In the months following the atrocities of October 7, Spain—and Barcelona in particular—has undergone a disturbing metamorphosis, one that has startled Jewish communities across Europe and reverberated through diplomatic corridors far beyond the Iberian Peninsula. A city long celebrated for its cosmopolitan openness, architectural grandeur, and cultural pluralism has found itself at the epicenter of a wave of hostility that transcends legitimate political dissent and veers unmistakably into the territory of resurgent antisemitism. What has unfolded since that autumn day is not merely a succession of isolated incidents, but the emergence of a political and social climate in which animus toward Israel has bled, with alarming frequency, into aggression toward Jews as Jews.

The transformation has been as sudden as it has been unsettling. In Barcelona, public discourse has been increasingly suffused with rhetoric that frames Israel not as a controversial state actor but as a pariah entity to be symbolically erased, economically isolated, and culturally delegitimized. This atmosphere has not been confined to the margins. On the contrary, it has been catalyzed and amplified by official decisions taken by municipal and national authorities, decisions that have lent institutional imprimatur to sentiments that, in previous eras, might have been relegated to the fringes of protest culture.

Among the most striking of these gestures was Barcelona’s declaration of “Palestine” as its symbolic eleventh district, a move that went beyond symbolic solidarity to include the allocation of public funds to UNRWA, an organization that has been widely criticized for deep infiltration by Hamas operatives. For many in the Jewish community, the decision felt less like a humanitarian overture and more like a municipal endorsement of a narrative that blurs the line between advocacy for Palestinian welfare and tacit alignment with extremist actors. The symbolism was compounded by the city’s organization of a massive “concert for Palestine,” during which Israel was erased from a projected map of the region.

At the event’s emotional crescendo, the son of Marwan Barghouti—a convicted terrorist responsible for the murder of civilians—was invited onto the stage to call for his father’s release, greeted by cheers from thousands. The spectacle, in its choreography and rhetoric, conveyed not merely criticism of Israeli policy but a valorization of figures associated with lethal violence against Jews.

Barcelona’s universities, historically bastions of intellectual inquiry and debate, have not been immune to this climate. The University of Barcelona’s launch of “Facultat 18,” a project explicitly designed to raise and transfer funds to UNRWA, further entrenched the perception that academic institutions were becoming conduits for politicized activism with scant regard for the complex realities of the organizations they were endorsing. For Jewish students and scholars, the initiative symbolized a narrowing of the discursive space in which nuanced or dissenting perspectives could be safely articulated. It also reinforced the sense that the city’s educational elite was participating in the same moral economy that had begun to dominate municipal politics.

Beyond these high-profile gestures, the everyday texture of life in Barcelona has been increasingly marred by a proliferation of antisemitic graffiti. Over the past two years, hateful slogans and imagery have appeared in hundreds of locations, transforming walls, doorways, and public squares into canvases of intimidation. The desecration of a Jewish cemetery, emboldened by the ambient rhetoric of hostility, marked a particularly chilling escalation. Cemeteries, repositories of memory and sanctity, are often the first sites targeted when hatred seeks to announce its permanence.

The smashing of headstones at the Les Corts Jewish Cemetery in January, which Israel’s Foreign Ministry linked to the broader anti-Israel campaign of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s government, reverberated as a symbolic assault on the dignity of the dead and the security of the living.

The response from Spanish Jewish organizations was measured but unmistakably anguished. The Federation of Jewish Communities of Spain and the Jewish Community of Barcelona condemned the vandalism in the strongest possible terms, framing it as part of an ongoing wave of hostility toward Jews. While these organizations stopped short of directly attributing responsibility to the government, their statements conveyed a palpable sense of vulnerability, an acknowledgment that the social environment had deteriorated to the point where such acts could no longer be dismissed as aberrations.

The hostility has not been confined to symbolic or rhetorical domains. Concrete actions have begun to constrict the civic and economic space available to Jews and Israelis in Spain. A new royal decree “against the genocide in Gaza” led Spanish bank Sabadell to freeze bank accounts, a move that sent shockwaves through the business community and raised questions about the potential weaponization of financial institutions in service of political agendas. Around two thousand pro-Palestinian demonstrators gathered outside the hotel housing Hapoel Jerusalem’s basketball team in Barcelona, harassing and effectively hunting the players in a display of mob intimidation that forced authorities to acknowledge their inability to guarantee safety. A Maccabi Tel Aviv game was held in the city without spectators for the same reason, a stark testament to the erosion of basic security assurances.