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 its founding treaty contains no mechanism for suspension or expulsion. Sánchez dismissed the report, saying Spain acts on official positions, not leaked emails. But the signal is unmistakable: Washington is now openly pricing the cost of Madrid’s defiance alongside Jerusalem, and the currency is no longer reconstruction contracts — it is alliance architecture.

[https://www.centcom.mil/MEDIA/PRESS-RELEASES/Press-Release-View/Article/4344137/cmcc-grows-with-representatives-from-50-nations-and-international-organizations/]

What Sánchez is buying with all of this is the ability to claim, when European publics and the Global South are eventually tallying responsibility for the Lebanon and Iran campaigns, that Spain stood apart. The return is denominated in moral standing, domestic consolidation on his left flank, and influence in forums where Spain’s Mediterranean and Latin American networks matter more than its NATO weight.

This is not a stupid bet. It is, however, one Spain can afford to make precisely because it is geographically insulated from the consequences others are absorbing — outside the Hormuz energy exposure crushing German and Italian industry, no soldiers in the Gulf, minimal banking exposure to Iranian counterparty risk. The conviction is real; so is the freeriding. Both can be true simultaneously, and any honest analysis has to hold them together.

What Netanyahu has actually done

Netanyahu’s “immediate price” is not rhetoric. Kiryat Gat is where the architecture of post-war Gaza is being assembled — humanitarian corridors, security guarantees, and the contracting framework that will channel an estimated $71 billion in reconstruction capital (the figure EU foreign policy chief Kallas cited at a Brussels donor conference this week). Removing Spain is a foreclosure: Madrid no longer sits in the room where decisions get made about which firms participate and which Mediterranean logistics nodes get integrated into the rebuild. For Spanish construction, infrastructure, and renewables firms that had quietly positioned themselves for exactly this opening, the cost will show up in tender results over the next eighteen months.

The second-order effect will show up in conversations that simply stop happening. Spanish renewables and infrastructure firms had been making careful approaches to Gulf sovereign capital on the assumption that Gaza reconstruction would create a natural integration point. Those approaches will now go unanswered. Nobody in that part of the world says no out loud; they simply stop returning the call. With one move, Netanyahu has made Madrid a more awkward counterparty across the entire Abraham Accords commercial perimeter, and he has done it without asking a single Gulf capital to lift a finger.

Where each side could be wrong

The scenario Israel needs to worry about is straightforward. On April 22, Spain, Slovenia, and Ireland formally requested that the EU Foreign Affairs Council debate suspending the Association Agreement. Germany and Italy blocked it. The bid was shelved — for now. But Orbán’s recent fall in Hungary has removed one of the most reliable vetoes Israel could count on in the Council, and the next ministerial meeting is May 11. If even one major EU economy — Germany under domestic pressure, France moving in the direction Macron’s recent rhetoric suggests, Italy if Meloni’s coalition wobbles — joins the suspension push, the cascade dynamics change abruptly. Suspension is not a linear escalation. It is a regime shift in trade, research collaboration through Horizon Europe, and the legal architecture underpinning €42.6 billion in annual bilateral goods trade (Eurostat, 2024). The probability remains low. The conditional impact would be enormous.

The scenario Spain needs to worry about is the mirror image — and it got sharper today. Trump extended the Iran ceasefire indefinitely on April 22, but the US naval blockade of Hormuz remains in place and Iran refuses to negotiate until it is lifted. If the strait eventually reopens, if the energy pressure on Berlin and Rome eases, if reconstruction proceeds without Madrid, and if no other major capital follows, then Sánchez has paid a substantial premium for a stance that earns him nothing he can deposit. The Pentagon email adds a dimension that did not exist a week ago: Spain hosts Rota, home to Europe’s largest US weapons and fuel depot, and the Morón air base — both critical to the US southern flank. If Washington moves from leaked emails to formal pressure on basing rights, or if the memo’s logic of questioning European “imperial possessions” — currently aimed at Britain’s Falklands claim — ever extends to Spain’s own North African enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, Madrid’s insulation from consequences disappears. For now, however, Hormuz stays closed — and every week it does, German and Italian tolerance for the status quo erodes a little further, which is exactly the dynamic Sánchez is counting on.

Neither Madrid nor Jerusalem is behaving irrationally. Both are looking at the same post-Iran-war regional order and arriving at incompatible positions because their assumptions about what comes next differ. Both bets cannot pay.

Three things will tell us which way this resolves. The first is the May 11 Foreign Affairs Council meeting: the April 22 session went exactly as Jerusalem expected — blocked by Berlin and Rome — but the arithmetic has shifted with Orbán gone. If a fourth or fifth government joins Spain’s push next month, the cascade Israel cannot easily absorb has begun. The second is the first round of Gaza reconstruction tender awards out of the CMCC framework. When the contract list is published, count the Spanish names. The number — almost certainly zero — will tell you exactly what April 10 cost Madrid. The third, as of today, is whether the Pentagon email remains a leaked provocation or hardens into policy. NATO’s treaty offers no mechanism to suspend a member. But Washington does not need a treaty clause to make Rota and Morón uncomfortable places to operate from — and Sánchez knows it.

The El Burgo effigy will be ash by next Easter. The tender list will not.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)