Tel Aviv and Gaza City were once sister cities, at least on paper. On September 24, 1998, their mayors, Roni Milo and Aoun al-Shawa, joined Barcelona Mayor Joan Clos in signing a cooperation agreement. Municipal exchanges and cultural projects would translate Oslo’s diplomatic promises into everyday ties between residents. Barcelona would help finance the effort.
Although the 1995 Oslo II agreement and the 1997 Hebron Protocol kept the peace process moving, Palestinian suicide bombings deepened Israeli doubts that concessions would deliver security. Despite opposition, Tel Aviv’s city council approved the pact.
The Second Intifada shattered trust. Israel withdrew its settlements and military presence from Gaza in 2005; Hamas won a slight majority in the Palestinian legislative election in 2006,
The promised partnership never developed. The Second Intifada shattered trust. Israel withdrew its settlements and military presence from Gaza in 2005; Hamas won a slight majority in the Palestinian legislative election in 2006, and then violently seized Gaza and killed or expelled Fatah members in 2007. An agreement conceived under Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority now faced a terrorist movement committed to Israel’s destruction.
Even then, Tel Aviv kept the door open. In 2008, with Israeli communities under rocket fire and soldier Gilad Shalit captive in Gaza, Mayor Ron Huldai urged councilors to freeze the pact rather than cancel it. They agreed, preserving the possibility of cooperation when circumstances improved.
Hamas instead expanded its arsenal and military tunnels. Its indiscriminate rocket attacks on Israeli civilians were unlawful. Its human-shield tactics endangered Palestinians while exploiting Israel’s efforts to avoid civilian casualties. In 2012, rockets from Gaza reached the Tel Aviv area. Gaza’s sister city on paper had become a target in practice.
In Barcelona, however, the Palestinian Community of Catalonia demanded an end to the Tel Aviv partnership by 2009. That January, its Barcelona-based spokesman Salah Jamal highlighted Hamas’s ability to rally Arabs around its “discourse of resistance against imperialist plans,” while accusing Israel of seeking the “annihilation of the Palestinian cause.” In 2014, the organization’s website republished an interview in which Israeli activist Michel Warschawski described Hamas as “above all, a resistance movement” and declared: “Its charter has never bothered me.” A liberal Israeli municipality faced exclusion, while Hamas’s violence was justified.
In 2017, the Literal book festival, subsidized by Barcelona City Council, hosted aircraft hijacker Leila Khaled. She was a prominent figure in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a European Union-listed terrorist organization. The festival’s program called her first hijacking “a complete success.” The council said it did not choose the speakers. Yet public funding helped provide a platform for someone who continued to defend armed struggle against Israel.
In February 2023, Barcelona Mayor Ada Colau suspended relations with Israel, including the Tel Aviv pact. Colau insisted that she opposed government policy, yet she sanctioned a municipality whose politics could hardly be equated with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s. Spain’s Federation of Jewish Communities condemned the decision as “sophisticated antisemitism.” When her Socialist successor, Jaume Collboni, restored ties that September, Colau’s party accused him of bowing to the “Zionist lobby.”
After Hamas’s October 7, 2023, slaughter of Jews, Israel had the right and duty to defend its citizens. Yet Barcelona’s leaders treated its campaign to defeat Hamas as grounds for isolation. Colau called it genocide. The International Court of Justice’s January 2024 provisional measures made no such finding; the merits remained undecided. The allegation was presented as fact, lending official credibility to what historian Simon Schama called “the new blood libel.”
In May 2025, Barcelona’s council severed the municipal pact. Its 20-point resolution endorsed a two-state solution but did not mention Hamas once. It demanded action from Israel without offering Israelis any credible strategy for defeating a terrorist movement whose genocidal aims—Israel’s destruction and the killing of Jews—are spelled out in its founding charter. Hamas welcomed the decision, describing Tel Aviv as an “occupied city.”
The government in Madrid echoed Barcelona’s approach: In September 2025, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez accused Israel of “exterminating a defenseless people” and announced further restrictions against it.
Madrid’s professed support for two states rings hollow when a minister embraces an antisemitic slogan that denies the Jewish people’s right to self-determination.
Meanwhile, antisemitism in Spain surged after the October 7, 2023, massacre. The country’s antisemitism observatory documented 34 incidents in 2022 and 60 in 2023. Spain’s Federation of Jewish Communities recorded 221 antisemitic incidents in 2025, up from 193 in 2024. Its president, David Obadía, described Jewish children attending school under police protection. Yet in September 2026, Youth and Children Minister Sira Rego endorsed a free Palestine “from the river to the sea.” Madrid’s professed support for two states rings hollow when a minister embraces an antisemitic slogan that denies the Jewish people’s right to self-determination.
Barcelona’s measures also failed judicial scrutiny. In October 2026, Catalonia’s High Court upheld the annulment of its 2023 suspension of relations with Israel and procurement restrictions as discriminatory and beyond municipal powers. The separate 2025 termination of the Tel Aviv pact fell outside the ruling’s scope.
The political double standard was clear: Barcelona demands sweeping changes from democratic Israel but none from Hamas’s dictatorship in Gaza. It preached coexistence while excluding the Israeli city that had kept a channel for cooperation open. In the name of peace, it dismantled a bridge. Hamas applauded.
