the construction of a few houses? When did the EU call in the Palestinian ambassadors about incitement that calls for Israel's destruction?... They don't tell the Palestinians that they have to make their peace with a nation-state for the Jewish people. They just give the Palestinians a nation-state." — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Meanwhile, Spanish BDS activists continue their efforts to prevent Israeli artists from performing at Spanish music festivals, and vice versa.

Anti-Israel activists in Gijón, Spain are pictured above calling for a boycott and sanctions against the Jewish state, in 2012.

The Jewish American singer Matisyahu has been re-invited to perform at an international music festival in Spain, days after he was disinvited for refusing to make a public statement about his position on Israel's "apartheid policies" against the Palestinians.

The organizers of the Rototom Sunsplash festival, an annual reggae festival held in Benicasim, a resort town on the Mediterranean coast, said in a statement that they were sorry for cancelling Matisyahu's concert and that he was now welcome to perform at the festival on August 22, as originally scheduled.

The organizers said that the decision to disinvite Matisyahu — an American citizen who does not hold an Israeli passport — was due to a "campaign of pressure, coercion and threats employed" by BDS País Valencià, a local branch of the pro-Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

In a post on his Facebook page, Matisyahu wrote: