On Saturday, the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) and Schmal’s government organized a “pro-Palestinian” photo protest in Madrid, as the Israeli government made final preparations for a bloody attack on Rafah. Around 1.5 million people are crammed there on the border with Egypt, without food, water or proper shelter.
The Madrid protests had a politically sinister character. The movement was called for by the PSOE, Smar, Podemos, the Communist Party (PCE) and its allied trade unions the Committee of Labor (CCOO) and the General Union of Workers (UGT) under the banner “Freedom for Palestine”. Ta. No to impunity, end the genocide. ” However, all parties are implicated in the US and EU supporting the Israeli state’s genocide against Gaza.
According to recent reports, first the PSOE/Podemos regime (ending in November 2023) and then the current PSOE/Shmal regime continued to arm Israel. Last November, a Spanish company exported nearly 1 million euros worth of ammunition to Israel. Exports included “bombs, grenades, torpedoes, mines, missiles, cartridges, other ammunition and projectiles, and their parts, including slugs, shot, and wads for cartridges.” In addition, Spain has acquired 705 million euros worth of products from the Israeli company Elbit Systems since October 7, according to the same study.
As for the union bureaucrats, they have no intention of opposing the PSOE-Sumar government’s support for Israel. UGT leader Pepe Alvarez participated in a rally in support of Israel in front of the Israeli embassy called by a pro-Zionist group, met with the Israeli ambassador, condemned the “Hamas attack” on October 7, and encouraged members of the UGT to This caused their disgust. The UGT, which belongs to the ruling party PSOE, has a long relationship with the Histadrut (Confederation of Land Workers of Israel), the Israeli corporatist trade union that is a pillar of Israel’s apartheid regime and fully supports the attack on Gaza. ing.
CCOO, Spain’s largest trade union with ties to Smar, Podemos and PCE, issued several statements calling for an end to the war. But it has refused to call on members of Spain’s main military industry, airports and ports to halt arms shipments to Israel.
Saturday’s protests, ostensibly labeled as pro-Palestinian, were aimed at deflecting public anger over PSOE-Sumar’s continued arms sales, trade and diplomatic relations with Israel. Trade union bureaucrats are pro-Palestinian while refusing to heed the Palestinian Trade Union Federation’s call last October for industrial action to paralyze Israel’s war machine and stop the genocide. He used it to act like that.
Around 3,000 people took part in the PSOE-Sumar protests, according to Madrid regional authorities, and 15,000 according to the PSOE-Sumar government. Participants included six ministers, including Transport Minister Oscar Puente, the first senior PSOE official to attend a demonstration of this kind. Joining him on behalf of Mr. Smar were Leader and Deputy Prime Minister Yolanda Díaz, and other members of Mr. Smar’s cabinet: Silla Rego, Ernesto Urtasun, Pablo Bastinduy and Mónica García. Met. Podemos leader and former social rights minister Ione Berara was also in attendance.
“Despite widespread calls, the number of protesters is lower than in other protests in support of the Palestinian cause,” the pro-Shmal online newspaper El Diario Es reported. At the end of the demonstration, public “Only 100 people gathered to hear the manifesto read.”
The low turnout for last Saturday’s protests is a sign of weakening opposition to the massacre in Gaza, which has killed more than 35,000 Palestinians, injured more than 60,000 and displaced more than 2 million people. It does not reflect the
Indeed, on January 20, 50,000 people gathered for a pro-Palestinian protest in Madrid, and tens of thousands more marched in Barcelona, Valencia, Seville, and Granada. The following Saturday, more than 20,000 people marched in Madrid, again at the urging of mainly civil society pro-Palestinian organizations in Madrid and across Spain. They were part of a wave of global anger over Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza that has sent millions to the streets. New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Istanbul, Stockholm, Baghdad, Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur have all seen demonstrations by tens or even hundreds of thousands of people.
PSOE, Smar, Podemos and the trade union bureaucracy had no intention of organizing such a demonstration. Despite having direct access to bourgeois media, entire public relations departments, and large numbers of followers on social media, they did little to publicize the event. They even refused to mobilize their own members and union officials. PSOE has 172,000 union members, Smar has 70,000, Podemos has 18,000, CCOO has more than 100,000, union officers have more than 100,000, UGT has 983,521, It claims 92,000 delegates.
The manifesto calling for the demonstration made it clear that this was a government propaganda event. Although he has refused to explicitly say that the Israeli regime is committing genocide in Gaza, he has called for recognition of a Palestinian state and an immediate ceasefire, a call that Netanyahu will simply ignore. These are the two main demands made by the PSOE-Sumar government in its international diplomacy.
Above all, the low turnout was due to billions of workers terrified by Israel’s onslaught on defenseless Gaza, and PSOE, which continues to arm the Zionist state while pretending to be sympathetic to the Palestinians. It exposed the class chasm separating the Schmal government and its allied allies.
The demonstration did not receive support from pro-Palestinian organizations that had previously organized protests. This is because it did not advocate any measures against the far-right Netanyahu government, such as severing diplomatic relations with Israel, immediately halting arms sales and imports, imposing economic sanctions, or supporting South Africa’s complaints at international conferences. court. His recent YouGov poll found that 78% of Spanish citizens agree with a total arms embargo.
Nevertheless, some workers and young people took part in protests and chanted slogans against the PSOE-Sumar government. “We want to see,” a group of Palestinian women shouted into a small megaphone. [Prime Minster] “Pedro Sanchez has closed the Israeli embassy” and “We have another plan, to send Nazi Netanyahu to a criminal court.” Demonstrators chanted “Israel, a genocidal state” and “Stop Israel now They held up placards that read “Boycott.”
When the demo manifesto is finally read out, Publico It acknowledged that “Palestinian and Muslim groups…have been organized to accuse those who read official documents of being representatives of the government.” This led to isolated conflicts over collaborationism and accusations of betrayal. ”
Social Democrats and pseudo-leftist politicians intervened to cover them up. The PSOE raised the slogan “Stop civilian deaths.” It’s peaceful now! ” refused to call the war a genocide. The plan was spearheaded by Transport Minister Oscar Puente, who authorized the use of Spanish ports and airports to transport weapons and supplies to Israel.
“We must stop arms sales to Israel and we must sanction Israel, as we have done in similar situations,” said Yolanda Diaz of Smar. There is no relativism in human rights. ” But in reality, Diaz sits as a minister in a capitalist government that sells weapons to Israel for genocide.
Podemos leader Belara called on the PSOE-Shmal government to halt arms sales to Israel so as not to continue to be “complicit” in the “genocide” of the Palestinian people. She argued that the government “must immediately stop the purchase, sale and transportation of ammunition and weapons or it will become complicit in this genocide.” But in reality, months of arms sales to Israel have already made it complicit in genocide.
It must be added that Belara was concealing his own complicity. She sat in government for 45 days between the October 7 Palestinian uprising and Podemos’ departure, as Madrid made millions of euros worth of arms deals with Israel.
To stop the Gaza massacre, we need to mobilize workers across Europe and internationally against the capitalist states and all these bankrupt pseudo-left parties oriented towards imperialist diplomacy. The struggle of the working class must be developed into an international unified struggle against genocide, imperialist war and capitalism, and for socialism. This requires building a revolutionary Trotskyist vanguard, part of the International Committee of the Fourth International, to combat pseudo-leftist parties such as Zumaru and Podemos.