Spanish State: The government criticizes Israel while selling it weapons to continue committing genocide
Featured image: Navantia shipyard in Puerto Real. Source: El País
We publish an unofficial translation of an article of Servir al Pueblo.
The genocide continues in Gaza, while the heroic Palestinian National Resistance continues to struggle to defend every inch of land from the Zionist imperialist invader. We call it genocide because the State of Israel is aware that the only scenario in which it can emerge as a victor is the physical extermination of all of Palestine. That is why it murders children and the elderly, men and women, journalists and humanitarian workers, attacks schools and hospitals, etc.
Since the Al-Aqsa Flood began on October 7, the Spanish government has maintained a public stance of slight support for Palestine: summoning the Israeli ambassador, demanding compliance with the international laws of war, demanding that there be no civilian targets nor humanitarian, calls for a ceasefire, ceases diplomatic relations…. The latest hand-washing for the PSOE government, Sumar and the rest of the partners has been a short tour of Pedro Sánchez through several Arab countries and announcing that, in this legislature, there will be recognition of Palestine as a proper State.
This support is false and hypocritical. Any government that is born from the bourgeois polls is a bourgeois government, which manages the bourgeois State and therefore, manages the interests of the Spanish imperialists. We can see how hypocritical the government’s support is: while it criticizes Israel and talks about massacring civilians, it sells weapons to continue killing. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, European Union and Cooperation reported on February 12 that, since October 7, no weapons have been sold to Israel. However, researchers from the Delàs Center for Peace Studies discovered that weapons were sold for almost one million euros in November 2023. Specifically, goods in category 93 (bombs, grenades, torpedoes, mines, missiles, cartridges and other ammunition and projectiles, and their parts, including slugs, shot and cartridge wads). Business between Spain and Israel has been going on for years , and there are also Israeli companies authorized in Spain to provide “protection services” and police training. That is, the relations are bilateral: buy and sell weapons and other military services among themselves.
Despite the hypocrisy of the government, which does business with genocide, Spanish weapons would have killed anyway because weapons had been sold to Israel for many months and years. In the first half of 2023, just before the beginning of the Flood, Spain authorized the sale of weapons for 44 million euros: light weapons, fire direction systems, armored vehicles, aircraft material and electronic and imaging equipment.
The Spanish arms industry is powerful. It is enough to see that BBVA and Santander – two of the most powerful banks that make up the banking monopoly – invest 5,000 million dollars each in the arms world. According to the SIPRI (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute), companies from the Spanish arms monopoly such as Navantia or Indra are in the world’s top 100 arms companies. In the period 2015-2019 , Spain was the seventh arms exporter worldwide after the US, Russia, France, Germany, China and the United Kingdom.
