Spain: two million on the streets against genocide in Gaza say – enough is enough!

Over the weekend, the streets of Spain were flooded with a tide of people, protesting against the Zionist genocide in Gaza. Along with Israel’s assault on the Flotilla, which was aiming to break the blockade of humanitarian aid to the massacred Palestinian population.

[Originally published in Spanish on comunistasrevolucionarios.org]

On Saturday 4 October, 400,000 people demonstrated in Madrid, 300,000 in Barcelona, 100,000 in Valencia, 50,000 in Pamplona, and tens of thousands more in almost a hundred cities. To this must be added the 100,000 high school students who came out to protest on 2 October, and nearly half a million people who came out that same afternoon in protest at the raid on the Flotilla. There were also tens of thousands more students and university professors who took to the streets on Friday 3 October. 

Yesterday, on Sunday 5 October, another 200,000 people took to the streets in Santiago (Galicia), Cádiz, Jaén, Palma (Balearic Islands), Gijón, Tenerife, Salamanca, and elsewhere. Overall, nearly 2 million people have come out to protest in these four days of unceasing demonstrations. This has been the largest popular protest in support of Gaza since the massacre began two years ago.

This enthusiastic response from the Spanish working class and youth has been brewing for weeks. It was started by an apparently secondary event, the protest against the participation of an Israeli cycling team in the traditional Vuelta Ciclista a España, a cycle race which took place between the end of August and the first half of September. 

What began with an improvised protest by five people on the side of a road at the start of the competition as it passed through the Catalan town of Figueres, culminated in a rally of 100,000 people in Madrid on the final day of the Vuelta. The race eventually had to be called off when people rushed along the route, preventing it from continuing. 

The leaders of the People’s Party (PP) and Vox in Madrid – right wing parties with strong economic and media ties to Zionist capital – called the tens of thousands of youth and workers who boycotted the Vuelta ‘hordes’ and ‘rabble’, blaming the Sánchez government for having encouraged them, giving the latter an undeserved leading role in the boycott of the Vuelta.

All this has further strengthened the resolve of the masses to take to the streets. In addition to the above, of course, there is the impact of the movement generated weeks ago with the departure of the Flotilla from the ports of Barcelona and Genoa. A part of this is the impact of the declarations of the Genoa dockers to block trade with Israel if the Flotilla is attacked, and the extraordinary mobilisations of the Italian working class and youth in the previous week. Hundreds of thousands were energised by this, and these events served to strengthen their determination to show their opposition to the genocide in Gaza.

It must be said that the panic of the ruling class about an ‘Italianisation’ of the Spanish protest was also transmitted to the government of Pedro Sánchez at the end of the mass demonstrations on Thursday 2 October. Here, the police in Madrid, Barcelona and Seville, the most important demonstrations, were ordered to repress them with truncheons in some of their sectors, without any prior provocation of the demonstrators.

They were trying to send a signal: that the people should not rise up, that they should not believe in their own strength. In short, it reflected the fear of a social explosion. But this had no impact on intimidating the people, who tripled and quadrupled their number in the demonstrations on Saturday 4 October in these cities.

To tell the whole truth, this extraordinary response we have seen on the Spanish streets has taken place in the midst of a total dearth of leadership, be it trade union, political or otherwise. The masses have mobilised without even a prominent leader or organisation to set a date, a place and a time to take to the streets. Every step forward of the movement has been spontaneous or semi-spontaneous, following its own instinct.

‘Enough words! We want deeds!’

One distinctive element has distinguished these protests from those that have taken placein the past two years, and that is that they extend blame and point out the complicity of western and European governments in Israel’s genocide. The governments have done nothing to prevent the massacre. 

The protests have rightly pointed out the responsibility of these governments in supplying arms to Israel, which is why one of the main slogans has been the demand that Sánchez carry out a total arms embargo on Israel and the severance of all diplomatic, commercial, and cultural relations with the Zionist state.

This is something the government is reluctant to do. That is why the most important conclusion of these mobilisations has been enough words, we want action! Hence another of the most important slogans was, following the Italian example, to demand the call for a general strike.

But this massive mood of anger against Israeli genocide and support for the Palestinian people was not born a few weeks ago. To go back no further, a survey conducted in May by the Elcano Royal Institute, a right-wing think tank which cannot be accused of Palestinian sympathies, revealed that 82 percent of the Spanish population described the Israeli action in Gaza as ‘genocide’. Furthermore, 78 percent were in favour of a Palestinian state, and only 23 percent in support of the state of Israel. 

Regardless of the reliability of this survey, it is clear that support for the Palestinians and rejection of Israel has only increased since the survey was conducted. In reality, sympathy and support for the Palestinian people among the Spanish working class has been there for decades, and now the genocide in Gaza has brought it out in full force.

The actions of the Sánchez government

The whole performance of the Sánchez government, which nationally and internationally presents itself as a champion of the Palestinian cause, is nothing more than an attempt to accommodate itself to this mood of anger amongst workers and youth.

It is an attempt to shore up its popular support in the face of its political weakness at home, where it maintains a very weak and wavering parliamentary majority. In any case, whatever its subjective desires, objectively, this formally belligerent attitude against the Israeli government has helped to broaden the pro-Palestinian movement.

Now, the government has passed a decree-law to consolidate, it says, the embargo on arms trade with Israel that it passed on 20 October 2023. But the fact is that, until the middle of last year, the Spanish government had bought €1 billion worth of arms from Israel since October 2023. Between June and August this year alone, it has sold arms to Israel worth at least €1 million euros, according to the Israeli customs authority itself. 

The government has never really attacked the fundamental interests of Zionist capital in the Spanish state, with which it has so far maintained a dependence on military matters, espionage, and security systems, like many other western countries. Sánchez says that this military disengagement has already taken place or is about to take place.

In any case, the ban on the transit through Spanish ports of weapons and fuel for military use to Israel, which the government has also approved, is subject to verification of the cargo declared by these ships. If these ships do not declare such cargo, they are not inspected, which is a way of circumventing the ban. The same applies to US planes and ships that land at its Spanish military bases in Rota and Morón where, according to the agreement established in 1988, Spain cannot check the contents of their cargo. In this way, the US could continue to use these military bases to move weapons to Israel.

Recently, there was a meeting in Genoa of dock workers' representatives from all over Europe, including representatives from Spanish ports, where they resolved to prevent the loading and unloading of all military equipment. What is needed is to move from words to deeds, in close collaboration with the organisations promoting protests in favour of the Palestinian people. Only the organised working class can enforce a real embargo on the arms trade with Israel and not laws written on paper.

The lamentable role of the trade union leaderships

Since 23 September, after the impact of the first general strike in Italy – called by a small union, the USB – a boiling and very clear atmosphere began to develop in favour of similar initiatives in Spain. The leadership of the biggest unions, UGT and CCOO, pressured by this atmosphere, hinted that they would call for ‘mobilisations’ on 15 October, three weeks later. 

Clearly these leaders were even more panicked than the ruling class about unleashing a movement that would get out of control. Without openly confessing it, they hoped that by that date some kind of agreement would be reached in Gaza so that they would not be obliged to organise anything at all. But equally regrettable has been the attitude of the other smaller and ‘combative’ unions such as CGT and the Basque (ELA and LAB) and Galician (CIG) nationalist unions, which have a leading position in these regions and which have always criticised UGT and CCOO for their passivity. 

One of our comrades, a union delegate, spoke on 23 September at an assembly of the LAB union in the Basque province of Alava, with about 200 union delegates present. He proposed that LAB take the initiative to propose a general strike to the other trade union organisations in the Basque Country and the rest of Spain, at the time of the attack on the Flotilla. 

The LAB leaders dismissed the proposal with unusual arguments, such as that they were not sure that the workers would respond, that it is difficult to reach agreements to go out together to fight, etc. A few days later, the Basque union ELA then proposed to LAB to hold a separate strike in the Basque Country for 13 October! They justified this with divisive and chauvinist arguments, saying that in the Basque Country the popular struggle against genocide is more advanced than in the rest of Spain, which is not the case as the facts have shown. 

A separate general strike in the Basque Country could have played a positive and progressive role if it had been called, as in the case of Italy, for 2 or 3 October. This would have put unbearable pressure on the bureaucratic leaderships of UGT and CCOO to force them to join or to bring forward their call for struggle, which will be a two hour ‘strike’ on 15 October. 

Finally, all these unions (CGT, ELA, LAB, CIG) have ended up joining the 15 October date, calling for general strikes in the case of the Basque Country, Galicia, and Catalonia (although only CGT here), and for two hours in the rest of the country. In this way they hope to have saved face, although in practice they have deserted the struggle at the decisive moment. 

The mood for energetic struggle is now, the exposure of the role of the western governments and their popular discredit is happening now, the poor people of Gaza can expect nothing from the Trump-Netanyahu trap deal, and in two weeks we may see a resurgence of the movement. 

A general strike in the Spanish state would add to the impact of the strikes in Italy and open the perspective of similar developments in France, Belgium, Scandinavia, Britain, and even Austria and Germany, and in turn among the exploited masses of the Arab world. 

Only the fear of a revolutionary explosion in the whole of the Mediterranean, or this explosion itself, can defeat the Zionist genocide in Palestine. That is why the time for the full, militant, mobilisation of workers and youth is now! Anything less than this is a smokescreen, which reflects the chasm that exists between the masses of the working class and their official leaderships.

An explosive atmosphere

It is clear that the enormously radicalised and militant atmosphere we are seeing in the Spanish state is not just a rejection of the barbarism we are witnessing in Gaza. Indirectly, it is also a reflection of the weariness with the living conditions imposed by capitalism: insufficient wages, inflation, unaffordable housing, job insecurity, waiting lists in health care, the impossibility for young people to have a stable life. 

Today, the average salaries of Spanish workers under 35 are below the average pensions received by new retirees, the age young people move out of their parents’ home is over 30, 70 percent of workers under 30 live with their parents because they cannot afford to rent a house or share a flat, 70 percent of employment contracts have some degree of precariousness (temporary, part-time, etc.).

The Palestinian question has given millions of workers and youth a banner and a goal to fight for, which they do not find in the fossilised official left, even where that left, until recently, appeared quite ‘radical’. In the end, the material conditions of life have given a class expression to this deep-felt frustration and anger in society. 

The ultimate reservoir of sensitivity, of solidarity, of being moved by human suffering, is in the working class. In the face of this, millions have been able to clearly see the barbarism and heartless mentality of the propertied classes. They are the ones who have something to gain by exploiting or oppressing others, and they are the ones who have actively supported the Zionist genocide, or have tried to justify it in some way.

The revolutionary implications of the impact on consciousness of the barbarism in Gaza and the mass struggle against it are now evident, in Spain and around the world. Beginning with the advanced layers and moving on to wider swathes of the working class and youth, the conclusion is beginning to be drawn that the genocide in Gaza is not the result of the evil of one man or one government sitting in Tel Aviv. Rather, it is an expression of imperialist domination in the Middle East, rooted in western capitalist interests in this part of the globe. 

That is why the blood shed by tens of thousands of men, women, and children in Gaza is not falling on wasteland, it is already germinating and will continue to do so for a long time to come. It germinates in thousands of new fighters against imperialism, capitalism, and injustice, it germinates in a massive and unstoppable movement of indignation against the current system, and of hope for the new world that it is the task of our generation to build. 

To paraphrase the great revolutionary Buenaventura Durruti, we are not afraid of the ruins left by the bourgeoisie and its imperialist accomplices, whether in Gaza or in other parts of the world, we workers also know how to build – isn't that our essence? We will rebuild the world, and it will be better than before. 

As Durruti concluded: "The bourgeoisie can destroy and ruin its world before it leaves the scene of history. We, the workers, carry a new world in our hearts.” This world is growing minute by minute.