Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez speaks to the media on the day of his meeting with Ireland’s Prime Minister Simon Harris to discuss recognizing a Palestinian state, in Dublin, Ireland, April 12, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Clodagh Kilcoyne

Iran has expressed support for Spain’s decision to block US forces from using its bases for military operations against the Islamic regime, leaving 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.”

Irán reconoce plenamente y respeta esta posición, que está en consonancia con el derecho internacional. https://t.co/1U06SCqaWk

— Embajada de Irán en España (@IraninSpain) March 2, 2026

Spain, one of Europe’s most outspoken critics of the joint US-Israel operation, quickly condemned the strikes against Iran after they began on Saturday.

“We reject the unilateral military action of the United States and Israel, which represents an escalation and contributes to a more uncertain and hostile international order,” Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said.

“You can be against a heinous regime, like the Iranian regime, while also rejecting a military intervention that is unjustified, dangerous and outside of international law,” the socialist leader added the next day.

According to media reports, at least 11 US tanker aircraft left bases in southern Spain late Sunday evening, and at least seven arrived at Ramstein Air Base in Germany, with two others headed toward France. The others’ destinations remained unknown.

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.

Israel lambasted Spain’s response to the conflict.

“In Europe, you have all kinds of approaches,” Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar told Euronews on Sunday. “You have countries like the Czech Republic which is strongly supporting this operation and then you have Spain, which is standing with all the tyrants of the world.”

Spain’s Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares pushed back on Sa’ar’s characterization, labeling the accusation “absurd and ridiculous.” The Spanish diplomat added that “we have condemned every human rights violation from the Iranian regime and we are with the people of Iran.”

In an interview on Spanish television on Sunday, Albares said the nation’s bases “will not be used for anything that falls outside the agreement with the United States and the United Nations Charter.”

Since the start of the war in Gaza in October 2023, Spain has been one of Israel’s fiercest critics, launching a fierce anti-Israel campaign aimed at undermining and isolating the Jewish state 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, Spain recalled its ambassador to Israel and Sánchez accused Israel 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 over the weekend 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.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio offered a striking explanation on Monday for why the United States entered its current war with Iran. According to Rubio, the U.S. acted because Israel had decided on its own to strike Iran first, and Washington feared that Tehran would retaliate against American forces in the region.

In other words, Israel’s decision forced President Donald Trump’s hand.

This is not merely an implausible account of how great powers decide to wage war. It is a way for the U.S. government to evade responsibility by outsourcing it to Israel, and, in so doing, potentially endanger Jews worldwide. Rubio is validating an insidious storyline that isolationist populists have been constructing: that Israel, and those people in the U.S. connected to it — read, Jews — distort American priorities.

Why would Rubio do that?

The answer is not hard to find: The war is deeply unpopular. A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll found that only about one in four Americans supports U.S. strikes against Iran. Many believe the president is too quick to use military force.

In that context, it is politically convenient to imply that the U.S. did not truly choose this war, that it was instead forced upon us by an ally acting independently. (Rubio later added that an attack on Iran “had to happen no matter what,” because of the pace of Iran’s military development.)

Jews are all too accustomed to being forced into this narrative. For centuries, Jews in Europe were cast in an impossible role: useful when prosperous times prevailed, treacherous when crisis struck. The archetypical “court Jew,” a prime example, was granted access to power yet never fully trusted. His proximity to the throne made him both envied and vulnerable. When famine hit, when taxes rose, when wars failed, the ruler could redirect popular anger toward the Jew who supposedly whispered in his ear.

For the ruler who wanted to evade responsibility, the narrative was simple: We did not fail, we were failed by our perfidious advisors.

That’s the narrative that Rubio invoked with his Monday comments.

Of course, the idea that Israel could compel the U.S. to fight a war is nonsensical. The U.S. is the world’s most powerful military and economic actor. It provides Israel with diplomatic backing, military aid, and strategic coordination — not the other way around. Israel does not command American aircraft carriers. It does not deploy U.S. troops. It does not dictate U.S. foreign policy.

What makes this moment particularly combustible is that anti-interventionist sentiment is no longer confined to the progressive left. It is also rising sharply on the American right.

Figures such as Tucker Carlson have spent years arguing against “forever wars” and warning that foreign entanglements betray American interests. Leaders like former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene have echoed that rhetoric, fusing populist nationalism with skepticism toward overseas military commitments.

As a result, younger conservative voters are more suspicious of foreign aid, more hostile to global alliances, and more inclined to see U.S. involvement abroad as elite-driven folly. In that environment, suggesting that Israel’s independent action forced Washington into war is not a neutral explanation; it is political tinder. It aligns seamlessly with a narrative already circulating in right-wing populist circles: that American blood and treasure are being sacrificed for someone else’s agenda.

That logic echoes one of the most persistent antisemitic tropes in modern political culture: that Jews — or the Jewish state — wield hidden, disproportionate power over governments, steering them into conflicts that do not serve their own citizens.

This trope has never been confined to one side of the political spectrum. On the far right, it appears as conspiracies about globalist cabals and dual loyalty. On parts of the far left, it emerges in claims that American foreign policy is “bought and paid for.” Increasingly, we see anti-Israel sentiment fusing with broader suspicion about Jewish influence in politics.

When leaders imply that Israel’s initiative was the trigger for an unpopular war, the next step is predictable. If American casualties mount, if oil prices spike, if the conflict drags on, the public will ask who got us into this mess. And if they have been primed to believe that Israel forced America’s hand, some will leap from “Israel” to “the Jews.”

History teaches us how easily that slide occurs. The “court Jew” was always in danger because his position depended on royal favor and public patience. The moment his usefulness was questioned, he became expendable. The psychological mechanism of scapegoating remains the same in our modern world. When complex geopolitical decisions are reduced to the idea that a Jewish state pulled the strings, conspiratorial resentment against all Jews follows.

The truth is that the decision to attack Iran was made by Trump and his administration. The buck stops with them.

If they genuinely believe this war is a wise idea, Trump and Rubio should defend it on its merits. If they see it as necessary, they should be able to explain their national security rationale clearly to the American people.

Instead, in a moment when antisemitism is already rising on both right and left — when Jewish institutions require increased security, when online rhetoric grows more virulent, when anti-Israel activism sometimes spills into harassment of Jews — they’ve chosen to frame the choice to go to war in this reckless, deceptive way.

There are many legitimate reasons to criticize the state of Israel. But the U.S. government chose this war freely. If it comes to be seen as a success, the Trump administration will no doubt claim the victory. If it fails, we must not allow them to outsource the blame.

The post Marco Rubio invoked a medieval antisemitic trope in justifying war with Iran appeared first on The Forward.

Some movies cut so close to home that they make it impossible to have an objective response. When I was watching Tatyana Tenenbaum’s debut feature documentary Everything You Have Is Yours, the moment of truth hit about halfway through.

The film’s protagonist, dancer and choreographer Hadar Ahuvia, is rehearsing in an empty studio, talking about doing her homework at the Jewish Community Center in Hawaii as a child, while her mother taught Israeli folk dance classes in another room. She’d only stop when she heard a favorite song.

“I’d rush out,” Ahuvia says in voiceover “to join a dance or two with women my mother’s age, tucking into their palms for ‘Mah Navu.”

I leaped up because I suddenly remembered dancing with my own Israeli mother, at a New Jersey JCC in the 80s, my small hand tucked into her palm, as we moved softly in a circle with American Jews, to the opening notes of “Mah Navu.” My middle-aged legs were convinced that they still knew what to do. They didn’t, and I slammed into the coffee table, leaving angry bruises on both shins that still refuse to heal.

It’s a little on-the-nose, but so is life:

Like Ahuvia, I’m the daughter of kibbutzniks who moved to the U.S. and raised me here, and I loved the old dances. Like Ahuvia, I knew very little then about the history of how they’d come into being. I only knew they belonged to us, just as Israel belonged to us. And like Ahuvia, I come from a family full of conflict over the war. We throw words at each other: genocide, terrorists, resistance, safety, peace, justice. We wield facts and figures as weapons, we challenge each other’s sources. We demand empathy while offering none; we yell, we sulk, we storm out of group chats, and then collapse into that most un-Jewish of compromises: silences that sometimes last weeks. And this is just with my parents. Don’t even get me started on the uncles.

Despite all our best and worst efforts, we never change each other’s minds.

But perhaps that’s the trouble. And part of what makes Everything You Have is Yours such a necessary offering. Tatyana Tenenbaum and Hadar Ahuvia, both of them dance artists, are interested in the body, not the mind. Over the course of seven years, Tenenbaum films Ahuvia’s trips from New York to Poland to Palestine and to her mother’s kibbutz in Israel — everywhere that Ahuvia can, in her own words, “exercise my freedom of movement,” in pursuit of her troubled, troubling lineage.

Tenenbaum’s camera dances with Ahuvia as she wrestles with the folk traditions on which she was raised. The film’s title is taken from one of Ahuvia’s own works in which she and her collaborators demonstrate and re-enact the ways in which early Israeli folk dances appropriated, assimilated, and finally claimed ownership of Palestinian and Jewish Arab traditions.

Everything You Have Is Yours is not a screed or polemic but rather a gorgeous, engrossing portrait of committed dancers — Israeli, Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Mizrahi, American and Palestinian — as they, like Ahuvia, claim their own “freedom of movement” within the shackles that bind past and present. And while Ahuvia’s performances draw from her specific identity and heritage — as her collaborators draw from theirs — her questions are universal: How does history live in our bones? What do we lose, and what do we gain, when we challenge the myths of our childhood? How do we carry the violence inflicted on us and the violence we inflict on others?  And where do we go from here?

Ahuvia and Tenenbaum talked to me over Zoom about the film’s long journey to the screen, the impact of the past two years on their relationships and work, and why such a critically well-received project has yet to find a distributor.

I told them I’d connected with the film. I didn’t tell them it was the first movie I’ve seen about Israel that I could imagine watching with my own mother, across our differences, my palm tucked once more in hers.

When I first reached out to you for this interview, Tatyana, you expressed a very strong conviction that you and Hadar needed to be in the conversation together. 

Tatyana Tenenbaum: Hadar and I are both dance artists, and that’s how we met, so the movie grew out of a horizontal friendship. Before I proposed to Hadar that we document her process, we had already worked together as performers.

Also, the themes we’ve explored are related: I’m not Israeli, but I do have Ashkenazi Jewish lineage, so for me this project was also a reflection of what it means as an American to have assimilated into a national project and into empire.

You shot and edited over seven years. What kinds of conversations did you need to have as you were working out accountability over the long haul, both to each other and to the other dancers on camera? 

TT: So many! I’m a process-based artist and I had never made a film before, and at first I thought it would just be a 10-minute short. And then 15, and then 20, and it kept evolving. Hadar and I had a lot of catch-up work to do around consent. This is personal work and her relationships with her family are very tender. Ultimately the process mattered, not only because of the political ideas Hadar is grappling with and her beautiful artistry, but also her vulnerability.

Was it a shared editing process?

Hadar Ahuvia: No, I am really glad this is Tatyana’s film. I don’t think it would be an interesting thing to see a documentary that I made about myself.

The film has been very well received by audiences and critics, but there has been some struggle getting distribution and getting it shown, particularly by Jewish festivals. What do you think is happening there?

TT: Our struggles with distribution aren’t unique. Films that are critical of Zionism are not films that distributors want to take a risk on. There are exceptions: The Jewish Film Institute, for example, presented the movie in San Francisco for Winterfest, and they made a beautiful panel as the centerpiece of the weekend about it, which was lovely.

Because we were on their roster, all the Jewish festivals then solicited the film. But none of them programmed it. I think it’s worth saying, and worth naming that. It’s a missed opportunity.

HA: And we invite them to reconsider.

While the film has a point of view, it also features Israeli and American dancers rehearsing and performing together while navigating political disagreement. That diversity of thought feels both satisfying and precarious. How have the past two years of fracture, both between and amongst Israeli and American Jews, impacted these dancers and your relationships with them?

TT: It’s been hard. But we’re still in relationship with everyone in the film.

HA: We knew right from the start that we didn’t all sit in the same place politically. Even if we disagree about the exact makeup of what political futures should look like, we believe in the humanity and dignity of all people. And I think that continues to be true for everybody who participated, which enables us to continue to be in relationship.

On the other hand, while the Palestinian-Americans in Freedom Dabka Group are featured prominently, they only appear in parallel. There’s never an intersection, or a moment of seeing the two sets of dancers come together. 

HA: It would have been superficial to try to invite Palestinians into my work. That wouldn’t change the power dynamics of it still being my work, and my authorship. Also, the politics in the real world are such that this kind of collaboration in my work about Israeli dance didn’t feel possible. It would have been superficial for me to rush to solutions.

I even thought about putting videos of Palestinians in different pieces, and that didn’t feel right either, because it wouldn’t give them the agency of representing themselves. And so what I decided to do instead was to “notice the absence.” The absence of relationship with Palestinians comes from the way that apartheid in the State is actualized in my body.

There’s a particularly arresting scene featuring Hadar’s on-stage breakdown of how early Israeli folk dances altered and absorbed Yemeni Jewish steps, and how this represents a “de-Arabization” of the form. Then there is a similar process through which Palestinian dabka becomes Israeli debka. When asked about it on camera, Amer Abdelrasoul of the Freedom Dabka Group says “I don’t know about Israeli Debka, and I don’t wanna see it. Because I’m gonna get pissed.”

TT: Amer didn’t explicitly know about those Israeli dances. At the same time, he wasn’t surprised about them, because they reminded him of other cultural appropriations. That moment creates a visceral response in audiences, but I thought it was a great answer: direct, clear and honest.

I can imagine a critique from the left that within the context of what Palestinians are currently experiencing in Gaza, the occupied territories and elsewhere, art that focuses on Israeli perspectives — even critically — might be problematic. How would you respond to that?

HA: I think it’s important for us to do this work, so that Palestinians don’t have to. As Jews, it’s our responsibility to speak to our people.

How would you respond to the other side, to those who might feel that the critiques embedded in this film harm Jewish safety, and delegitimize Israeli experience?

HA: We really center Israelis. We humanize Israelis and show our diversity. And that itself could actually be critiqued from the Left. But from the Right, what I’ve heard most is, well, cultural exchange is good, isn’t it?  Even some of the dancers you see in the movies disagree with my critique of the cultural appropriation in these dances.

I think that cultural exchange is great too. But, again, this is about power dynamics. For example when I see Christian Zionists appropriating Jewish culture — as we see them do with my mother’s dancing in the film’s archival footage — it makes the dangers really clear to me.

TT: The largest Zionist voting bloc in the U.S. are evangelical Christian Zionists. It’s a fact that is often obscured politically, and I actually learned it from Hadar. We hope that the film also gives audiences a tangible experience with the way that, under Christian hegemony, there are people claiming to support us but who do not actually care about Jews.

When you ask the dancer and choreographer Ze’eva Cohen about her identity, she says that the answer to the question of where you come from lies not in your citizenship but in your heritage. What heritages do you invoke in this film?

TT: I am going to say… Somatic abolitionism.

HA: And especially the work of Resmaa Menakem.

I was expecting the answer to be Poland, or Eastern Europe.

TT: Hadar and I share an education in postmodern dance, and we share the idea of being with the body on the level of sensation and function and integration. This is where Menakem has been so important for our dance field. The need for reintegration only emerges because of colonialism. Without colonialism, we wouldn’t need to reintegrate: Our bodies would just be there.

This brings us back to Ze’eva Cohen saying that in Yemeni Jewish culture “if you didn’t dance, if you didn’t sing…you didn’t believe in God, unless it was embodied.” 

HA: Dance continues to be a way that I process grief and anger. I’ve been researching Ashkenazi culture, and especially Ashkenazi vernacular and cantorial music, reclaiming this long chain of transmission.

As I’ve been dancing, I’ve been active with Rabbis for Ceasefire, and I’m also in rabbinical school. So, davening and prayer has been another way that I feel I stay connected to being Jewish — to being deeply rooted, while also holding what’s happening in the world, and ultimately being able to envision what else is possible.

Mor Mandel, an Israeli collaborator and dancer featured in the film, says of leaving Israel: “I left the ship sinking, but I still dream in Hebrew.” Hadar, are you still able to dance in Hebrew?

HA: In my research around Yiddish dance, I’ve discovered that there exists a beautiful sense of pride in each dance. I’ve reconnected to Jewish strength through that posture rather than through Zionism. So no, I no longer dance Israeli folk dance for fun.

Except that it felt meaningful to me at my wedding to do “El Ginat Egoz,” a dance by Sarah Levi Tanai, with my mom. It felt like a gesture that acknowledges our shared language. Context matters, right? So I don’t do these dances on the fields of the kibbutz, but it felt right to me to do them at my wedding, with my mom. It felt good to acknowledge this particular dance that…

TT: …that she loves.

HA: Yes, exactly. That she loves.

Everything You Have Is Yours screens on March 5 and 8 at the Laemmle Theater in Los Angeles. Information on further screenings is available on the film’s website.

The post In the face of conflict over assimilation, appropriation, colonialism and hegemony, a plea for human dignity through dance appeared first on The Forward.