Belarra: the Real Madrid – Israeli team match, a new lick of paint for a genocidal state.

The general secretary of Podemos, Ione Belarra, expressed her dismay regarding the Euroleague basketball match which will take place this Tuesday at the Movistar Arena, pitting Real Madrid against Maccabi Tel Aviv. She declared that “once again, sport is used to give a positive image to a state considered terrorist and genocidal.”

“We ask the Minister of Foreign Affairs to prohibit the entry of this team and its publicand they didn’t. With one hand they try to make it appear that they are taking steps to stop this genocide, while with the other they let boats loaded with weapons pass into Spain and maintain their diplomatic and economic relations with the State terrorist of Israel,” she added.

Belarra claimed the cancellation of this sporting competition and the severance of all relations with the genocidaires, whether economic, diplomatic, cultural or sporting. This is similar to what the Minister of Foreign Affairs had proposed in the case of Russia following its illegal invasion of Ukraine, she argued.

” In this case, the thousands of people killed simply because of their Palestinian identity, as we have seen over the course of this year and four months of genocide, do not appear to have been deemed serious enough,” she added.

Belarra, who sent a letter to the Ministers of Foreign Affairs and Interior, José Manuel Albares and Fernando Grande-Marlaska, requesting to prevent the entry of Maccabi Tel Aviv players and their supporters into Spain, participated in a demonstration in support of the Palestinian people in front of the building.

To the crowd, she said: “We are here to denounce the complicity of Pedro Sánchez’s government with the Zionists who commit genocide.

“Today we have a new example of the government’s inability to break ties with the genocidaires: a basketball game contributes to whitewashing the image of a group of aggressive, dangerous and violent Zionists who have already caused unrest by glorifying genocide in other countries, such as the Netherlands, and this will not go unnoticed,” she added.

Regarding the demonstration, organized at 8 p.m., 45 minutes before the match kicked off, about a hundred people attendedmonitored by around ten members of the national police.

Among the participants, some held large Palestinian banners and signs bearing messages such as “We are all Gaza” or “Long live free Palestine”. Chants were also sung calling for a boycott of Israel, criticizing the lack of sanctions and asserting that the match “whitewashes the genocide” and supports the Palestinian people.

Red cards were brandished and a large Palestinian banner was unfurled during acts aimed at make known the opposition to holding the meeting and to the presence of Maccabi supporters in the stands, a presence which was mainly symbolic and almost unidentifiable.