In Europe, Spain is Palestine's biggest champion. Here's why.

As Israel's bombing of Gaza began in October last year, people of all faiths and ethnicities gathered for a weekly candlelit vigil, organised by local Catholic priests, in the main square of my hometown in Andalusia.

Nine months later, the same plaza was packed with people glued to a massive screen showing Spain beating England in the UEFA Cup final. In the ecstatic celebrations that followed, Spanish and even English football fans were filmed chanting "Free Palestine."

Among European Union countries, Spain has been an unusually vociferous supporter of Palestinian freedom, and became one of the first countries to recognise Palestine as a state, in May. It's not just words, either: Spain tripled its humanitarian support to Palestinians in 2023, to over $54m, and mobilised an additional $17m this year.

Back in November, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez criticised Israel's "indiscriminate killing of Palestinians," later backing South Africa's case against Israel at the International Court of Justice.

Arab alliances

Spain has an ambivalent relationship with its Arab and Muslim heritage, though it is mixed into its culture as inextricably as vinegar in gazpacho. Officially, Spain downplays its eight-centuries long era of Muslim rule, misrepresenting Al Andalus as a 'barbaric foreign invasion', neatly and justly terminated. Despite the left clinging onto power in the last elections, the fledgling far-right party Vox remained the third largest party, campaigning on a horribly familiar anti-migrant platform that especially targeted Muslims. For people who are racially othered, racism and exclusion are sadly never far away.

On the other hand, many Andalusians honour their Moorish roots. In the popular book La huella morisca (The Morisco Trace), author Antonio Manuel describes myriad ways in which Andalusi culture remains alive in contemporary Spain. Some Andalusians proudly show documents confirming Moorish ancestry.

Scars of facism

A likely reason for pro-Palestinian sentiment in Spain is that Israel's brutal occupation is a painful reminder of the ‘White Terror’ repression during Spain's fascist period, which ended only in 1975 with Franco's death.

During that time, anywhere from 58,000 to 400,000 people associated (however tenuously) with the radical Republican movement, including children and pregnant women, were killed in field executions and dumped in mass graves; another 120,000 people disappeared, including newborns, while many others were systematically raped. Many Spaniards still carry a burden of grief and anger, knowing that neighbours were involved in their ancestors' suffering.

Spain has been led by a left-wing government for almost 50 years - most of its democratic life. Currently in power is a coalition of PSOE socialists, the left-wing group of parties Sumar, and several Catalan parties. Catalonia has a long history of supporting Palestine, though its reasons have more to do with the semi-autonomous region's own pursuit of independence.

PSOE played a crucial role in the Republican movement, which fought the quasi-fascist Falangists during the Civil War between 1933 and 1939. In 2007, it passed the Historical Memory Law formally condemning Franco's repressive regime and prohibiting its glorification.

During the White Terror, Spain was effectively turned into a vast prison for its dissidents, with up to half a million people thrown into concentration camps; the similarities to conditions in Gaza are striking. It's no surprise, then, that the left should have a strong sympathy for Palestinians suffering massacres, militarisation, arbitrary detentions and torture in their homelands today.

However, the Spanish right, with its close ties to Catholicism, also has its reasons for supporting Palestine. The region is home to Christianity's holiest sites in Jerusalem and Nazareth - centuries before the founding of Israel. The Palestinian Christian minority has also suffered under Israeli occupation; Gaza's Christians, the oldest Christian community on earth, are at risk of extermination.

While Evangelists in the United States have largely supported Israel – in a bizarre, toxic relationship in which each one anticipates the other's annihilation – the Vatican recognised the State of Palestine back in 2015. In December, Pope Francis condemned Israel's killing of Christians in Gaza, describing the war as "terrorism."

Unlike the bipartisan format in the US – where both parties effectively endorse the same policies – Spain's political landscape is spread out among a wide range of parties, perhaps making it harder for an Israeli lobby to reach a critical mass of support.

Nonetheless, pro-Palestine rhetoric in Spanish politics does not always match up with reality. Ione Belarra, Spanish minister for social rights and head of Podemos, part of Sumar, has called out Prime Minister Sanchez for simultaneously pledging to cut arms sales to Israel, but continuing to send or promise $1.1bn in arms to the country since the beginning of the war.

Palestine popularity

Still, on a popular level, pro-Palestine sentiment runs high. In Andalusia and Catalunya especially, you see graffiti about saving Gaza and stopping the genocide, keffiyehs in clothes shops, Palestinian flags in organic grocery stores. Perhaps Spaniards simply acknowledge the reality that Palestine does indeed deserve to be free from 76 years of brutal, illegal Israeli occupation.

It's not hard to see why Spanish people might identify with Palestinians. Much of Spain resembles Palestine, with rolling hills of olive trees, some hundreds of years old, whose roots reach deep into both nations' identities. The fact that over 800,000 Palestinian olive trees have been uprooted by Israel since 1967, for example, is a visual that can be readily imagined.

Once you can see yourself in the other, statistics return from the dry, numb page to the full-blooded, painful lived reality, and dehumanisation is reversed.

The call for a free Palestine is a powerful one that concentrates all the hopes for liberation of every person who has ever suffered oppression. The more the words "Free Palestine" are repressed, the more jubilant it feels to say them – even in the context of a UEFA cup final.

After all, Spain is the land of fiesta. And what a party it will be when Palestine is free.