Decisions by Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez to recognize a Palestinian state, label Israel’s operation in Gaza as “the biggest genocide of the century,” and enact an embargo on Jerusalem’s arms imports are part of a wider effort by European leftists to shackle the Jewish state. Now, Manchester mayor and soon-to-be British Prime Minister Andy Burnham is calling for restrictions on British weapons sales to Israel.
Eighty-two percent of Spaniards believe that Israel committed genocide in Gaza, 58 percent demand that arms sales to Israel be halted, and 60 percent oppose Israel’s military actions. Recent polls in Britain also show that half of the population believes that Israel committed genocide in Gaza and that the government should terminate arms sales to Jerusalem or impose sanctions on the Jewish state. Anti-Israel posters calling for the annihilation of the Jewish state punctuate leftist demonstrations and cultural events in Spain and Britain.
Anti-Israel posters calling for the annihilation of the Jewish state punctuate leftist demonstrations and cultural events in Spain and Britain.
To counter this leftish groundswell, Israel should begin outreach to conservative factions among regional pro-independence groups in Europe. In Catalonia, Silvia Orriols, of Aliança Catalana, has hoisted Israel’s flag in the regional parliament and argues that Israel’s victories also advance Catalonia’s interests. As mayor of Ripoll, Orriols took on the Salafist networks responsible for the 2017 Barcelona terrorist attack that killed 16 people.
Orriols—whom the latest polls project to finish second while she leads the most popular pro-independence party—is the latest in a line of pro-Israel Catalans, including former regional president Jordi Pujol, the founding father of modern Catalan nationalism, to defend the Jewish state’s survival. Like Catalonia’s right-wing Zionist-influenced movement, separatist elements in Spain’s Basque Country and Galicia, as well as in Scotland and Wales, also may help build Israel’s newest European alliances.
The Jewish state’s external intelligence agency, Mossad, has a special division, Tevel, that handles liaison operations with non-state entities. This division, which has developed networks worldwide to serve Israel’s interests, has the workforce and technical resources to establish and maintain relationships with right-wing, European, pro-independence movements. Its work in building underground structures, combined with expertise in countering radical Islamism and transferring know-how, makes Tevel the only entity in Israel fit to serve as the vanguard in building relationships with the pro-freedom entities.
These forces need the kinds of capabilities that Israel’s own Zionist movement and national revival pioneered, which Pujol once heralded and which Orriols now promotes in Catalonia. Specifically, Mossad’s Tevel must create a new work team, the Emerging Sovereign Partners Cell, whose staff could conduct a well-organized outreach to separatist movements in Europe.
Their first engagement should be with Orriols and Aliança Catalana, followed by other like-minded groups in the Basque Country, Galicia, Scotland, Wales, and perhaps also Flanders, Veneto-Lombardy, Corsica, Transnistria, Greenland, and the Faroe Islands. The Emerging Sovereign Partners Cell would help these movements build the essentials of statecraft: governance, defense, intelligence, financial systems, internal security, foreign policy, and de-radicalization or counter-anti-independence tools, tailored to each group’s needs and political aims.
This body could offer creative packages that emerging sovereign states could replicate as models. The Emerging Sovereign Partners Cell could create a Sovereignty Academy to organize fellowships for the emerging leaders and mid-level managers of these movements. Mossad’s Tevel could also sponsor constitutional design workshops to assist these movements in drafting their own Basic Laws, comparable to Israel’s, with an emphasis on their parliamentary sovereignty and protections for national singularity.
At the same time, the Emerging Sovereign Partners Cell could develop training programs to help build the movements’ own military structures: professionalized, volunteer army units, combined with technology to amplify their combat power, such as cyber defenses, drone-based reconnaissance and attack, and layered air defense, initially tailored to small populations using Jerusalem’s experience with hybrid wars.
The Mossad could apply its expertise in spycraft to structure and train these movements’ intelligence capabilities, with a focus on human intelligence and cyber, as well as on countering jihadism. Currency and monetary sovereignty packages could advise on sovereign digital currencies or on strategic purchases of Bitcoin, protected by Israeli cyber expertise and following the example of El Salvador, but insulated from the manipulations of the central banks of Madrid or London.
Europe’s pro-independence right would benefit from Israel’s model and Jerusalem could gain new allies in Europe that would protect its interests.
Indeed, the Emerging Sovereign Partners Cell could work with these pro-sovereignty movements to secure technology-transfer agreements that provide advanced desalination and water-management systems tailored to Mediterranean conditions, along with offshore extraction technologies adapted from Israel’s Leviathan gas field, thereby strengthening Scotland’s oil and gas industry and bolstering its energy security. The Mossad could share its experience in internal security and de-radicalization with these potential partners to help them address extremist elements among their own ranks, such as the Salafist remnants in Barcelona and Ripoll or the mafia networks operating in Cardiff and Edinburgh.
The Emerging Sovereign Partners Cell would help prepare these sovereignty entities’ diplomatic services, envoys, and United Nations missions through training in foreign-policy strategy, with an emphasis on gradualism and multi-vector diplomacy, as Israel practiced in its early years and countries such as China later adopted. These programs must include curriculum design, teaching methods, and educational materials aimed at preserving and strengthening national identity, drawing on models developed by early Zionist national revivalists.
Europe’s pro-independence right would benefit from Israel’s model and Jerusalem could gain new allies in Europe that would protect its interests, combat antisemitism, and oppose radical Islamism from Madrid to London. Legacy states like Spain and the United Kingdom might grow more antagonistic to Israel but, realistically, their anti-Zionist pivot is likely irreversible and so such a policy would simply calibrate to a new reality.
