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Mark Nayler
Friday, 18 October 2024, 18:16
Following Israeli strikes on a UN peacekeeping mission in southern Lebanon, Pedro Sánchez has called on the EU to suspend its trade agreements with Israel ... and to stop sending it weapons. He claimed that Spain has already done so and urged other countries to follow its example - "for one simple and overwhelming reason, because without weapons there is no war".
If Spain is no longer supplying weapons to Israel, it's not clear exactly when it stopped. In July this year, Podemos leader Ione Belarra announced that she had "no words to describe the shame I feel about the hypocrisy of the Spanish government". Belarra stated that, despite Sánchez's claims not to have sent arms to Israel since last October, his administration has in fact supplied Tel Aviv with 1.27 billion euros' worth of weapons.
Belarra was speaking at a seminar held by the Delas Centre, a Barcelona-based NGO that advocates for peace and disarmament. The discussion was focused on a report that the organisation had just published, entitled 'Business as Usual. Analysis of the Spanish arms trade in 2022-23 and the case for an arms embargo on Israel'.
The report's main finding was that, "despite the extreme gravity of Israel's actions in the Gaza strip, military relations between Spain and Israel have essentially remained as they were before October 7, 2023".
It revealed that in November 2023, Spain exported just under a million euros' worth of ammunition to a Haifa-based company called Ebit Systems, one of the main suppliers to the Israeli Defence Forces.
The report also stated that, since last October, Spain has imported defence equipment from Israel, collaborated with its business sector in order to reach third markets and awarded contracts to Israeli companies to produce goods for the Spanish armed forces. Looking at Spain's expenditure in "regions of high conflict and political tension", it found that in 2022, 23% of Spanish military exports went to the Middle East.
The only finding in the report that supports Sánchez's claim is that Spanish authorities have granted no new licences for military exports to Israel since last October. Clearly, though, exports under pre-existing licences, as well as two-way commercial activity between the two countries in other areas, has continued more or less as normal since the Hamas attacks.
If it's true that "without weapons there is no war", then the reverse also holds: that without war there'd be no need for weapons. It seems that, despite Sánchez's claims to the contrary, Spain has happily catered to that demand in the Middle East.
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