Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez speaks at a press conference in Kunshan, Jiangsu province, China, Sept. 11, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Xihao Jiang

The Palestinian terrorist group Hamas has praised Spain for permanently withdrawing its ambassador to Israel on Tuesday, joining Iran in heralding the NATO ally’s hostile posture toward the Jewish state and the US amid ongoing conflict in the Middle East.

“We welcome the decision of the Spanish government to withdraw its ambassador from the ‘Zionist entity’ and to reduce its diplomatic representation. This decision continues the honorable positions taken by the Spanish government against the genocide carried out against our Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip,” the Islamist group behind the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel said in a statement.

“While we greatly appreciate this courageous Spanish position, we reiterate our demand that all countries of the world sever all forms of relations with the ‘Zionist entity,’” the statement continued.

Hamas’s comments came after Spain published an announcement in its official gazette that the ambassador’s position had been terminated. Spain’s Foreign Ministry said its embassy in Tel Aviv will be led by a charge d’affaires for the foreseeable future.

Israel’s embassy in Spain is also run by a charge d’affaires after the country summoned its ambassador last May in protest of Spain’s decision to recognize a Palestinian state, a decision that Jerusalem characterized as a “reward for terrorism.”

Spain’s ambassador to Israel was initially summoned back to Spain in September amid a diplomatic dispute. Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar accused Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez of antisemitism, following Madrid’s latest measures against the Jewish state.

Sánchez unveiled new policies at the time targeting Israel over the war in Gaza, including an arms embargo and a ban on certain Israeli goods.

The Spanish government announced it would bar entry to individuals involved in what it called a “genocide against Palestinians,” block Israel-bound ships and aircraft carrying weapons from Spanish ports and airspace, and enforce an embargo on products from Israeli communities in the West Bank.

Meanwhile, Saar announced sanctions against two Spanish ministers, accusing the government in Madrid of antisemitism and of pursuing an escalating anti-Israel campaign aimed at undermining the Jewish state on the international stage.

For years, Hamas has received funding, weapons, and training from Iran, which last week expressed support for Spain’s decision to block US forces from using its bases for military operations against the Islamic regime. The move left Madrid as the only major EU country to have explicitly criticized the US-Israeli strikes on Iran.

In response to an online news report saying that the Spanish government “denies that the US is using its bases in Spain for the war against Iran,” the Iranian embassy in Spain reshared the headline and added, “Iran fully recognizes and respects this position, which is in accordance with international law.”

While Spain has strongly condemned the US-Israeli attack on Iranian regime targets, other European countries have denounced Iran’s counterstrikes on civilian sites across the Middle East.

US President Donald Trump has lambasted Spain for its stance, even threatening to cut off trade.

“I think they’re not cooperating at all. Spain. I think they’ve been very bad, very bad, not good at all. We may cut off trade with Spain,” Trump told reporters, adding that Madrid has been “very bad to NATO” and does not want to “pay their fair share.”

Spain quickly condemned the strikes against Iran after they began, calling them “dangerous” and “outside of international law.”

Israel accused Spain of “standing with tyrants” for opposing the war.

Since Hamas’s Oct. 7 atrocities started the Gaza war, Spain has been one of Israe’’s fiercest critics on the international stage.

Earlier this month, police raided a steel factory near Bilbao, northern Spain, questioning staff over suspected violations of the country’s arms embargo on Israel

The Action and Communication on the Middle East (ACOM) group, a pro-Israel organization in Spain, described the move as part of a “pattern of political pressure on economic actors for ideological reasons.”

“The combination of state intervention with a political climate that tolerates — and sometimes encourages — aggressive activism against Israel and its partners creates a scenario in which civil liberties and the legal security of companies and citizens are steadily eroded,” ACOM said in a statement.

In September, the Spanish government passed a law to take “urgent measures to stop the genocide in Gaza,” banning trade in defense material and dual-use products from Israel, as well as imports and advertising of products originating from Israeli settlements.

That same month, when Spain recalled its ambassador to Israel, Sánchez accused the Jewish state of “exterminating defenseless people” in Gaza and “breaking all the rules of humanitarian law.”

Sánchez’s administration expanded the boycotted products to ban imports from Israeli communities in the West Bank, eastern Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights.

While pursuing such policies and attacking Israel verbally, Sánchez has facing backlash from his country’s political leaders and Jewish community, who accuse him of fueling antisemitic hostility.

Amid a sharp rise in anti-Jewish hate crimes and anti-Israel sentiment, Lorenzo Rodríguez, mayor of Castrillo Mota de Judíos in northern Spain, accused the country’s leader in September of “fueling a discourse of hatred” against Israel and the Jewish people.

“The government is fostering antisemitism that will prove deeply damaging for Spain,” Rodríguez said in an interview with the local outlet El Español.

Comparing Spain’s attitude toward Israel with other countries, Sa’ar stated earlier this month that “the obsessive activism of the current Spanish government against Israel stands out in light of its ties with dark, tyrannical regimes — from Iran’s ayatollahs to [Nicolás] Maduro’s government in Venezuela.”

In January, as violent confrontations between ICE and protesters erupted in the Twin Cities, a knitting group at Needle & Skein yarn shop in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, started brainstorming what they could do to lift people’s spirits. Paul Neary, a designer at the shop with a special love for fiber arts history, quickly found inspiration: a pointed red knit hat with a tassel worn in 1940s Norway to protest the Nazi occupation and boost morale.

“He showed me the picture of the Norwegian resistance hat and I said that is exactly it,” store owner Gilah Mashaal told me.

Although it’s unclear why the red hats became such a popular anti-Nazi tool in Norway, some have noted the link between their design and the Phrygian cap, a symbol of freedom during the French and American revolutions. Neary reverse engineered the Norwegian pattern, creating a more modern beanie-like shape, birthing the “Melt the ICE” hats now seen at anti-ICE protests across the country. Although, as a Guardian article noted, Mashaal had a rule that “nobody talks politics” in the store, she felt stirred to action.

“It kind of transcends politics, in my opinion,” Mashaal said. “When your neighbors are afraid to leave their homes, or they’re afraid to take their sick children to the doctor, or they can’t go to work, something’s wrong with our society.”

The situation feels personal for Mashaal. Her paternal grandparents were from Baghdad and were forced to leave during the 1941 Farhud, a violent attack on Jews similar to the pogroms of Europe. Mashaal’s family settled in Cairo, but that proved to be only a temporary solution.

“When my father was 14 years old, the king was deposed so the military took over and things became very very difficult for the Jews in Cairo,” said Mashaal. Her father escaped to France and eventually immigrated to the United States. “They were forced to leave with absolutely nothing and my father told me the story of my grandmother breaking all the dishes in the house because she didn’t want to just hand it over to the military.”

Mashaal said she’s reminded of the terrible conditions her family had to endure when she sees what is happening in her community.

“This is about human decency,” she said. “This is about caring for your neighbor.”

After Neary came up with the pattern, they planned a knit-along for the following week.

“I thought we were gonna have like, you know, maybe 10 people show up,” Mashaal said. “Then all of a sudden there were more than a hundred people in my store.”

The pattern went viral online when the shop shared Neary’s pattern on Ravelry, a site where knitters and crocheters share patterns, projects and tips. When this article was written, 12,251 users reported they were making or had made the hats and 4,446 had put it in their queue of future projects. The design also inspired a number of customized spin-offs including a version that incorporated “Love is more powerful than hate” in morse code and a mini hat that could be worn as a brooch. Mashaal said that the communal values of the knitting world helped make the hats a success.

“They’re very politically minded,” she said. “And when they see something happening that needs attention, everybody comes together and works towards this common goal.”

When we spoke, Neary couldn’t resist a pun, telling me political activism in the yarn community is “literally knit into the fabric of our history.” Knitters in Belgium encoded messages about military activity in their stitches during World War I. Knitting circles have served as a place where women, who were discouraged from being political in public, could exchange ideas about issues such as slavery and women’s suffrage.

“When you see things happening and you feel helpless, you try to find some way to connect to other people who are also feeling helpless,” Mashaal said. “To create something with your hands is soothing, in a way, and very meaningful.”

Profits from the hats are donated to immigrant aid groups in Minnesota, such as the Immigrant Rapid Relief Fund. Mashaal said they have also received donations from around the world and have raised $760,000 thus far.

Not everyone is happy with Needle & Skein’s new hats. Both Mashaal and Neary told me they’ve received hateful emails, phone calls and letters from people who disagree with their message. But Mashaal said “the positivity far outweighs the negativity that we’ve gotten.”

Neary noted that they have received supportive calls from people who may not necessarily have been as politically engaged before.

“They’ll say something like, you know, ‘Usually I don’t get involved in stuff like this, but this really moved me,’” Neary said. “It’s their kind of gentle way of letting us know, like, ‘We maybe didn’t vote the same way, but obviously we’re on the same team.’”

Mashaal and Neary noted how the knitting community’s diversity connects people across racial, ethnic, gender and generational boundaries.

“It truly does give us all kind of a space to have together to learn more about different people and share comfortably,” Neary said.

“We just all have this one passion. And so we find that one literal common thread.”

The post How a Jewish-owned yarn store knitted the symbol of the anti-ICE movement appeared first on The Forward.

Zohran Mamdani is sworn in as mayor of New York City at Old City Hall Station, New York, US, Jan. 1, 2026. Photo: Amir Hamja/Pool via REUTERS

New York City’s new antisemitism czar, Phylisa Wisdom, has introduced herself with the language of inclusion: “expanding the communal table,” “pulling up additional chairs,” convening stakeholders, listening and learning.

But New York Jews do not need metaphors. They need clarity. They need enforcement. They need a city government willing to name antisemitism plainly and confront it without evasions — because the issue at stake is not communal symbolism. It is the most basic obligation of a liberal democracy: equal justice under the law.

Antisemitism in New York is not an abstract dialogue problem. It is not a misunderstanding that can be resolved through facilitated conversation. It is a civic emergency: assaults on visibly Jewish New Yorkers, threats against synagogues, harassment on public transit, and a permissive ideological environment — especially in elite progressive spaces — that treats Jewish identity as uniquely suspect.

The numbers alone should end any confusion. In 2025, the NYPD recorded 330 antisemitic hate crimes in New York City — more than all other bias categories combined, representing roughly 57 percent of all reported hate crimes. Jews make up about 10 percent of the city’s population but are targeted far more often than any other group. No other minority in New York is attacked so disproportionately and no other hatred is so often explained away.

And the crisis is accelerating. In January 2026 — Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s first month in office — the NYPD recorded 31 antisemitic hate crimes, a 182 percent increase over January 2025. Jews were targeted, on average, once per day.

And the threat is not theoretical.

Orthodox Jews have been punched, kicked, and harassed in broad daylight simply for looking Jewish — attacked on sidewalks, on buses, and in subway stations. New Yorkers have watched video after video of Jews being targeted in the one city that claims, more than any other, to be a capital of pluralism.

On January 28, 2026, a car was deliberately rammed into the Chabad–Lubavitch World Headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights, one of the most significant Jewish religious sites in the city. The driver was arrested at the scene and charged with multiple hate crimes; security was increased around Jewish institutions across the city in its aftermath. No one was killed. But the message was unmistakable: even the most iconic Jewish spaces in New York are targets.

This is the environment the city’s antisemitism office must confront. Yet so far, the public has been offered almost nothing beyond process language: listening tours, bridge-building, stakeholder engagement.

That is not strategy. That is atmosphere.

And it raises a deeper concern: the modern “czar” is often less a leader than a buffer — a bureaucratic layer designed to absorb outrage, issue statements, and manage optics while avoiding the harder institutional decisions that real enforcement requires. Cities appoint “czars” when they want to signal seriousness without exercising it.

The first question for any antisemitism czar is not: How many chairs are at the table? It is: What counts as antisemitism?

If the office cannot answer that, it cannot enforce anything. It cannot uphold the law. It cannot even speak honestly about what is happening.

But this question is not hypothetical. On his first day in office, Mayor Mamdani revoked the city’s adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism — the most widely adopted definitional framework for identifying when anti-Israel activism crosses into anti-Jewish hatred through demonization, double standards, or delegitimization. The definition has been adopted by over 1,200 entities worldwide, including 46 countries. And Wisdom herself has signaled agreement with Mamdani’s decision to discard it.

Without such a standard, the office is left without a diagnostic instrument. And the questions it must answer remain urgent:

Is “Globalize the Intifada” antisemitic? Is calling Zionists Nazis antisemitic? Is telling Jewish students they are foreign colonizers unless they renounce Israel antisemitic? Is treating the world’s only Jewish state as uniquely illegitimate antisemitic?

These are not academic puzzles. They are the daily realities of Jewish life in New York’s institutions.

To be clear: criticism of Israeli policy is legitimate in a free society. But the targeting of Jews as Jews — or the delegitimization of Jewish national existence — is not. A city that cannot draw that line is not combating antisemitism. It is managing it.

And here is the central danger of this moment: antisemitism is increasingly laundered through the language of justice. It does not always arrive wearing a swastika. It often arrives wearing the idiom of liberation, insisting that it cannot possibly be antisemitic because it locates itself on the “right side of history.” The most corrosive antisemitism today is the kind that insists it is morally impossible.

This is why definitional clarity matters.

The Jewish community has watched, again and again, as institutions respond swiftly to some forms of hatred while proceduralizing antisemitism into ambiguity. The result is moral incoherence: Jews are told they are protected, but only so long as they do not name what is happening too clearly.

That pattern is now visible on New York’s campuses.

At Columbia University, protest activity during the Gaza war escalated into harassment and intimidation so severe that a campus rabbi publicly warned Jewish students to leave campus for their own safety. That is not “difficult dialogue.” That is exclusion and fear, unfolding at one of America’s most prestigious universities.

Similar dynamics have appeared across parts of the CUNY system and other New York campuses: ideological litmus tests, demonization of Zionism as racism, and a climate in which Jewish students are told — implicitly or explicitly — that full belonging requires political renunciation.

A city serious about antisemitism cannot treat this as a mere communications challenge. It must confront the ideological ecosystem that makes antisemitism socially permissible again, especially among the educated classes.

There is also a basic credibility test. The Mamdani administration has repeatedly elevated figures who have trafficked in extremist rhetoric. His initial director of appointments, Catherine Almonte Da Costa, resigned within 24 hours after posts surfaced in which she wrote about “money hungry Jews.” A transition adviser, Hassaan Chaudhary, was flagged for calling Israel a “barbaric” nation. Another appointee, Alvaro Lopez, described people tearing down Israeli hostage posters as “heroes.” The previous head of the Office to Combat Antisemitism, Rabbi Moshe Davis, was abruptly fired and replaced with Wisdom; he told reporters he believes the administration found his identity as a “proud Zionist” incompatible with its direction. And Tamika Mallory — forced out of the Women’s March for lionizing Louis Farrakhan and reportedly claiming Jews bore responsibility for the exploitation of Black Americans — was appointed to Mamdani’s Committee on Community Safety.

And just this week, a New York City Health Department staffer, Achmat Akkad, was exposed for posting that “1 Israeli left in this world would be one too many!” and that “Jews that don’t support apartheid are safe. Zionists aren’t!” This from a city employee tasked with community engagement. It follows revelations that the city’s Health Department convened a “Global Oppression Working Group” that accused Israel of genocide while making no mention of Hamas’s October 7 attack.

The pattern is not incidental. It reflects an administration in which hostility toward Israel — and, increasingly, toward Jews who support or identify with Israel — is a background condition of employment rather than a disqualifying one. An administration that cannot vet its own staff for eliminationist rhetoric cannot plausibly present itself as the guardian against antisemitism.

New York does not need symbolic appointments designed to manage headlines. It needs leadership willing to draw bright lines — in hiring, in public language, and in enforcement — and to say clearly that those who flirt with eliminationist slogans have no place in city government.

New Yorkers do not need another figurative office. They need measurable commitments: a clear definition, explicit condemnation of eliminationist rhetoric, coordination with law enforcement and the Department of Education, and regular public reporting of incidents and prosecutions. Equal justice is not a metaphor. It is a duty.

Because antisemitism is not defeated through convenings.

It is defeated through moral seriousness: clear definitions, institutional backbone, consistent enforcement, and the courage to confront hatred even when it comes from one’s political allies.

That last part is crucial.

The most urgent antisemitism crisis in New York today is not a fringe rally in a distant borough. It is the normalization of anti-Jewish ideas inside the very institutions that claim the mantle of justice: universities, activist coalitions, cultural organizations, and parts of the political left that have decided that Jews — or at least Zionist Jews — are fair game.

If an antisemitism czar cannot confront that reality, then the office is emblematic by design and functionally useless.

New York City is the largest Jewish city in the world outside Israel. It should be setting the national standard for confronting antisemitism with seriousness and resolve.

Instead, it is offering rhetoric. The task is not to expand the table. The task is to ensure that Jewish New Yorkers receive what every citizen is owed in a constitutional republic: equal justice under the law.

A city that cannot define antisemitism cannot fight it — and a city that cannot fight it is telling its Jews that equal justice is no longer guaranteed.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.