2 Spanish Cities Reverse BDS Motions Following Legal Action
(JTA) — Two municipalities in Spain rescinded their adhesion to the campaign to boycott Israel following legal action by a Madrid-based organization devoted to defending the Jewish state.
The city council of Villarrobledo, a city of 25,000 that is located 100 miles southeast of Madrid and is known for its wine industry, scrapped last week a motion passed in April that declared the municipality to be a part of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel, or BDS.
The move on August 21 followed a motion by the ACOM group, which in recent years has promoted the scrapping, annulment or suspension of 26 motions to boycott Israel by Spanish municipalities.
This week, the city council of Sagunto, a city of 64,000 residents located 200 miles east of Madrid, near the port city of Valencia, also reversed a motion it had passed on June 26, declaring it a “space free of Israeli apartheid.” The reversal followed a warning by ACOM that failure to scrap the motion will result in legal action, the group said.
Tribunals in Spain, including the nation’s Supreme Court in two of its rulings, have voided more than a dozen motions passed by municipalities when ruling on motions by ACOM and other groups. Other municipalities voluntarily scrapped their boycott motions under threat of legal action by ACOM.
Despite many victories over the BDS movement in Spain, the country still has dozens of municipalities supporting BDS, more than in any other EU member nation.
Alyssa Fisher is a news writer at the Forward. Email her at fisher@forward.com, or follow her on Twitter at @alyssalfisher
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO