“Images showed police striking people with batons and pinning others to the ground while being jeered by onlookers,” Reuters reported on May 24 about the Basque regional police’s violent treatment of International Freedom Flotilla participants arriving at the Bilbao Airport.
The incident in Spain wasn’t the first episode in which the flotilla activists, who participated in a Hamas-linked campaign to break Israel’s legal blockade of the Gaza Strip, faced mistreatment. Days earlier, international media outlets intensively covered Israeli Public Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir taunting the bound participants before their deportations.
Remarkably, Spanish media and public discourse displayed far more interest in the Israeli minister’s faraway humiliation of the group than in the Basque police’s home-court violent welcome for the same activists.
A simple Google search in Spanish for the terms “Ben-Gvir” and “flotilla” returns roughly 431,000 results. In contrast, a similar search for “flotilla” and “Ertzaintza” (the regional police force of Spain’s Basque Country) produces far fewer results—approximately 273,000.
Widely available footage documenting the violence of local Ertzaintza officers aggressively pummeling activists with batons failed to generate the same level of Spanish public outrage as Ben-Gvir’s mocking of the bound detainees thousands of miles away.
Search engine results offer a raw, uncalibrated metric that reflects volume as opposed to editorial weight. But the quantitative gap is merely the tip of the iceberg, pointing to a deeper, undeniable trend. The Spanish-language media ecosystem dedicates glaringly disproportionate coverage and refracted framing when Israel is the subject.
The narrative gap is blatant when comparing two reports by Spain’s public broadcaster RTVE. On May 20, a headline read: “Video of an ultra [sic] Israeli minister humiliating flotilla activists sparks international outrage.”
Five days later, the neutral headline at the Spanish tax-funded news outlet was: “Galician flotilla activists criticize Ertzaintza police conduct upon arrival in Spain and deny provocations.”
The contrast was striking. When the story unfolded in Israel, RTVE invoked moral scandal and a violation of fundamental rights. The headline relied on emotionally charged language: “humiliating,” “international outrage.” It described the Israeli minister with the pejorative “ultra,” while presenting the activists as mere victims.
With the scene’s shift to Spain, however, the language changed dramatically. That headline did not cite humiliation or outrage, much less violence. The activists merely “criticized police conduct” of an unspecified nature. While RTVE previously characterized Ben-Gvir’s humiliating treatment as an assault on human dignity, it spun the Spanish police’s outright violence as disputed and undefined events.
The contrast in the reactions to the activists’ ordeals inside versus outside Israel became even more striking when reports emerged that 10 flotilla participants, including Spanish journalist and activist Alicia Armesto, disappeared after their arrest in Libya.
While the dynamics of news coverage in conflict zones such as Libya are complex and opaque, the difference in Spanish journalists’ editorial outrage is telling. There were fewer opinion pieces, fewer solemn condemnations, and considerably less public indignation.
One revealing example came from El País, where a prominent Spanish intellectual published a column titled Vejaciones en el mar (“Humiliations at Sea”).
The author argued that Israel had “once again degraded the democratic ideal with the abuses and humiliations inflicted on the members of the Gaza flotilla.” Particularly noteworthy was the repeated use of the term “kidnapping” to describe Israel’s actions, even though, unlike in Libya, the activists detained by Israel were subsequently returned to their home countries.
As CAMERA has previously documented, the Spanish media’s application of double standards with respect to Israel extends beyond flotilla coverage. Spanish news reports routinely characterize Israeli officials with ideological pejoratives such as “far-right,” “ultra” or “extremist,” providing readers with an interpretive framework before the facts.
For instance, Spain’s EFE news agency recently began a dispatch by describing Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich as “the settler and Jewish supremacist Bezalel Smotrich.” Whether one agrees or disagrees with that characterization is beside the point.
Such language belongs more to political interpretation than to neutral reporting at a wire service tasked with supplying secondary media outlets with factual information. Notably, EFE doesn’t similarly editorialize about leaders of terrorist organizations.
As usual, Israel becomes the exception.
