Strip away the theatre — including the surreal moment when Israel’s Foreign Ministry summoned Spain’s chargé d’affaires over an Andalusian “Burning of Judas” effigy of Netanyahu stuffed with gunpowder in the village of El Burgo, near Málaga — and what remains is a calculated exchange of costs between two governments that have decided the relationship is worth less than the position each is now defending. Both Madrid and Jerusalem are paying real money for what happened on April 10 — and as of this morning, the ledger just got longer. The question worth asking, especially for readers, is whether either side has correctly judged what it stands to lose.

What Sánchez is actually doing

Spain’s position did not begin last week. It began in May 2024 with formal recognition of a Palestinian state, deepened through the cooling of ambassadorial ties, and accelerated sharply after Operation Eternal Darkness — the ten-minute IDF aerial assault on roughly one hundred Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon on April 8, hours after the US-Iran ceasefire was announced. Lebanese authorities put the toll at 357 killed and over 1,200 wounded. Sánchez called the strikes intolerable. Foreign Minister Albares went further, describing them as “indiscriminate.” Madrid then moved to close airspace to certain US military overflights, reopened its embassy in Tehran, and renewed its push within the European Council to suspend the EU-Israel Association Agreement.

Sánchez is paying a real and quantifiable price for this stance: exclusion from CMCC, loss of voice in post-conflict Gaza reconstruction architecture, and — should the rest of the EU fail to follow him — isolation within his own bloc. And as of today, the bill just got considerably larger. Reuters reported that an internal Pentagon email, circulating at senior levels in the War Department, floats suspending Spain from NATO as one of several options to punish allies that refused to grant the US access, basing, and overflight rights for the Iran campaign. NATO immediately responded that........

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