This June 21, 2026 by CAMERA Español’s Masha Gabriel appeared in JNS.
Basque police beating a flotilla participant (screenshot from widely circulated footage)
“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.
Read the rest of CAMERA’s Op-Ed at JNS.