Since Marga Prohens took office at the Consolat de Mar two years ago, Holocaust Remembrance Day in Mallorca has become an event that shamefully justifies the occupation and genocide perpetrated by Zionism in Palestine for over 75 years. By linking the recent global wave of pro-Palestinian solidarity to an alleged resurgence of past levels of antisemitism (which is not even supported anecdotally), last year the president used the institutional ceremony of lighting six candles in honor of the millions of Jews annihilated by Nazism to add a seventh. This out-of-context seventh candle was dedicated to the memory of Israelis killed or kidnapped during the Al-Aqsa Flood on October 7, 2023, a response operation by the Palestinian resistance against the intensification of dispossession, blockade (political and economic), and dehumanization of their people in the 21st century.
Alongside fanatics, misogynists, and racists like Ari Molina, Miquel Segura, or the Zionist apprentice Laura Miró, Prohens once again deliberately stoked confusion between the oppressor and the oppressed. Pushing Holocaust victims to the background, she dedicated the event to vindicating “Israel’s right to exist.” In turn, former police chief Ari Molina, who presents himself as the leader of the Jewish Community of the Balearic Islands but only represents the interests of VOX, with whom he openly sympathizes, overlooked in his critique of anti-Zionism and the USSR the fact that it was the Red Army and communists across Europe who lost the most lives in the fight against Nazism, and that January 27 also commemorates their sacrifice.
These predictable gestures have not only been praised by outlets like Ultima Hora, a propaganda organ for Zionism on the island, but have also garnered applause and support from the social democratic parties of the “opposition.” At this point in the film, Lluís Apesteguia, coordinator of MÉS per Mallorca, who couldn’t help but applaud the president’s Zionist speeches, still caricatures the legendary offensive of the Palestinian resistance as “Hamas terrorism” – let’s remember that, at the national level, MÉS is part of the Sumar coalition that governs with the PSOE and supports the arms trade between Spain and Israel, which since 2023 has exceeded €1.027 billion [1].
A bit further to the right, though not far off, just a few months ago the PSIB “gathered” (that is, assembled 15 people in a Palma square) with its proletarian domestication organ (UGT) to support the slogan “No to terrorism, no to genocide”; that is, to criminalize the legitimate defense of Palestinians against genocide and to equate the only language Israel understands – armed resistance – with the systematic ethnic cleansing carried out by the Zionist army. Faced with the electorally calculated ignorance displayed by some and others, and despite sensing that they won’t take advantage of it, it’s never too late for a humble history lesson. Especially when more and more Jews or descendants of Jews around the world are organizing to combat the horror Israel commits in the name of their religion or that of their ancestors (Jewish Voice for Peace, the International Network of Anti-Zionist Jews, etc.).
Let’s go back to 1917. Since British Minister Arthur Balfour pushed for the creation of a “Jewish nation” in Palestine, then a British colony, Zionists grouped in the World Zionist Organization since 1879, under the pretext that the only way to practice Judaism in peace was to create a separate national community, encouraged the mass relocation of Jews from around the world to Israel. Faced with the initial lack of interest in the project, they accused those who did not want to leave their countries or confront antisemitism with a solution that had been defended for centuries by Christian antisemitism – the disappearance of Jews from Europe – of being “assimilationists.” As Ilan Pappé (2006, 2024), author of revealing works on the colonial and imperialist crimes of Zionism, explains, the vast majority of Jews did not have a nationalist or fundamentalist view of religion. They did not perceive Zionism as a remedy against the historical rejection and persecution they suffered, but as an obstacle to modernization, secularism, and religious coexistence on the continent.
Shortly after, specifically from 1933 onwards, Zionism moved from this accusation to collaboration with Nazism to advance its state project: the WZO established the Haavara (transfer, in Hebrew) Pact with the Hitler government. As Ivan Martín (2022) explains, Zionists and Nazis had different political ideologies, but they shared ultranationalist and chauvinist approaches like the theory of Lebensraum – which Israel has not stopped reinterpreting broadly since its founding in 1948. The pact involved cooperation to transfer Jews living in the Third Reich to Israel, one of the solutions (among other more brutal ones) that Hitler tested to rid Germany of what he considered “enemies of the state.” Although during that period the Nazi authorities stripped Jews of all political rights, they allowed the activity of the WZO and fascist Zionist youth groups like the Betar collective (the origin of Netanyahu’s Likud party). Moreover, they threatened the majority of Jews who were not Zionists with a fatal fate – which many would experience in the extermination camps – if they did not leave for Palestine.
Today, it is common to hear the phrase “the Jews are repeating with the Palestinians what Hitler did to the Jews.” A phrase that, in light of history, is not accurate. The first “Jews” should be replaced with “Zionists,” because otherwise one falls into the trap of equating Judaism with Zionism and obscuring the collaboration between Nazism and Zionism, as well as the criminalization of those who believed that the solution to antisemitism did not involve adopting a colonial project to replace the native population of the region. The “Zionistization” of the memory of all Holocaust victims, to which Prohens also contributes, obscures the fact that the majority of Jews exterminated by Nazism were not Zionists, mainly because on the continent and in the world this ultranationalist interpretation of Judaism was neither the only way to be Jewish nor the most widespread. Despite the confusion stoked by the president, the global history of Judaism is much older, longer, and richer than that of Zionism.
It therefore makes no sense to claim that anti-Zionism is inherently antisemitic; one can reject the existence of Israel and advocate for a free Palestine from the river to the sea, appreciating the human, cultural, and religious complexity that has historically shaped it, without implying any desire to exterminate or expel any cultural or religious identity from the region. In fact, the only way to advance this Palestine is to advocate for the destruction of the State of Israel, a colonial project built on the dehumanization, apartheid, and extermination of the predominantly Arab natives (Muslims, Christians, Jews, Druze, Bedouins, etc.) of the region and the spearhead of imperialism in Western Asia. The constant accusations of antisemitism by the supposed guardians of Majorcan Xueta memory who thrive under the current government are nothing more than crocodile tears. Because opposing an occupying entity that normalizes pogroms against Palestinians does not deny that one can reject the historical persecution suffered by converted Jews and their descendants in Mallorca. In the vast majority of cases, this conclusion leads to greater awareness of the other within the local anti-Zionist movement.
As expected, among Prohens’ candles, there is none for the over 50,000 Palestinians killed since October 2023, including around 20,000 children. Nor will we hear in her speeches any recognition of the right to legitimate defense (enshrined in the UN Charter) of the Palestinian people in the face of genocidal escalation. From the beginning, advised by paid consultants like Miquel Segura and Pedro Aguiló or the pseudo-academic Gil White, who have compared Palestinians to rats and orcs that must be exterminated from Gaza, the president has chosen to cover one genocide with the victims of another. However, in a few years, many history teachers, when addressing the attempted Palestinian genocide with perspective, will remind students of the side of history she chose. As in other historical cases (India, Algeria, Vietnam…), the genocidal accent is a sign that Israel’s collapse looms on the horizon. At this point, nearly 80% of Israelis support Trump’s plan to expel Palestinians from the Strip – to silence progressives who still believe that “there are many Israelis who oppose the genocide,” we emphasize that more than half of the remaining 20% are “Arab Israelis”; that is, naturalized Palestinians [2]. But beyond Israel, more and more voices are distancing themselves from the bloodiest colonial and genocidal entity of our time.
As Pappé reminded us during his visit to the island this February, Zionism has gone from being a movement with significant international sympathy to seeing its support drastically reduced among the world’s workers. To the point that today its main allies, or at least the most convinced, are neo-Nazis (after learning about the pacts between the WZO and Hitler in the 1930s, this does not seem like such a “curious inversion of history”) and far-right politicians, as well as those who feed them, whether they are called Biden, Merz, or Prohens. On the other hand, it is increasingly evident that Jewish Communities like that of the Balearic Islands (founded in the 70s by British expats under the name Comunidad Israelita de Palma), which should represent the plurality of thought among practitioners or descendants of this religion, have become satellites of the Israeli embassy in Spain. This has much to do with the work of bodies linked to the Zionist state like ACOM (Action and Communication in the Middle East), a lobby that emerged last decade to try to undermine the expansion of the BDS movement.
In Mallorca, only a tiny fraction (usually from good homes and with far-right leanings) of the islanders with lineages stigmatized as “Xueta” since the 17th century cling to an unjust oppression like anti-Jewish hatred – which has not disappeared, but compared to Islamophobia today is much less present – to cover up the Zionist genocide. This is exemplified by the words shared last year on Holocaust Remembrance Day by philosophy professor Lluís Segura, bearer of one of the lineages persecuted in the past: “Carrying Xueta lineages does not oblige you to defend the State of Israel, just as being the grandson of Falangists does not prevent you from being left-wing. At a certain age, everyone must know how to put their heritage in parentheses. It’s called maturity.”
PATXIPÒLEG
