(JTA) — MADRID — Spain has permanently withdrawn its ambassador to Israel in a symbolic rebuke of the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has emerged as an unequivocal and lonely voice in Europe against the Iran war, widening Spain’s rift with Israel and making an enemy of President Donald Trump.

Ambassador Ana María Salomón Pérez was removed from her post on Tuesday, according to an announcement issued Wednesday by the Spanish government. Israel recalled its ambassador to Spain, Rodica Radian-Gordon, shortly after Spain said it would recognize a Palestinian state in May 2024.

Spain’s move marks an escalation in the countries’ strained relations, which have severely deteriorated since the start of the war in Gaza in 2023.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez became one of Europe’s most vocal critics of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s prosecution of that war. Over the last three years, he rallied support for Palestinian statehood, accused Israel of genocide in Gaza and imposed a total arms embargo on Israel.

Pérez was summoned to Madrid in September, following a diplomatic row over Spain’s ban on aircrafts and ships carrying weapons to Israel. Israel’s foreign minister Gideon Saar called the measure antisemitic and barred two members of Sánchez’s Cabinet from entering Israel, saying they supported “terrorism and violence against Israelis.”

Spain and Israel are now both represented in each other’s embassies by their respective chargés d’affaires, lower-ranking officials who reflect their downgraded relations. It is the same status that Israel maintained with South Africa before the two countries ejected even the lower-level envoys earlier this year.

Sánchez has been one of few major European leaders to emphatically reject the U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran, calling them “an unjustified and dangerous military intervention” that he says violates international law.

As the leaders of Germany, France and Italy have taken more conciliatory tones, Trump has lashed back at Sánchez. After Spain refused to allow the United States permission to use two jointly operated bases in its territory for strikes on Iran, Trump threatened to sever trade.

“Spain has been terrible,” Trump said during a press conference with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz on March 3. He added, “We’re going to cut off all trade with Spain. We don’t want anything to do with Spain.”

Sánchez, in response, has revived the “No to war” slogan that galvanized Spaniards in 2003. At the time, millions took to the streets to reject then-Prime Minister José María Aznar’s support for the Iraq war, contributing to his center-right party’s collapse in 2004. The war was also seen as a driver behind a deadly terrorist attack in Madrid whose 22nd anniversary Spain marked on Wednesday.

Sánchez said the slogan summed up the Spanish government’s position in a televised address on March 4. In a pointed line, he said leaders who have not improved their people’s lives “make use of war to hide their failure whilst filling the pockets of a few — the usual ones, the only ones who win when the world stops building hospitals in order to build missiles.”

Even more pointedly, without naming Trump, he said, “We are not going to be complicit in something that is bad for the world and contrary to our values and interests, simply out of fear of reprisals from anyone.”

The post Spain withdraws ambassador to Israel, widening diplomatic rift as Trump threatens to sever trade appeared first on The Forward.

Last summer, a 21-year-old far-left activist named Calla Walsh traveled to Iran for its International Memorial for the Media Martyrs of the Struggle Against the Zionist Regime.

Addressing the crowd in Tehran, Walsh said: “We all have a duty, when we go back to the countries we came from, to share the truth we saw here and to struggle against Zionism and imperialism.”

“Glory to all the martyrs. Glory to the axis of resistance,” she added, also saying “Death to America. Death to Israel.”

Not every leftist American activist is jetting to Tehran to spout propaganda. But the language that Walsh — who supported Sen. Ed Markey’s 2020 campaign, which I worked on — used should be familiar to anyone tracking anti-Israel sentiment in the United States.

What may be less familiar: It’s language that the Islamic Republic of Iran has been key to spreading.

In the current war and in recent years, Israel has proven far more capable in degrading the Islamic Republic as a military actor than in undercutting the influence of the ayatollahs’ ideas, in which anti-Zionism, antisemitism and anti-imperialism are melded into a single ideology. This framework becomes all the more potent when Israel’s government hands its critics ammunition: Settlement expansion, the killing of Palestinian civilians and a rightward lurch have combined to make caricatures of Zionism feel, to many, like a good enough approximation of the truth.

But what the ayatollahs demonstrated better than anyone is that criticism of Israel rooted in anti-imperialism is often just a vehicle for antisemitism.

The bait and switch

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Islamic Republic’s hardline founder, pitched the Iranian revolution as one of social justice.

In 1963, Khomeini declared that the “great aim of Islam” was “to prevent oppression, arbitrary rule, and the violation of the law” — abuses heavily associated with Iran’s repressive government under the Shah. He spoke to the Iranian public in terms with clear parallels to the liberal canon of the American founders, promising citizens a “government that will assure their happiness and allow them to live lives worthy of human beings.”

As Abbas Milani, with whom I studied at Stanford University, recently wrote in The New York Times, this was a bait-and-switch: a liberal mirage used as a tactic to consolidate support for the revolution. Khomeini cast those principles aside the moment he entered power.

But even before the revolution, Khomeini’s pronouncements about Jews foreshadowed the illiberal oppression that was to come.

“We see today that the Jews (may God curse them) have meddled with the text of the Qu’ran,” Khomeini declared in a series of lectures on Islamic governance in 1970. “We must protest and make the people aware that the Jews and their foreign backers are opposed to the very foundations of Islam and wish to establish Jewish domination throughout the world.”

“Since they are a cunning and resourceful group of people, I fear that — God forbid! — they may one day achieve their goal, and the apathy shown by some of us may allow a Jew to rule over us one day.”

Khomeini’s Jew-hatred appeared to be a genuine ideological commitment, rather than just a political maneuver. In 1977, on the eve of the revolution, he said that “The Jews have grasped the world with both hands and still they are not satisfied.”

Anti-Judaism to anti-Zionism

Israel became the central focus of Khomeini’s conspiratorial belief in Jewish subversion. As such, his objections to Israel often emphasized its Jewish nature rather than its policies.

In 1970, Khomeini lambasted the Shah for extending “his recognition to a government of unbelievers — of Jews, at that — thereby affronting Islam, the Qur’an, the Muslim governments, and all the Muslim people.” (The Shah never formally recognized Israel, but did have unofficial representation in Tel Aviv. One Iranian official at the time described it as “relations of love without a marriage contract.”)

In 1971, Khomeini called attention to “Israel, that stubborn enemy of Islam and the Quran, which a few years ago attempted to corrupt the text of the Quran.” Replace “Israel” with “Jews” and that statement is all but identical to his earlier accusation that Jews had altered a holy text.

From theology, Khomeini turned to pathology. Eight years after the revolution, he spoke of Israel as a “prevalent, festering, and cancerous Zionist tumor.” Israel must be destroyed, he said, to keep Muslim countries “safe from the evil of this unclean enemy” and the “unclean presence of the Zionists” — taking issue not with Israeli political actions but with the cleanliness of its people, a classic antisemitic trope.

Khomeini referred to imperialism, too, as a cancer. In a 1972 letter to students in North America, he wrote that “Israel was born out of the collusion and agreement of the imperialist states.” Khomeini had previously referred to Jews as the “servants of imperialism,” and framed Islam as “the school of those who struggle against imperialism.”

Colonialism’s pernicious legacy and antisemitic tropes of Jewish domination made it easy for Khomeini to package opposition to colonial rule with opposition to Israel. Muslims, Khomeini said, needed to “stop colonialism and Zionism” on the basis of “human duty, brotherhood, and rational and Islamic standards.”

Khomeini’s vision was clear: resistance to imperialism, opposition to Israel and hatred of Jews were all the same cause.

Khamenei exports revolution

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who succeeded Khomeini as supreme leader in 1989, committed himself to spreading that vision. His English-language account on X amassed more than two million followers, and issued pronouncements such as “the long-lasting virus of Zionism will be uprooted thanks to the determination and faith of the youth.” In 2022, he spoke of “Zionist capitalists” as “a plague for the whole world.”

After the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel , Khamenei addressed American campus protesters, telling them: “You have now formed a branch of the Resistance Front.” He invoked, in that address, “the global Zionist elite” that “owns most U.S. and European media corporations.” He repeatedly refused to call Israel by its name, referring to it instead as the “Zionist regime” or “Zionist entity.”

That wasn’t the first time he explicitly appealed to Western, left-leaning youth. A 2015 letter he issued after Islamist gunmen attacked the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris explicitly addressed “the youth in Europe and North America.” The letter referenced slavery and colonialism, and encouraged young Westerners to study Islam for themselves rather than let it be defined by the West, who “hypocritically introduce their own recruited terrorists as representatives of Islam.” Khamenei notably did not condemn the act of terror itself.

The letter did not specifically engage with issues surrounding Israel, but it marked a notable moment in Khamenei’s efforts to establish connections with young Westerners. And, alarmingly, the considerable energy he and the Islamic Republic spent in translating their ideology to Western, English-speaking, progressive audiences worked.

The echo chamber

Calla Walsh’s pronouncements in Tehran were extreme. But they still pointed to an escalating tenor of activist discourse that is increasingly shaping the public’s attitudes toward Israel.

Democratic Socialists of America chapters across the country have passed resolutions defining Zionism as “a racist, imperialist, settler-colonial project,” with some insisting on the need to oppose it “by any means necessary.”

On TikTok, video after video uses Khamenei’s framing of Israel as a “Zionist entity,” from a clip saying that “the American public has woken up to the Zionist entity known as Israel” to another decrying “the cowardly Arabs who normalize relations with the Zionist entity.” A coordinator of the sham charity Samidoun, which conducted fundraising for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in North America and Europe, stated in October 2022 that “we all have a right and a duty to resist the murderous Zionist entity.”

Most of the echoes between activists and the ayatollahs represent rhetorical alignment, rather than literal coordination. But that alignment has had profound consequences for how the world thinks about Israel, and about Jews.

The road ahead

We do not know how this military campaign ends. But no matter what happens, the ideology of the ayatollahs has already outlasted Khamenei.

Even the reactions to his death prove it: Some leftist organizers have put together vigils for the slain dictator. One coalition of activist groups in New York wrote that “we stand with Ayatollah Khamenei because he stood for us” and lauded him for speaking “about the shared struggle of oppressed people.”

The confluence of anti-imperialism, anti-Zionism, and antisemitism didn’t originate solely with the ayatollahs. Many other forces, including some academic theorists at American institutions such as Edward Said and Judith Butler, played a role.

And many protesters opposing Israel, or the current war, may have no idea that some of the rhetoric they use has ties to the oppressive regime in Tehran. The genuine horror of the war in Gaza, ongoing crackdowns in the West Bank, the sense that the U.S. has enabled these abuses, and a wariness of American adventurism in the Middle East can do a lot to explain public opinion.

But the rhetorical ties are there all the same. And while this war may determine crucial aspects of the future of the Middle East, it will not undo the damage the ayatollahs’ ideas have already wrought.

Khomeini insisted he distinguished between Jews and Zionists, even as he cursed Jews in one breath and condemned Zionists in the next. When today’s activists make that same claim, we should ask whether the distinction they draw is any more meaningful than his was.

The post The one crucial domain in which Iran outwitted Israel appeared first on The Forward.

One week after California Gov. Gavin Newsom caused a stir by using the term “apartheid” to describe Israel, Jewish leaders in the state and beyond — have tried in vain to get him to walk back his statement.

Those seeking answers include allies of the term-limited governor, a likely presidential candidate, who have defended his record and even the comment itself.

Newsom said March 3 on a podcast that Israel had been talked about “appropriately as sort of an apartheid state,” and suggested that a time may come when the U.S. should reconsider its military aid to Israel.

Some Jewish leaders have said the apartheid comment had been taken out of context, and representatives of Jewish groups who met with the governor’s staff following Newsom’s remark called the conversation constructive. But Newsom has not backtracked in public appearances since then, leaving those leaders split on whether a serious contender for the 2028 Democratic nomination — long seen as a champion of Jewish causes — is plotting a new course on the national stage.

Newsom’s clarification two days later — noting that he was referencing a Thomas Friedman column in the New York Times about the direction Israel was headed — offered them little succor.

“It’s out of step,” said David Bocarsly, executive director of Jewish California, a group that represents more than 30 Jewish community organizations in the state. “This isn’t the Governor Newsom that we know.”

Newsom’s office did not respond to an inquiry.

‘Sort of an apartheid state’

Newsom made the remark in a live taping of Pod Save America, a podcast hosted by former Obama administration staffers Jon Favreau and Tommy Vietor. The duo, who are among the Democratic mainstream’s most vocal Israel critics, asked Newsom whether he thought the time had come to reevaluate American military support for the country.

In an extended response, Newsom brought up Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“The issue of Bibi is interesting, because he’s got his own domestic issues,” Newsom said. “He’s trying to stay out of jail. He’s got an election coming up. He’s potentially on the ropes. He’s got folks, the hard line, that want to annex the West—the West Bank. I mean, Friedman and others are talking about it appropriately as a sort of an apartheid state.”

As to whether the United States should consider rethinking military support for Israel down the road, Newsom replied, “I don’t think you have a choice but that consideration.”

Newsom’s use of the term and apparent willingness to break from pro-Israel orthodoxy sent heads spinning. Jewish Insider described the interview as a “hard left” shift. A column in the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles assailed Newsom for “finger in the wind politics.” And secular outlets like Politico and The Guardian reported that Newsom had likened Israel to an apartheid state.

Even organizations that have historically enjoyed a collaborative relationship with Newsom publicly condemned the remarks. Jewish California, whose member groups include the state’s local Jewish federations, took to Instagram to call them “inflammatory.”

Newsom said in a subsequent live appearance March 5 that he was referencing Friedman’s recent assertion that Israel annexing the West Bank without giving Palestinians equal rights would create an apartheid system.

“I was specifically referring to a Tom Friedman column last week, where Tom used that word, ‘apartheid,’ as it relates to the direction Bibi is going, particularly on the annexation of the West Bank,” he said. “I’m very angry with what he is doing.”

The clarification wasn’t strong enough for the Jewish California coalition. Bocarsly told The Jewish News of Northern California last week the groups hoped to see a definitive public statement from the governor that he continues to support funding for Israel’s defense and that he “doesn’t believe that a thriving, pluralistic and democratic society, as it is in its current state, is an apartheid state.”

Tye Gregory, chief executive of the JCRC Bay Area — a Jewish California member group — added to the outlet that “we need to hear directly from the governor.”

The coalition left its conversation with Newsom officials believing such a statement was forthcoming, but Bocarsly said his optimism was fading.

“It’s been several days, and we haven’t seen the clarification that we had hoped,” Bocarsly said. “And we’re still waiting.”

A loaded word

Some international and Israeli human rights organizations say Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and the treatment of Palestinians in the territory already constitutes apartheid.

The term was originally used to describe the system of institutionalized segregation in South Africa that granted the minority white population official higher status, denied nonwhites the right to vote and enforced a range of other forms of economic, political and social domination. Those applying the apartheid term to Israel point to the Israeli citizenship, voting rights, freedom of movement and legal protections granted in the West Bank to Israeli residents but not Palestinians in the territory.

But many Jews say that any charge of apartheid — whether referring to the present or a hypothetical future — oversimplifies the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and is used as a cudgel to delegitimize the Jewish state, where within its boundaries Israeli Arabs can vote and travel freely.

Israel annexing the West Bank — a stated goal of far-right ministers in the Netanyahu coalition like Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich — would replace the premise of Palestinian sovereignty in the territory, which is officially governed by the Palestinian Authority, and enshrine the two-tier system. Such a step, Friedman wrote in a Feb. 17 column, would amount to apartheid.

Bocarsly believed that Newsom’s reference to apartheid had been misinterpreted — even after the governor clarified his views — as describing Israel today, rather than a future scenario.

Nevertheless, he said, by invoking the term “apartheid” at all the governor had played into an effort among Israel’s detractors to make use of terms like “apartheid” and “genocide” to describe the Jewish state’s actions a litmus test for elected leaders.

Only a month earlier, Democratic State Senator Scott Wiener — then the co-chair of California Legislative Jewish Caucus — called Israel’s war in Gaza a genocide, after first declining to during a congressional candidate debate and getting jeers in response.

“For someone as close to our community as Gavin Newsom is, I think it was disappointing and painful for a lot of people to see that he was falling into this test,” Bocarsly said. “We want to know that when it comes down to it, that he is willing to avoid criticizing Israel in that way.”

Halie Soifer, chief executive of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, said Newsom’s initial comments had been taken out of context, and she was satisfied with his later clarification. Instead, she objected more to Newsom’s suggestion that the U.S. might eventually withhold military aid to Israel. The JDCA rejects withholding or conditioning such aid in its platform.

Still, while the “apartheid” phrase got the most attention, Soifer suggested it was just as revealing when — in the same podcast appearance — Newsom had described Israel’s rightward turn under Netanyahu as “heartbreaking.”

“It’s indicating his emotions are actually in this but also disagreement with the policies of the current Israeli government,” Soifer said. “And that is a view that polling has consistently shown is held by the vast majority of American Jewish voters.”

But she acknowledged that further backtracking would help, noting that she had listened to the section of the podcast multiple times to get a clear idea of his intent.

“I don’t think the average person is doing that,” Soifer said in an interview, “and he shouldn’t assume that either.”

The governor you know

The comments seemed to break with Newsom’s track record of verbal and legislative support for Jewish life both in the state and in Israel.

During his seven years in the governor’s office, he has funded the largest nonprofit security grant program in the nation, signed a landmark bill aimed at addressing antisemitism in public education and poured some $50 million into Holocaust survivor assistance programs. He also visited Israel to meet with Oct. 7 survivors less than two weeks after the attacks.

That made Newsom’s failure to hedge in a more fulsome way all the more confounding for his Jewish allies.

Gregg Solkovits, president of Democrats for Israel Los Angeles, a Democratic party club, thought the governor had been intentionally vague — and was intentionally waiting out the Jewish criticism — to “protect his left flank” as a future presidential candidate.

“He knows that in the upcoming election, there will be Bernie-supportive candidates who are going to be running for the nomination, and he will be attacked for being too pro-Israel, which he has been consistently,” Solkovits said. “Would I wish that he had not taken that approach entirely? Of course. I also understand he’s running for president.”

Soifer offered that Newsom might just be waiting for the right opportunity.

“He doesn’t actually legislate on this particular issue, so perhaps he feels he doesn’t need to clarify,” she said. “But I think it would be helpful for him to clarify that, especially if he’s seeking an opportunity at some point in the future to weigh in on such decisions.”

The post ‘This isn’t the Gov. Newsom that we know’: One week after apartheid remark, calls to reconsider remain unheeded appeared first on The Forward.