On Yom Kippur in Madrid, I Saw Europe’s Hypocrisy on Full Display

On Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year, I arrived in Madrid with my wife and baby daughter. It was my first time in Spain. We were jet-lagged, but we pushed a stroller for nearly 13,000 steps through the city, trying to take it in. Instead, we witnessed something I will never forget.

My late mother, who would have turned 80 today on the Hebrew calendar, was born on Yom Kippur in 1945. She passed away nearly nine years ago. On this sacred day of reflection and atonement, a day that is also the 53rd anniversary of the Yom Kippur War — when Israel was brutally attacked by its enemies — I thought about her, and about the world my daughter will inherit.

What we saw in Madrid shook me. Hundreds of people wore Palestinian flags and cheap Amazon-made keffiyehs, as if dressing up as terrorists were a costume party. These were not acts of peace. They were not acts of solidarity. They were raucous celebrations of hatred, staged in a country that once expelled its Jews in the Inquisition and now allows its ports to be used for flotillas designed to provoke Israel during a time of war.

Let us be clear. These flotillas are not humanitarian. They are not about aid. They are about tying up Israel’s military, humiliating its defenders, and giving cover to Hamas — a vicious terrorist organization that continues to hold hostages from the October 7 massacre, desecrates the remains of others, and openly celebrates the murder of children.

One of those hostages was Hersh Goldberg-Polin, kidnapped from the Nova music festival, where he had gone simply to celebrate life and music. He was later killed in captivity. In his honor, I gave my daughter the middle name Hersh. That is how personal this is for me. And yet here in Madrid, activists pranced in watermelon T-shirts and keffiyehs, pretending they were on the side of freedom. The truth is that Hamas would gladly throw every one of those marchers — women, gays and lesbians, revelers — off rooftops. The hypocrisy is staggering.

At one point, a woman walked by us in her keffiyeh. She looked into my stroller and smiled at my daughter. I gave her nothing back. No smile. No warmth. Only the scowl of a father who knows exactly what that cloth represents: celebration of terrorism, hatred of Jews, contempt for my family’s existence.

Spain and Europe should be ashamed of what they are enabling. On Yom Kippur, on the anniversary of the war that nearly destroyed Israel, they send ships to embolden Hamas and allow their streets to become parades of hate.

The Jewish people have survived worse. We survived the Inquisition. We survived the Yom Kippur War. We will survive Hamas. And we will survive the useful idiots who wear made-in-China terror rags while pretending they are righteous.

Fifty-three years after Israel was attacked on its holiest day, we are attacked again — not only by rockets and kidnappings, but by propaganda and the dangerous theater of European hypocrisy. We see it. We will remember. And we will not apologize for defending life.

Dory Benami is a Democratic Party candidate for Congress in California’s 32nd District. Born in Tel Aviv and raised in the San Fernando Valley, he is the son of Israeli immigrants and the father of a young daughter whose middle name, Hersh, honors Hersh Goldberg-Polin, an Israeli-American who was killed while held in captivity in Gaza.