Recently, Spain witnessed an event that should alarm any international observer: the National Police conducted a raid on the headquarters of Sidenor in Basauri, in Spain’s Basque Country, seeking information about alleged steel sales to Israel. While presented as a judicial procedure, its broader context reveals something beyond a routine investigation — a pattern of political pressure on economic actors for ideological reasons.
Sidenor is not a marginal player. It is one of Spain’s leading steel producers, a strategic supplier for the automotive, infrastructure, and heavy-industry sectors, and a major industrial employer in northern Spain. Its president, José Antonio Jainaga, is a prominent industrial figure who also chairs Talgo, one of Spain’s flagship rail manufacturers. The escalation had already begun earlier, when Jainaga was summoned to testify on accusations framed as “collaboration with genocide” — language that goes far beyond standard export-control or compliance inquiries and signals an attempt to criminalize ordinary commercial activity through politically charged legal categories.
What should have been an administrative compliance process is increasingly perceived as a show of force by a government that has strayed from the standards of transparency, proportionality, and legal certainty promoted by the European Union. The combination of state intervention with a political climate that tolerates — and sometimes encourages — aggressive activism against Israel and its partners creates a scenario in which civil liberties and the legal security of companies and citizens are steadily eroded.
Policymaking by decree and ideological assumptions
Under Pedro Sánchez, leader of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), democratic norms are under growing stress. A clear manifestation of this is the adoption of a Royal Decree-Law imposing sweeping restrictions on relations with Israel, approved without the depth of parliamentary scrutiny that such far-reaching measures would normally require.
In its preamble, the decree takes for granted the claim that Israel is committing “genocide in Gaza” and uses that contested assertion as the moral and legal foundation for broad restrictions on trade, procurement, transit, and cooperation. Enacting emergency foreign-policy measures through executive decree — and on the basis of politically loaded assumptions — raises serious concerns about executive overreach and the erosion of democratic accountability.
Criminalization of trade and extraterritorial effects
The decree effectively criminalizes wide categories of commercial and industrial exchanges with Israel, especially in defense and dual-use technologies. Its impact goes well beyond Spain’s borders, producing extraterritorial effects on multinational supply chains and on companies headquartered in other EU countries and in the United States.
The case of Airbus illustrates this vividly. The European aerospace champion, with major industrial operations in Spain, was forced to seek a special exemption from the Spanish government to continue using Israeli-sourced technology in certain programs. When a global industrial group must negotiate ad hoc political waivers to preserve its production chains, legal certainty has already been replaced by discretionary power.
Ports, ships, and aircraft: expanding coercive control
Spain has gone further by banning ships bound for Israel — including U.S.-flagged vessels — from calling at Spanish ports when they carry cargo deemed military or dual-use. This decision has already triggered a reaction in Washington: the U.S. Federal Maritime Commission has opened inquiries and publicly discussed possible countermeasures, including restrictions on Spanish shipping and substantial fines, if Spain is found to be creating discriminatory conditions for maritime trade.
The policy has also extended to the air domain. Spain has restricted or denied overflight and transit permissions to aircraft carrying military material destined for Israel, and has reportedly blocked certain logistics movements linked to U.S.–Israeli defense cooperation through Spanish territory and bases. These steps go well beyond symbolic diplomacy and amount to a unilateral assertion of political control over international logistics networks.
Arbitrary cancellations of defense contracts
Beyond trade and transit, Spain’s policy has led to the cancellation or freezing of concrete, high-value defense programs involving major Israeli suppliers and Spanish industrial partners, with cascading effects across supply chains.
Among the Israeli companies hit:
• Elbit Systems — Spain moved to cancel the SILAM/PULS rocket artillery program, a deal widely reported at around €700 million. The system was based on Elbit’s PULS multiple-launch rocket technology and was intended to modernize Spanish Army artillery. The cancellation abruptly cut off Elbit as the prime technology provider and forced Spain to rethink or re-tender the entire program.
• Rafael Advanced Defense Systems — Several Rafael-linked programs were affected, including the planned acquisition of targeting and guidance pods for Spain’s Eurofighter Typhoon fleet and the Spike LR2 anti-tank missile program selected to replace older systems in Spanish service. Both were suspended or cancelled under the new restrictions, removing Rafael from key Spanish modernization efforts.
• IMI Systems (now part of Elbit) — Contracts related to ammunition and munitions supply, including orders linked to Spanish security forces, were also frozen or rescinded as part of the broader break with Israeli suppliers.
Industry and press estimates suggest that the total value of cancelled or derailed Israeli-linked contracts approaches, or exceeds, €1 billion.
These were not “foreign-only” deals. Several Spanish and European industrial partners were embedded in the affected programs:
• Rheinmetall Expal Munitions (Spain) — A key Spanish munitions and rocket-systems producer, part of the SILAM program’s industrial ecosystem, saw planned production and workshare disrupted.
• Escribano Mechanical & Engineering (EM&E) (Spain) — A major Spanish defense electronics and remote-weapons-station supplier involved in subsystems and integration linked to programs using Israeli technology, now facing cancellations and redesigns.
• Indra (Spain) — Spain’s flagship defense systems integrator, expected to play a central role in integration, command-and-control, and systems architecture for several modernization programs, forced to absorb delays, redesigns, and additional costs as a result of the policy shift.
• Airbus (Europe/Spain) — While not a cancelled contract in itself, Airbus was directly affected and had to seek special exemptions to continue using Israeli-sourced technology, underlining how deeply embedded these components were in European defense-industrial programs.
These decisions did not merely “signal” a political stance. They voided signed or advanced-stage procurement programs, disrupted Spanish industrial planning, and introduced legal and financial uncertainty for both Israeli primes and Spanish subcontractors. Programs had to be re-tendered, redesigned, or delayed — at significant cost to taxpayers and to Spain’s own defense readiness.
The academic front and the courts
The same logic has spread into the academic sphere. Several public Spanish universities have announced the suspension or rupture of cooperation agreements with Israeli institutions, affecting research partnerships, exchanges, and joint programs.
In response, the civil society organization ACOM has brought legal actions before Spanish courts, arguing that these academic boycotts violate principles of institutional neutrality, non-discrimination, and fundamental rights. Spanish courts have entertained and, in some cases, upheld these challenges, making clear that public universities are not free to impose politically motivated boycotts when such decisions conflict with constitutional and legal standards. These rulings underline that the rule of law still provides some checks — but also how far politicization has already advanced into public institutions.
Washington’s stated policy: words that now demand action against Spain
The Trump administration has not been ambiguous about how it views attempts to isolate Israel through legal, economic, or institutional pressure. In official statements and executive actions, the White House has made clear that such efforts will not be treated as neutral policy choices, but as hostile acts with concrete consequences.
In one of its most explicit formulations, the administration declared that actions targeting the United States or its allies, including Israel, “constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States”, and stated that Washington is prepared to respond with measures including the blocking of property and assets and the suspension of entry into the United States for those responsible. The same policy framework emphasizes that the United States “will use all appropriate and available measures” to protect its personnel, its allies, and its strategic interests from politically motivated legal and economic warfare.
This is not abstract rhetoric. Senior U.S. officials and congressional leaders aligned with the administration have repeatedly warned that governments or institutions that promote or enforce boycotts against Israel should expect tangible consequences, including being placed on anti-boycott lists and facing financial, commercial, and regulatory retaliation under U.S. law. The message has been consistent and public: using trade, transit, or regulatory power to target Israel is not cost-free.
Against this backdrop, Spain’s actions — blocking or discouraging port access for ships bound for Israel, restricting air transit, disrupting defense and dual-use supply chains involving American companies, and canceling major contracts with Israeli firms — fall squarely within the category of measures the Trump administration has said it is prepared to confront. These are not symbolic gestures. They directly affect U.S. commercial, strategic, and security interests.
A broader erosion of democratic norms — and what should be done
When the state deploys police raids against major industrial groups, summons business leaders under accusations framed in terms of “genocide,” reshapes trade and procurement by executive decree, and conditions access to ports, airspace, and public institutions on political alignment, the cumulative effect is not a series of isolated measures but a systemic shift in how power is exercised. Legal certainty is replaced by political discretion; neutrality by ideological litmus tests; and the presumption of lawful activity by suspicion driven from the top.
This drift also carries a heavy international cost. Spain, traditionally seen as a stable European democracy aligned with EU and transatlantic norms, increasingly projects the image of a country willing to subordinate the rule of law and economic predictability to short-term political signaling.
Our position is straightforward: the Trump administration should make good on its stated policy and impose sanctions on countries that engage in hostile, discriminatory measures against Israel, especially when those measures directly harm U.S. strategic, commercial, or security interests. Spain’s actions meet that threshold.
In principle, the European Union should also act to defend legal certainty, non-discrimination, and the integrity of the single market. In reality, nothing meaningful can be expected from the EU. That leaves the United States as the only actor both willing and able to enforce the red lines it has already drawn.
If sanctions are to mean anything, they must be used when the threshold is crossed. In Spain’s case, that threshold has already been breached — not in rhetoric, but in actions that disrupt U.S. trade, shipping, defense cooperation, and industrial partnerships. Failing to respond would signal that hostility dressed up as “values” is cost-free. And that is an invitation to further escalation, not restraint.
