José Manuel Sánchez Gordillo is a member of the regional parliament of Andalucía for the United Left/Greens/Andalucía’s Call party and mayor of the town of Marinaleda. In this story in today’s El País, the paper’s Jerusalem correspondent Juan Miguel Muñoz describes how, while returning home from Israel after accompanying a number of Palestinian children back to the West Bank after a holiday in Spain, he was “humiliated” by the security procedures at Ben Gurion Airport and subjected to “every kind of mistreatment, including being obliged to take off his shoes, having his belongings searched in an abusive manner and being questioned at length about his activities.”

It seems that matters may have been exacerbated by Sánchez Gordillo’s belief that “as a political office holder he was under no duty to answer questions from soldiers (sic) of another state.” Such was the palaver arising from his interaction with security staff that he missed his flight and had to spend a day longer in Israel than he planned. In conclusion, the Andalucian socialist is quoted as saying that his questioning was “more worthy of the Gestapo or a fascist regime than a western democracy”

Muñoz then allows himself a paragraph of editorializing about how abusive security procedures are at Ben Gurion before getting to the most interesting part of the story. He quotes an unnamed source at the Spanish embassy,

It’s advisable for elected representatives or government officials to let the embassy know [of their plans]. When they do, there are usually no problems. Other groups of aid workers, regardless of how big they are, tell us about their trip and we prepare their return journey so that there are no problems.

A few points about all this, most of them really obvious, but I’ll make them anyway.

1.

Security procedures at Ben Gurion are indeed very strict. I know this from personal experience as I was once had to strip down to my underwear there myself. There is a reason for this high level of security. It is that there are great many people who are very anxious to commit mass murder on, or in the vicinity of, aircraft leaving Israel. One of the successful attempts is detailed here. The lack of incidents at Ben Gurion in recent years is a tribute to the effectiveness of the security measures in place there and not the result of Israel’s enemies having become any less keen on slaughtering Jews. It’s funny how Jews taking measures to avoid getting killed seems to upset some people.

2.

I won’t dwell on the fact that being interrogated by the Gestapo was a rather more demanding experience than having to answer questions put by security staff at Ben Gurion airport. Making the comparison suggests either a profound lack of basic historical knowledge or contempt for the victims of Nazism, or both. Alas, Sánchez Gordillo’s comparison is typical of an increasingly common tendency among supposed leftists to see Israel as a reincarnation of Nazi Germany. It’s curious how untroubled these people usually are by human rights violations carried out by some of Israel’s neighbors, those that maintain a firm line against Washington, of course.

3.

As the quote from the embassy staffer reveals, it would have been a matter of the greatest simplicity for Sánchez Gordillo to avoid any problems at the airport. He could have given a ring to his embassy before travelling and the Gestapo-like Israeli security personnel would have smoothed his path for him. He chose not to do this and instead holler about his rights to people who were doing their best to prevent him and others from getting killed. What is it about a certain class of human rights activist that makes them yearn for pseudo-martyrdom?

4.

Sánchez Gordillo is a citizen of a state that only now, 33 years after the death of the tyrant Franco, is starting to get at least a little bit serious about identifying the victims of his dictatorship. Not that any living Spanish torturer or state-sanctioned murderer is ever going to have to face justice; the most that will be done is that some families will be able to find out what happened to a loved one and where their bones are buried. And one more thing; Arnaldo Otegi, a Basque nationalist, has just been let out of prison in Spain after serving a 15 month sentence for glorifying terrorism, that is, for expressing an opinion.

None of this should be taken to mean that Spain is anything other than a democratic country or that people should confine their political activities to questions arising within their own national territory. It does, however, suggest that a Spanish person interested in the promotion of human rights abroad might be able to put the putative damage to their own human rights caused by as trivial a matter as this into perspective.