The Diplomat
The plenary of the Barcelona City Council yesterday rejected by a large majority the decision of the mayor, Ada Colau, to break the twinning with Tel Aviv and the relations with the State of Israel.
“The Plenary of the Municipal Council of the Barcelona City Council agrees that, urgently and immediately, the municipal government reestablish relations with the State of Israel and the twinning of Barcelona with the cities of Tel-Aviv and Gaza,” reads the text, approved in an extraordinary plenary session with the votes in favor of Junts per Catalunya, PSC, Ciudadanos, PP, Valents and a non-attached councilor, and with the abstention of ERC and the vote against BComú, Colau’s formation.
Several Jewish organizations attended the vote from the tribune. Precisely, the Federation of Jewish Communities of Spain (FCJE) congratulated yesterday “the citizens of Barcelona” and the political groups of the Barcelona City Council for the rejection in the plenary session of the “unilateral decree of rupture with Tel Aviv and Israel imposed by Mayor Ada Colau”.
The representatives of Barcelona, it continued, “have shown good sense and want the best for the city, being an example of an open, hospitable and free metropolis in a universal and non-exclusive framework”. “The rupture of the twinning culminates the trajectory of ‘sophisticated anti-Semitism’ of Mayor Colau’s municipal group,” the FCJE added.
On February 8, the Barcelona City Council suspended institutional relations with the State of Israel and all official institutions in the country, including the twinning with the city of Tel Aviv, after meeting with the organizations behind the citizens’ initiative Barcelona con el Apartheid no, Barcelona con los derechos humanos sí, in support of the Palestinian people, which had collected more than 4,000 signatures. According to Colau, the decision “is in no way a discrimination against the Jewish population, it is a criticism of a government, not of a people or a religion”. The Barcelona City Council twinned with Tel-Aviv and Gaza in 1998, a few years after the signing of the Oslo Accords (1994), which were to bring peace to the region.
During yesterday’s debate, Ada Colau criticized accusations of “anti-Semitism” and assured that “Barcelona is a city committed to its Jewish community.” “I take personal responsibility for suspending these relations, just as I have done with St. Petersburg,” but “one cannot remain silent in the face of apartheid,” she said. For her part, the deputy mayor for Social Rights, Laura Pérez, of BComú, warned that the suspension of relations between Barcelona and Israel will be maintained until the end of apartheid, for “coherence” and because “the repression of the Palestinian people no longer admits silence”. Yesterday’s vote in the plenary is not binding.
In a very different sense, the also deputy mayor Laia Bonet, leader of the PSC, urged to “censure the unilateral decision of the mayor”, regretted that the rupture was decided by decree because “there was no majority in the municipal council” and assured that Colau’s reason for breaking relations with Israel is “that elections are approaching, and no other”.
