Last week, Spain’s second deputy prime minister, celebrating her country’s decision to recognize a Palestinian state, declared that “we can’t stop here. Palestine will be free from the river to the sea.” Supporters of Israel have reacted to Spain’s decisions with invocations of Inquisition. Others have suggested that Jerusalem respond to Madrid’s recent move by recognizing the independence of Catalonia, a region with a powerful and sometime violent separatist movement. Alberto M. Fernandez believes that such reactions misunderstand the motivations of Spain’s current government:

The ruling leftist/far-left/Catalan- and Basque-separatist coalition in Spain is in favor of Catalan independence, is soft on Islamic rule in Spain, and is reliably anti-Catholic. It is the left in Spain that wants to allow Islamic prayers in the Cathedral-Mosque in Cordoba. It is the left in Spain that encourages illegal immigration from Muslim countries into Spain, a kind of counter-Reconquista. . . . The separatist rulers in Catalonia have welcomed Islamic migration, and even the spread of Salafism in their region, as long as the new arrivals don’t commit the cardinal sin of speaking Spanish, [as opposed to Catalan].

Spain has the most left-wing government in Europe, the only one with actual hardcore Communists in it. . . . Spain is important in this equation because the left is already in power and it is perhaps a model for progressive foreign policy that we may see more often in the West as demographics change and as the left is pressured by both its own far-left wing and by a rising populist right.

As important as all this is to understanding the present direction of Spain and Europe, and shaping the appropriate Israeli response, I still don’t think it’s possible to disconnect this anti-Israel passion from the country’s long history of anti-Semitism, even if it comes from the anti-clerical left rather than supporters of the church and the crown. Such deep-seated ways of thinking about Jews don’t fade easily, and can certainly prime people, regardless of their political leanings, to think about the Jewish state in demonic terms.

In October, a young Mauritanian national murdered an Orthodox Jewish man on his way to synagogue in Chicago. This alone should be sufficient sign of the rising dangers of anti-Semitism. Nathan Diament explains how the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act (AAA) can, if passed, make American Jews safer:

We were off to a promising start when the AAA sailed through the House of Representatives in the spring by a generous vote of 320 to 91, and 30 senators from both sides of the aisle jumped to sponsor the Senate version. Then the bill ground to a halt.

Fearful of antagonizing their left-wing activist base and putting vulnerable senators on the record, especially right before the November election, Democrats delayed bringing the AAA to the Senate floor for a vote. Now, the election is over, but the political games continue.

You can’t combat anti-Semitism if you can’t—or won’t—define it. Modern anti-Semites hide their hate behind virulent anti-Zionism. . . . The Anti-Semitism Awareness Act targets this loophole by codifying that the Department of Education must use the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of anti-Semitism in its application of Title VI.