Is Spain at war?

We are witnessing a war language and a mobilization of economic and military resources at a level that should lead us to ask ourselves if Spain is at war in March 2024.

We should begin by pointing out that countries no longer declare war. The truth is that war is forbidden as a way of resolving conflicts between States, the date is around 1945, with the planet frightened with the second great European and then world war, when the United Nations bets in its Charter for the peaceful settlement of differences: "The parties to a dispute, the continuance of which is likely to endanger the maintenance of international peace and security, shall, first of all, seek a solution by negotiation, inquiry, mediation, conciliation, arbitration, judicial settlement, resort to regional agencies or arrangements, or other peaceful means of their own choice".

It adds that "nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security".

The use of force, which we understand to be military, is thus reduced to self-defense, to civil wars appearing elsewhere (internal affairs) and to force approved by the Security Council. Few exceptions can be added, except for the right of a colonized people to liberate itself, which took shape in the following decades; and at the turn of the century, humanitarian interference appeared, the responsibility to protect, which has not come to fruition after the bad Libyan experience.

Despite what international law and the UN say, the reality is that wars exist and today we are witnessing live two particularly close ones in Ukraine and Palestine-Israel, both conflicts coincide with us at this time, another thing is that we are finding out what is happening.

In this context, the Spanish Minister of Defense, Margarita Robles, declared in mid-March 2024 in an interview in La Vanguardia that "the threat of war is absolute and society is not fully aware". The message of an imminent danger and an unconcerned citizenship is launched, which, if both factors are true, would require a permanent pedagogy from the areas responsible for our security.

It is often insisted on an underage citizenship, unaware of the dangers that lie in wait for us, the vision is also applied to Europe -an infantile political entity, apparently, formed by very mature States-, to which it would be necessary to respond with respect and information; the alternative would be an understandable discourse for a 14-year-old teenager, as it has been concluded from Trump's messages, with variants such as 'the bad guys' that truffle also here many of the public interventions of our uniformed men and women.

"The threat is total and absolute", we are told, "Europe has to be aware that the danger is very close; it is not a pure hypothesis, it is real, civilization can be attacked by unscrupulous people like Putin".

In military terms related to the war in Ukraine the position of Spain is coordinated and indistinguishable from the international organizations of which we are part and with whose members we are united by the commitment of mutual military assistance, by Article 42(7) of the EU Treaty and Article 5 of the Washington Treaty (NATO), in the case of receiving an armed aggression, it is understood, explicitly or not, an attack against the territory.

In view of the public statements and the reaction in practice, in Spain, the EU and NATO we have apparently decided that the Russian aggression against Ukraine in February 2022 is an existential threat, only in this way can the actions put in place be explained; and it turns out that a hostile Ukraine is also perceived in Russia as an existential threat. With this scenario, and taking into account the nuclear capability of both sides, military victory is impossible and the objective is to wear down the opponent in the long term.

War in many cases can be a term used in a broad sense, just as it is used to refer to the war against tobacco, obesity or diabetes. Although not even in this metaphorical sense it would be convenient to relax, since that self-styled war on terror, the use of terrorism as a framework to justify military operations, has since the beginning of the century covered armed conflicts whose toll has far exceeded one million dead, mainly in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria.

Spain currently has 622 military personnel deployed in Latvia, a country bordering Russia, a contingent that includes tanks; and the deployment of 700 military personnel and 250 Army vehicles in Slovakia has just been completed.

Spain also plans to deploy eight fighters in Latvia and Romania during 2024, in four-month rotations involving the transfer of 150 military personnel. In addition to the above, 40 Spanish military personnel will operate a radar in Romania, a country bordering Ukraine and the Black Sea.

As for the Navy, Spain assumed command this January of NATO's permanent Naval Group number 1, which mobilizes at least another 400 Spanish military personnel and operates in the North Sea.

The economic effort in defense, support to Ukraine, own weapons systems and spending commitments are also being intense. Just to mention that under President Sanchez the budget of the Ministry of Defense has increased by about 50% in just five years; plus a long series of agreements of the Council of Ministers for the acquisition of new weapons systems that can add up to about 20,000 million euros to be paid in the medium and long term. The silence of the conservative opposition makes it probably the biggest unspoken political agreement in the country, since the PP has decided to dynamite Europe as a shared space.

In view of what has been seen, to the initial question it would be necessary to answer provisionally that yes, Spain is actively participating in a war, although delegated, 'proxy war', which they call, we support with all the economic and armament means, we even train Ukrainian military on national territory, but the front line of combat and the mortal victims are put by someone else.

Spain is at war, taking into account economic, armament and military resources deployed, also according to the dialectic, rhetorical resources; and the leap to a conventional war would be marked by our own deaths, which could be caused by combats with Spanish troops on the ground in Ukraine (not contemplated until today, although it is recognized that there are already military personnel from NATO member countries), by attacks received in waters or countries neighboring Russia where we operate, by Russian attacks on military targets in Spain in case of an escalation that could occur by conscious decision of the parties or by accidental spark.

In view of the scenario described above, it is necessary to convey complex messages to the public, to promote public and parliamentary debate, ingredients not often used in matters related to Defense, security and the Armed Forces, which usually live more comfortably in the absence of explanations and without accountability for decisions taken.

The permanent minority of age of the Spanish society in security matters could be faced with citizen education, training and political and technical responsibility, to try it out, and then we will analyze the results.

Until it happens we are left with some certainties: the certainty that we are asking ourselves questions, the rising public expenditure, the impossible military victory over Russia; we have certainties such as the absence of declaration of war, the absence of debate and own deaths; and that the situation is so explosive that the current balance could explode at any moment.

The great unknown is the amount of resources that are being devoted to the day after, to advance alternative scenarios or to build the future neighborly relationship between the EU and Russia.

Original text in Spanish. Translation is courtesy of Atalayar magazine, 

a journalistic bridge between shores and cultures where this article was also published.

Ukraine and the informative ammunition

The Ukrainian president has not worn a tie or a jacket for sixteen months, surrounded by world leaders, international summits and meetings at the highest political level, which he attends wearing attire somewhere between Decathlon (hunting and fishing section) and Coronel Tapioca, in brown and greenish colours. He looks as if he has just arrived and immediately returns to the front. Pure political communication.

The communication also explains the constant reference to the Russian mercenaries of the Wagner Group fighting in Ukraine, conveying the message that there can be no just cause based on paid soldiers, although this is a growing trend in conflicts long before the invasion of Iraq, where tens of thousands of Blackwater (now Academia) mercenaries operated with criminal immunity. The prism of communication also explains the constant references to the Iranian nationality of drones used by the Russian Armed Forces, without us knowing the nationality of the rest of the equipment that flies and operates.

Given that most of the Ukrainian arsenal in the conflict comes from NATO, the information ammunition is very likely to have the same origin.

There is a lack of perspective to draw conclusions about the conflict stemming from the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, with many precedents and much context of which little is heard. In any case, this crisis has ushered in a new form of US-NATO-European communication, the fruit of lessons studied, it is unclear whether they have been learned, about Russian information capabilities in the past.

Here we find so-called strategic communication, in many cases operated or combined with many other fields unrelated to communication (cyber defence) but serving as a pedagogical umbrella for the uninitiated.

Strategic communication abounds in NATO, borrowing from the US, which Europe is disciplinarily imitating in this military field, with the impression of a shortage of journalists and budget, when staff and resources is the indicator of the importance given to a public policy. The presence of many technologists and specialists in civil and uniformed security is perceived, but fewer specialists in communication.

In the world of private enterprise, communication has traditionally been seen as a subordinate element of marketing, while strategic communication has recently gained increasing prominence in large organisations and seems to have risen somewhat in status, albeit also linked to quantifiable and external objectives that are more prestigious than mere communication.

Returning to Ukraine, or to conflicts, we could say that there is no strategy without communication and no communication without a minimum strategy.

The Atlantic Alliance has had the NATO Centre of Excellence for Strategic Communications in Riga, Latvia, since 2014, from where it operates with increasing intensity in the diffuse field of disinformation.

NATO's strategic communications, following its terminology, envisages the coordinated use of NATO's communications activities and capabilities in support of NATO's policies, operations and activities, and in furtherance of NATO's objectives, where we find subsections such as the following: 

• Public diplomacy: NATO's civilian communications and outreach efforts responsible for promoting awareness and generating understanding and support for NATO's policies, operations and activities, as a complement to Allied national efforts.
• Public Affairs: NATO's civilian engagement through the media to inform the public about NATO's policies, operations and activities in a timely, accurate, responsive and proactive manner.
• Military Public Affairs: promoting NATO's military goals and objectives to the public to improve awareness and understanding of the Alliance's military aspects.
• Information operations: NATO military advice and coordination of military information activities to create the desired effects on the will, understanding and capabilities of adversaries and other parties in support of Alliance operations, missions and objectives.
• Psychological operations: planned psychological activities using communication methods and other means directed at approved audiences to influence perceptions, attitudes and behaviour, affecting the achievement of political and military objectives.

We have all of this in the conflict arising from the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which will be studied in the short term with strategic communication as one of its major operational novelties.

As we have seen so far, it is a matter of taking the initiative, remembering the communication or megaphone diplomacy in the months prior to the start of the conflict, and therefore the adversary is trailing behind, active versus reactive actions that always give some advantage, at the cost of the surprise effect.

A curious example of this is the British Ministry of Defence's almost daily Twitter feed of intelligence on the progress of the conflict, which is of little use to those involved and baffles the majority.

This explains the repeated announcement for weeks of the invasion of Ukraine (a self-fulfilling prophecy); or the imminent counteroffensive announced by Ukraine for at least the first half of 2023. 

The last step, yet to fit into the overall communication framework, is the recent news silence imposed by the Ukrainian authorities, and the increasing difficulty of journalists deployed there, with military officials on video ordering silence on the announced counteroffensive.

However, in this general approach of airing the enemy's alleged plans and silencing one's own, there is more tactics than strategy.

The powerful presence of strategic communication in the Ukrainian conflict, to a much greater extent than in past conflicts, compels the utmost attention as a discipline of success; and it also compels an awareness that such self-interested communication initiatives bring more obscurity than clarity to the conflict.

Fortunately, analysis of security, defence and international relations in Spain has been greatly enriched in recent years, with dozens of universities, think tanks, associations and study centres offering their products in a way that has never before been more accessible to the general public, a scenario that is enriched despite the biases and interests of each analytical forum, always in need of external funding.

It is noticeable that the quantity and diversity of specialised analysis on the Ukrainian war does not translate to the same extent into public, social and media debate, which is occupied by an impoverished and schematised to the point of caricature.

There is also a lack of greater political debate on the conflict in parliament, either because what is said there has not been known outside or because it has been decided that relevant changes such as the 26% increase in the Ministry of Defence's budget in little more than a year do not merit parliamentary discussion.

For all parties concerned, the ultimate goal should be an informed citizenry, and no one could help the citizen to reduce the complexity of the world like specialists or policy-makers in competitive competition. 

Moreover, the diversity of approaches, of approaches, of contrasting opinions, is a strength of an open and democratic society, not a weakness. 

"The danger is not that it is difficult to distinguish the real from the false, but that the distinction ceases to matter," says American philosopher Michael Sandel in the June 2023 issue of Fundación Telefónica's Telos magazine. "Democracy requires persuasion, argumentation, debate across our differences," he argues, advocating the need for a civic education that involves something like media and information literacy that helps all citizens, not just young people, to interpret what we are told and encourages democratic public debate. "Learning to listen beyond disagreement is an important civic art. And it is not something we are born with. It is something we have to develop, practice and learn".

Original text in Spanish. Translation is courtesy of Atalayar magazine, 

a journalistic bridge between shores and cultures where this article was also published.

Israel-Palestine, a single de facto state

In recent months, Israel has experienced two politically relevant processes: the parliamentary elections held in November 2022, which have facilitated the most extreme and ultra-nationalist government in its history; and the massive popular mobilisation against the reform of the judiciary, with constant demonstrations by hundreds of thousands of Israelis since January 2023.

In both cases one could find a very present absence, using an oxymoron, a fashionable rhetorical figure that defines contradictory expressions such as the living dead or thundering silence: there are no Palestinians. It was not a major issue in the election campaign, in political programmes, nor is it present in the massive movement rejecting Netanyahu. To continue with other expressions, one could think of the elephant in the room, as the Anglo-Saxons allude to an omnipresent and at the same time uncomfortable topic, which leads to pretending to ignore it.

"Israel will either be a Jewish country or a democratic country, the two options are incompatible", a Spanish diplomat posted to the Middle East recently predicted. Despite the use of Israel's innovative technological character -Start up nation- or the gay paradise of some parts of the territory, the political drift points towards an exclusively Jewish conception of the country, a growing confessionalism of the state at the same time as the democratic framework is being reduced.

Israeli policy-makers are working to establish a situation of de facto annexation that is irreversible, with various categories of citizens and rights, an objective that has been achieved for years now, a level of violence that is bearable for the Palestinians themselves and the international community, a situation that is perfectly possible, although incompatible with the rule of law and democracy: equal rights for the entire population, separation of powers, and between church and state.

The peaceful and progressive future of Israel-Palestine is conditional on a democratic solution to the situation of colonial discrimination of the Palestinians, today divided within the borders of the 1948 State of Israel - 20% of the population - in the so-called 1967 occupied territories of Jerusalem, Gaza and Golan, where 600,000 Jewish settlers have already illegally installed themselves in settlements; the Palestinians of the diaspora, especially in Lebanon and Jordan. The geographical and legal fragmentation of the Palestinians is another goal long pursued and also achieved.

It is a fiction to decouple Israeli technological initiative, military competence (continuous attacks on Syrian soil for a decade now; nuclear capability), it is a fiction to decouple a promising future for Israel from the colonial occupation of the Palestinians.

In the first four months of 2023, more than a hundred Palestinians and a dozen Jewish Israelis have been killed or died in violent circumstances, a conflict whose disproportionate number of victims does not adequately illustrate the disproportionate number of contenders, which are not comparable and do not allow for equidistance: there is a colonial situation of force and a colonised population.

This May marks the 75th anniversary of the Nakba (catastrophe, in Arabic), which is the period since the founding of the State of Israel in 1948 and the operation that would have been called ethnic cleansing if the label had existed, which displaced 800,000 Palestinians, well studied even by Israeli historiography; and 30 years since the Oslo accords that established the solution of two neighbouring states.

Provocations, victims, violence for three quarters of a century, could feed the argument of endless history and irresolvable conflict, but nothing could be further from the truth, everything indicates that the situation is anything but stable, and very recent circumstances have altered the picture. The very long, though not eternal, conflict has been made possible by an ongoing series of political decisions and permitted violations of international legality, which may or may not continue. At the very least, the political and social framework is in permanent change, and has accelerated in recent times, as the following references can show.

In much of the world, a revision of colonialism is taking place lately, symbolically affecting commemorative statues and museum collections, far removed from imperial visions or civilisational fantasies. There is now enough time for colonisers and colonised alike to take a new, more scientific than nationalistic approach to the phenomenon. And the exception is the so-called 'settlement colonialism' that is still being practised in Israel in 2023. In this sense, it could be said that the times are moving more towards a historical re-reading of past colonialism than a practice of future colonialism.

It is also possible to apply the maxim confirmed in most European countries that colonial violence ends up taking its toll on the coloniser; it was experienced in Spain with the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera from 1923 onwards, the coup d'état of 1936, the civil war it provoked and the Franco dictatorship; it was experienced in metropolitan France with the various military solutions and the coups d'état of the early 1960s. It can be interpreted that Israeli colonial violence will end up affecting, if it is not already affecting, today's Israeli citizens, the dissenting, the moderate, the Christian, the non-ultra-Orthodox ultra-nationalists (there are also ultra-Orthodox non-ultra-nationalists).

Shlomo Ben Ami, former Israeli Foreign Minister and former ambassador to Spain, has on several occasions described the political and social situation in his country as South African, without advocating a solution to the conflict that is also South African, which would be a single state with citizens equal in fundamental, social and political rights.

With the nuances imposed by history and different realities, the system of institutional discrimination known as apartheid largely defines the situation in Israel-Palestine, as has been recognised and documented by local human rights organisations and others of little debatable trajectory such as Amnesty International (report of February 2022, 'Israeli apartheid against the Palestinian population: Cruel system of domination and crime against humanity') or Human Rights Watch ('Israel's abusive practices constitute crimes of apartheid and persecution', report of April 2021).

It should be recalled that the International Criminal Court included the 'crime of apartheid' as a crime against humanity in the Rome Statute in 1998 (article 7).

The equating of apartheid-style supremacism with the situation in Israel-Palestine has long since gone far beyond Palestinian kufiyya and hookah; just as the international reach of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which works to end international support for Israel's oppression of Palestinians and press for its compliance with international law, is noteworthy.

Another change of scene concerns the Abraham Accords, sponsored in September 2020 by Donald Trump as US president, and by his son-in-law, which have led to closer diplomatic and political relations, or to the surfacing of those kept in elite and security secrecy, between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan. Far from the grandiloquent declarations of the communiqués, and the undoubted achievement of having succeeded in separating the Palestinian conflict from Israel's relations with some Arab countries, the process has languished since the departure of the Trump administration, in the face of the indifference of Arab public opinion (beyond the odd flag at the World Cup in Qatar) and with Saudi Arabia further away every day from signing the communiqué.

Another new element affects precisely the world's second largest arms importer, Saudi Arabia, which announced in early March the re-establishment of diplomatic relations with Iran, broken since 2016, an agreement that to widespread surprise has come about with the mediation of China.

The agreement defuses the most powerful security glue that has united partners of convenience for years against Tehran; and the steps following the announcement reveal the willingness of both sides to move towards a new situation, which has direct effects on the Yemeni civil war, such as the exchange of a thousand prisoners in mid-April.

Last but not least, a change of script affects the United States, probably more the civil society, public opinion and published opinion than its government, bearing in mind that history shows that Israel is a matter of US domestic policy and this will be accentuated as the November 2024 presidential elections draw nearer.

Changes can be detected, and this is how one can interpret a recent and lengthy analysis published in Foreign Affairs magazine, with its century of history behind it and international reference, entitled "Israel's One-State Reality. It's Time to Give Up on the Two-State Solution" (published on 14 April).

Signed by four scholars in International Relations from George Washington University and the University of Maryland in the US, the text points out that "the temporary 'occupation' status of the Palestinian territories is now a permanent condition in which a state ruled by one group of people rules over another group of people".

For the authors, the Oslo peace process "ended a long time ago. It is time to deal with what the one-state reality means for politics, policy and analysis. Palestine is not a state-in-waiting, and Israel is not a democratic state accidentally occupying Palestinian territory".eThe highly commendable Foreign Affairs analysis adds that "the entire territory west of the Jordan River has long constituted a single state under Israeli rule, where land and people are subject to radically different legal regimes, and Palestinians are permanently treated as an inferior caste. Politicians and analysts who ignore this one-state reality are doomed to failure and irrelevance, doing little more than providing a smokescreen for the entrenchment of the status quo".

They argue that "a one-state settlement is not a future possibility; it already exists. Between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, one state controls the entry and exit of people and goods, oversees security, and has the ability to impose its decisions, laws and policies on millions of people without their consent"; yet, they add, "forced to choose between Israel's Jewish identity and liberal democracy, Israel has chosen the former. It has locked itself into a system of Jewish supremacy, in which non-Jews are structurally discriminated against or excluded in a tiered scheme: some non-Jews have most, but not all, of the rights that Jews have, while most non-Jews live under severe segregation, separation and domination".

The article recalls that the law passed in 2018 defines Israel as "the nation-state of the Jewish people" and holds that "the exercise of the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel is exclusive to the Jewish people"; it makes no mention of democracy or equality for non-Jewish citizens.

Leaving aside Foreign Affairs' analysis, one might conclude that in the last century the approach to the Israel-Palestine conflict has been one of statehood, as proposed by the United Nations in 1947 and Oslo in 1993, one state for each community, logical because that is how the international community works and it is the state that grants nationality and rights to citizens. However, the approach may be changing.

This is suggested by a Palestinian, Israeli and international citizenship in transformation; a situation on the ground that implies a de facto annexation of the whole of historic Palestine, already irreversible barring further ethnic cleansing that would not be accepted by the international community today.

The Palestinian liberation movement, in state terms, would be better expressed today as the liberation movement of the Palestinians, which will also be that of all residents regardless of their religious affiliation, political orientation or cultural affiliation, citizens with the same fundamental, social and political rights of a single multicultural and multi-religious state, as they are almost everywhere; like the one that already exists on the ground, but truly democratic for its entire population.

Original text in Spanish. Translation is courtesy of Atalayar magazine, a journalistic bridge between shores and cultures where this article was also published.

Suggestions

• Israel's One-State Reality. It's Time to Give Up on the Two-State Solution, by Michael Barnett, Nathan Brown, Marc Lynch and Shibley Telhami (Foreign Affairs, 4.14.2023).
• Ex-Jordan FM: Two-state solution is 'dead and cannot be revived' (MEMO, 4.14.2023).
• God or democracy: the moment of truth in Israel, by Michael Marder (El País, 4.13.2023).
• Morocco balances between its new alliance with Israel and its historic support for the Palestinians (El País, 4/12/2023).
• The Israelis who sneak the occupation of Palestine in the protest against the judicial reform (El País, 27.3.2023).
• Israel protests are not the salvation of Palestinians, by Ramzy Baroud (Arab News, 3.13.2023).
• Palestine in this blog: link to articles in reverse chronological order.

Tribute to Montávez, in the middle distance

This February 14th, 2023, Pedro Martínez Montávez has changed dimension, from the earthly to an unknown one, and my head and my key ask me to write a column in his honour, which is a tribute to the Arabist who taught me and directed the Department of Arab and Islamic Studies at the Autonomous University of Madrid in the eighties, probably also a tribute to my youth as a student of Arabic Philology, just as Joan Baptista Humet wrote a song about his adolescence. 

It is a mid-distance homage, because from this moment on I designate myself as the spokesperson for so many students and graduates who end up working professionally in something other than what they studied; the world is full of geographers, historians, biologists, graduates in the subject and then their professional careers lead them to other tasks, in my case to journalism and communication. 

I didn't want to pull out the notes from my degree that are sleeping somewhere in the lumber room or from Saint Google, but to write a few words from my memory or impressions somewhere stuck, words that I would probably never have dared to say to him in person, there wasn't enough trust and I didn't follow him around the university or in specialised forums. 

I identify Professor Montávez as a reference in Spanish Arabism who turned the traditional focus of Arab studies in Spain from the Middle Ages, many of them looking for the Christian traces of Al-Andalus, to the contemporary period. He had the interest and the wisdom to look for the traces of Al-Andalus, but in the Arabic literary work of the twentieth century. 

I associate Professor Montávez with the Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani, whom he translated; with his "History of Modern Arabic Literature", the handbook of many, and with such sonorous names as Abdul Wahhab al-Bayati, Badr Shákir al-Sayyab, Fadwa and Ibrahim Tuqán, Tawfiq al-Hakim, Gassán Kanafani, personalities of Arab literature and culture of whom I could say little and whose music still echoes in my head, and Taha Husein, he spoke a lot about Taha Husein. 

I remember attending many evenings of lectures at the Asociación de Amistad Hispano-Árabe, Calle Príncipe de Vergara in Madrid, like someone attending a session of a Masonic lodge entering through a hollow tree. In that forum and in others he frequented or promoted, there was a desire to disseminate beyond specialised academic circles; also in part of his immense publishing output, I remember from that period books with modest binding and a lot of content, in Cantarabia, in those publications of the Instituto Hispano Árabe de Cultura, the predecessor of the later Instituto de Cooperación con el Mundo Árabe and today's Casa Árabe. 

Montávez was an Arabist from the East, there are those from the ninth century and those from Morocco; he must have gone to Egypt after graduating and there he experienced the pan-Arabism of Gamal Abden Náser, a certain euphoria of the 1950s and 1960s; from a certain period as a translator for the Foreign Office, I remember him telling of his surprise on hearing the sound che pronounced in Iraq, and later I personally verified it as a reader of Spanish during a stay between the wars. 

I remember that class at the Autonomous University in which we smoked like crazy, the spring festivities and a huge blackboard, with chalk and eraser, full of fractal plurals, a convoluted way in which the Arabic language departs from regularity and makes strange plurals, which we later discovered also followed some kind of irregular logic. 

And we were also fractos, those of us who were studying Arabic Philology there, a little more than two dozen in class, it is often forgotten that students learn something and also learn to be a person, with the detours that come with age, while now we are asking primary school children to decide their vocation once and for all.  

Pedro Martínez Montávez demonstrated with his career that it is possible to be born in Jaén and be a wise man, and he showed it without stridency hidden behind his moustache and a deep voice with which he expressed a rather rhetorical discourse that he liked to use Arabic words as a spur. 

He opened many innovative paths and several of them led to Latin America, in search of the literature and life of the Arabs who emigrated by the thousands at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century (máhyar), many of them Lebanese, then under the Turkish Empire and who appear as Turks in García Márquez's novels. 

This column is a vindication of my university education and subsequent trajectory, neither directly linked to nor detached from the Arab world, somewhere in between, an intermediary in my case between Arabists by profession and the general lack of knowledge on Arab issues, a defence of intermediaries, such as journalists or politicians, today discredited by the lights of technology and the shadows of populism, and more necessary than ever. 

Montávez was rector of the Autonomous University and the chronicles say that at that time he facilitated a conference in which Muammar Gaddafi himself took part with his "Green Book", which served as an inspiration to the extreme left and the extreme right of those years. The professor's biography and career does reveal an informed political commitment to Palestine, disseminating its literature and history; the invasion of Iraq and the Arab Springs mark a more recent stage. 

With Pedro Martínez Montávez I identify my university days, and a circumstance that surprised me then and which I have not forgotten for decades was that he used to listen, I discovered with him that you have to be very wise and very intelligent to listen carefully to the unelaborated discourse of a young man off-centre in search of something diffuse. 

Original text in Spanish. Translation is courtesy of Atalayar magazine, a journalistic bridge between shores and cultures where this article was also published.

Ukraine, from grey to black

Angela Merkel speaks Russian and Vladimir Putin German. The linguistic abilities of both contribute something about European diversity, neighbourhood, personal experiences or the Cold War; they add something of complexity to an information panorama that has been simplified to the limit after the invasion of Ukraine.

A political philosopher (Innerarity) reflects that the most difficult thing to achieve in the face of a problem is an overall vision, the arguments tend to be one-sided, specialists abound with great knowledge of a very limited area of reality and often with opposing positions.

In order to get a rough idea of the conflict in Ukraine, let us use the formula of trying to illuminate four ingredients that we receive mixed together, four approaches or flashes that shed some light: military conflict, communication, energy and globalisation.

The aim is to identify trends that have been triggered by the crisis - conflicts do not usually create phenomena out of nothing, but grow issues already in germ (and not all trends develop).

Military conflict

Wars produce deaths and rapes of women, all wars, the just, the chosen, the unjust and the unjustifiable, which some seem to be discovering now. Hence any effort to avoid them is obligatory, despite the growing number of those humiliated by real or invented concessions to the opponent, the nostalgia in leaders for Putin's own will and firmness that was so highly praised in many quarters until 24 February. In any case, the frivolity with which one's own involvement in an armed conflict is treated is surprising.

War, this war, is a failure of deterrence and a worst-case scenario.

The idea seemed to be widespread that traditional armed conflicts were on the decline - at least between great powers, and in Europe - and that countries were competing in the field of economics and in the diffuse grey zone, the intermediate space in political conflict that separates competition in accordance with conventional patterns of politics (white) from direct and continuous armed confrontation (black).

The reality is that not since Cuba and Vietnam have we been closer to a confrontation between great powers that we thought had been put on hold.

In the military field, we could point out that at least since the Guernica razed to the ground in 1937 during the Civil War, which the Ukrainian president recalled in his speech to the Spanish Parliament - that Nazi Condor Legion was used to the full in the area west of Madrid months earlier - wars in the last century have been characterised by the omnipresence of aerial bombardments of greater or lesser precision, the main cause of victims in any armed conflict, the vast majority of whom are civilians, and this circumstance is not occurring to date in Ukraine.

Some analysts describe this conflict almost as a civil war, given the close ties of all kinds between Russians and Ukrainians - cultural, familial, historical - to which it should be objected that civil wars are usually even bloodier than what we are witnessing in Ukraine; we could describe it as a conflict between first cousins, in order to find an explanation for the scarcity of massive aerial bombardments on civilians.

Another not insignificant point is that wars create national identity; Ukrainian nationalism will emerge from this conflict strengthened. Historiography has studied the fact that nationalism is a political construct - nothing immutable from two millennia of history -, national identity is constructed and changing, and nothing like a war with a neighbour to reinforce it.

It is also notable that the military reaction of the United States, the Atlantic Alliance and the European Union has so far been coordinated and indistinguishable.

The EU is on track to increase the more than 200 billion euros in the defence budgets of the 27, three times as much as Russia; as a novelty, the mantra of the goal of allocating 2% of GDP to military spending will soon be transformed from abstraction into what it is decided to promote, specific programmes and weapons systems, some of which are already being tested on the ground in Ukraine.

Communication

We are introducing new forms of communication, "megaphone strategy", as it has been called, deterrence by information overload, which has not been effective either.

Peter Biden, Peter Johnson and Peter Stoltenberg warned since the end of 2021 on some twenty occasions that the wolf was coming and in reality they were right, but they were wrong on 19; and we can ask ourselves whether Peter or we could have done more than wait in the process, for that reason of avoiding deaths and violations.

The attempt here is to point out that communication has developed trends in this conflict, perhaps drawing on lessons studied - rather than learned - from Russia's disinformation strategy in the recent or distant past. It can be said with little room for error that throughout this crisis Russia has lagged behind from the communication point of view, and has clearly lost the battle of public opinion in US-NATO-EU territory, but not in Russian territory; in this sense, convincing its own people, as has happened on each side, is no easy achievement, although it leaves work pending in the area of the opposition and in the neutral zone where we could situate half the planet.

Real news: a Ukrainian blogger has recently been arrested in Tarragona (Spain) and placed at the disposal of the Audiencia Nacional on an international warrant issued by the Ukrainian government for his pro-Russian positions. This is another important development in the field of communication as a result of the invasion of Ukraine: the restriction of press and opinion freedoms has been accentuated in Russia itself, with a long tradition of persecuting journalists, journalistic companies and new legislation that threatens anyone who does not publish the official version with imprisonment; a new restriction of press freedom in Europe and Spain, with the decision to ban media outlets such as Russia Today or Sputnik without prior authorisation from a judge. Let us recall here interviews of even the demon Saddam Hussein on Spanish television during one of the three Gulf Wars.

A final note on communication may be the appearance of journalists/tertullians/analysts in the role of activists, mostly with an uncritical rejection of Putin, which is not surprising because of the positioning, but because it does not seem the function of a journalist or an analyst to uncritically support anything.

We will follow the invasion of Ukraine, with dozens of displaced journalists, without images of fighting, without casualty reports, without front lines, without clear objectives, without reliable information, without context and without opinions of the aggressor side.

Energy

Much focus is directed at the energy dependence of much of Central Europe on Russian supplies, and it is again simplified with expressions such as "Germany finances Putin's war".

The same argument could have been used during the existence of the USSR, when the gas never stopped flowing, "Germany finances Soviet communism", which was never said because it is a misleading reduction. It would be the same to say that Francisco Franco financed the Algerian socialist revolution by buying gas (the first gas tanker arrived in 1974) and Muammar Gaddafi's Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya (agreement in 1969); that whoever buys Saudi oil finances its death penalties, whoever imports something from the USA finances capital executions from the electric chair or the invasion of the Capitol.

Today our mouths are full of energy sovereignty without recognising the advance of renewables in Spain over the last two decades, a clearly identifiable political impulse that has been criticised or directly torpedoed with taxes on the sun.

A third of the electricity produced in Spain in 2021 came from wind and solar farms, which together with hydroelectric power accounted for 46% of the electricity generated last year. This is strategic autonomy, energy sovereignty, and there have been those who have promoted it in recent years and those who have not.

Neither Germany is financing Putin's war, nor Europe, nor is the solution going to come from importing South African coal or Nigerian uranium. The reality is that the invasion of Ukraine has accelerated the need to develop green energy, a trend already present in the EU's political priorities before this crisis, along with digital transformation.

Spain is facing this European crisis in much more favourable circumstances than other members of the European club, with a diversified energy supply, zero dependence on Russian sources, gas distribution capacity and growing renewable generation.

Globalisation

The international order has become disordered, although it was already showing signs of material fatigue, the international political and security system, designed in the Cold War after the Second World War, which had been faltering since the fall of the Berlin Wall, was no longer able to cope, with the absence of China as a country that had already emerged.

The invasion of Ukraine has altered the world economic, energy and military order, the production and distribution of goods, and the international financial system.

The crisis in Ukraine has caused the UN Security Council to be blocked, perhaps definitively, which is predictable because it always happens whenever the conflict affects one of its permanent members with the right of veto, which has led to recourse to the General Assembly with non-binding resolutions that on this occasion are of maximum relevance, unlike in other cases and geographies.

And we have discovered that globalisation is a less globalised system than we thought, at least with a non-globalised leadership. The expulsion of Russia, not Putin, from international organisations, the banking system, Eurovision song contest, the World Tourism Organisation, cultural forums or sporting competitions, reveals that the globalised world has a non-globalised control. 

The consequence is not less globalisation, but different and hopefully better regulated globalisation. The degree of openness of the Spanish economy - the weight of foreign trade over GDP - will continue to be around 60% of the country's economic movement.

Closing

Putin's strategic mistake with the invasion of Ukraine seems clear from its consequences: international isolation (on the European and North American side); the resurrection of NATO (brain-dead before yesterday, according to Macron), Finland and Sweden knocking on its door, which will bring the Alliance to the northern border; the EU has woken up strategically; sanctions, dead.

With Ukraine, Putin has turned the confrontation from grey to black, from non-open confrontation to the exchange of shells.

The strategic mistake can be identified as that of an autocracy, a category of political regime in which a single person rules without any constraints and with the power to enact and amend laws at will; such regimes are not capable of processing information well, a principle applicable to the north and south of this iberian peninsula.

Using Pantone's colour standardisation system, the chromatic stanag, Putin has set international relations on black, which is identified by six zeros; hence it is hard to imagine strategic gains for Russia or for himself. The grey range between black and white, which is where the analysis lies, does not seem to be of much interest today, and will be sorely lacking in the post-war period.

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Original text in Spanish. Translation is courtesy of Atalayar magazine, a journalistic bridge between shores and cultures where this article was also published.

Palestinian pupils yawning

The epic is all very well: flags, anthems, trumpets, uniforms, medals, martyrs, heroes; anyone who has experienced an act with these ingredients up close cannot help but feel sincere and momentary emotion.

International legality is another field of enormous relevance: United Nations resolutions, the International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice in The Hague, every centimetre that is advanced in these instances is an achievement that cannot be rolled back, a new brick in the construction of a society regulated by justice and law, and therefore those responsible for its violation can be denounced; success is also usually temporary in this case, given the surprising impunity of non-compliance.

There is another space that is more difficult to access: that of the everyday.

It turns out that the moments of the epic and of international tribunals might be said to be public holidays, but our lives are mostly spent on weekdays.

The spring of 2021 and its Ramadan have been marked in Palestine-Israel by the umpteenth repression of Palestinian civilians in the wake of the umpteenth case of confiscation of Palestinian property to be handed over to settlers, plus accumulated frustration. And this time coincides with the recent reading and discovery of 'I saw Ramallah', an autobiographical novel by the Palestinian writer Mourid Barghouti, born in the West Bank in 1944 and who died in Amman in February 2021 (a discovery to thank Separata Árabe, a website and reading club on Arab literature with Silvia Rubio and Maribel González behind it).

"It is enough to suffer the first experience of exile to feel exiled forever", says Barguti in a book in which he conveys feelings and impressions of his first visit to Ramallah after 30 years of exile. The 1967 war broke out when he was studying in Cairo and he could not return to his village until the mid-1990s, when Oslo opened a window that has now been definitively ruined by reality.

Conflict turns normality into a symbol, and people disappear. "The usual Jerusalem, the one of our little moments, the one we quickly forgot because we didn't have to remember it, because it was as normal as water was water, and lightning was lightning. But when it slipped through our fingers," writes Barghouti, "it climbed upwards and became a symbol. To the sky. All struggles prefer symbols. Jerusalem is now the Jerusalem of theology. The world is concerned with the 'status' of Jerusalem, with its idea and its legend. But they don't care about our life in Jerusalem and the Jerusalem of our life.

Barghouti recalls in the novel the everyday life lost and impossible to recover: "They have taken the addresses of our houses and the dust on our stairs (...). They have taken away the yawning of the pupils at the desks, the drowsiness of the last class on Tuesdays. They have kept my grandmother's footsteps on the way to Mrs. Hafiza's house".

The double estrangement of the exile and the poet appears constantly in the book: impossible to return to childhood, frozen in the memory of an unreachable past; and without a future. "The occupation left us as we were. This is its crime. It is not that it forbade us to remember yesterday with ease, but that it deprived us of the beautiful uncertainty of tomorrow".

Permanent temporariness has set in in Palestine and among Palestinians: "Since '67 everything we do is temporary and 'until things become clearer'. But things have not been cleared up after thirty years," writes Barguti, not two decades after the novel was published. And the situation is compounded by the arbitrariness always present in authoritarian and/or colonial regimes.

"Exile is like death. We think it can only happen to others". Barghouti's life gives names and scenarios to the Palestinian diaspora, the Gulf monarchies as a work destination, the dispersion of the dead and the living throughout the Middle East and the rest of the planet, the dependence on the telephone, today on networks, always in search of papers that often open borders except one's own.

Palestinian dispersion does not prevent violence that is also dispersed, such as the murder of two of Barghouti's friends, the writer Gassan Kanafani, murdered in Beirut in 1972, and the cartoonist Nayi Ali, murdered in London in 1987.

'I saw Ramallah' is an extraordinary invitation to learn from a poet about the situation of Palestinians in exile and on the ground, marked by colonisation.

Let us remember that the settlers gave their name to colonisation, a perspective that illuminates and facilitates the understanding of the Palestinian question, with the great peculiarity - the journalist Teresa Aranguren argues - that here we are witnessing a strange case in which the coloniser wants to expel the colonised, beyond exploiting them (which is also the case).

The biography of Barghouti and many Palestinians is marked by the 1967 Six-Day War, the origin of the Israeli occupation of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

"In our calendar, numbers lose their neutral, objective meaning and become something that can only mean one thing. Since the 1967 disaster, I have not been able to look at the number 67 again without thinking of defeat. I see it immersed in the telephone number of a relative or a friend, on the door of a hotel room, on the number plate of a car driving down any street in any country in the world, on the entrance to the cinema or the theatre.

Numbers, many numbers, have taken over the Palestinian conflict: 1948, 67, 73, 82, 88, 93, 242, 338, dates and UN resolutions that Palestinian children know with a premature political coming of age.

Three decades after the Madrid Peace Conference and a couple of years after the Oslo Accords, the two-state solution (the Palestinian one on 20 per cent of historic Palestine, territory truffled by 700,000 settlers) is now impossible, which may not be bad news; and the Palestinian administration created in the process runs the risk of being a collaborator of the occupation (for example in security matters) or directly part of the colonial administration. Murid Barguti and Edward Said were highly critical of Oslo already in the 1990s, and time has proved them right.

The current situation is one of more than fragmentation of Israeli society and the political landscape, with four general elections in two years; to which must be added the further postponement of the Palestinian elections originally scheduled for this May, fifteen years after the last ones.

In this May 2021 of growing violence, phantoms are appearing, such as a new intifada to provide a temporary outlet for the humiliation; and others may even be thinking of a new episode of ethnic cleansing (as the Israeli historian Ilan Pappé calls what happened in 1948) that would break the demographic balance tied at 6.8 million people (the same number of Arabs as Jews, not counting the Palestinians in neighbouring countries).

The systematic violation of Palestinian rights in a kind of new apartheid, institutionalised racial discrimination in South Africa, is a diagnosis shared both by NGOs such as Human Rights Watch, with a report released this April on the subject, and by politicians with a proven track record such as Shlomo Ben Ali, who was Israel's foreign minister as well as ambassador to Spain.

It is surprising that the South African diagnosis does not correspond to a South African solution, since any other alternative would be unacceptable today - the forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of people - based on the conviction that the continuation of the current situation (a non-democratic Jewish confessional state with third-rate Arab citizens) is a sure bet on instability and a burden for future development.

Question: can there be any project for the future other than a single democratic state that would provide for the coexistence of all the people living in Palestine-Israel? 

If we want to find people in the past, present and future of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the yawning Palestinian pupils at their desks, we will have to turn to literature, because the media do not have that as their main mission, but to find clients, often presenting a non-existent equidistance: it is not the same to be coloniser as colonised, occupier as occupied, militia as nuclear power, aggressor as attacked.

"The pillow is the daily Last Judgement", says Murid Barguti, pointing to that moment of solitude in which every human being finds himself.

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Original text in Spanish. Translation is courtesy of Atalayar magazine, a journalistic bridge between shores and cultures where this article was also published.

Hidden Spanish Ramadan 2021

Images of modern mosques in Spain,
this first in Madrid, the next in Málaga and Ceuta.

With the mathematical regularity that the movement of the planets through dark energy has, religious and civil festivities come to us: Carnival, Easter, Fallas, the Andalusian spring fairs..., now Ramadan; one of the five pillars of Islam, a month in the Islamic calendar linked to spirituality, fasting during the day, uncontrolled schedule, special meals, children's illusion and the social and family feast, which began this 13 April.

Let's face it, Ramadan brings a certain unpredictability; because of the moon that causes it to shift in the calendar a few days each year, it is a somewhat misplaced regularity.

The viruses in the air and its restrictions make these festivities pass without enthusiasm. Silvio Rodríguez could be singing today, where do the birthdays that we don't celebrate go, do they ever become something again, do they go away, and where do they go, where do they go?

The pandemic invades us with its deluge of hard-to-categorise data, the daily reports, the satisfaction of having spent another week..., as if to think of the afterlife, but the religious reminders arrive here without asking permission.

What's new in Ramadan 2021? It is celebrated with thirteen months of pandemic behind us, without the fear in the body of 2020, but with restrictions and curfews that prevent the night meetings that characterise these dates. The Islamic authorities in Spain warn that "it is not advisable to perform the iftar in the mosque - the breaking of the fast at nightfall, the breakfast we could call -, in order to avoid crowds and risks of contagion, must at all times keep interpersonal distances and the correct use of masks, without delaying in time".

First of all, the data. According to the demographic study of the Muslim population, the latest published at the end of 2019, prepared by the Union of Islamic Communities of Spain -UCIDE-, 2,100,000 Muslims live in our country, with a greater presence in Catalonia (560,000), Andalusia (340,000), Madrid (300,000) and Valencia (220,000).

In these data there are children and surely they include agnostics and atheists, it is an approximation that uses nationalities and generalisations, because there is no denominational census in Spain, nor any other study more reliable than this one.

Recently, the first nationality of Muslims in Spain is... Spanish (880,000 people), followed by Moroccan (810,000) and, at a distance, citizens from Pakistan (90,000), Senegal (70,000) and Algeria (60,000).

Among the Spanish Muslims, let us say that 350,000 are naturalised, some 70,000 are from Ceuta or Melilla and half a million are minors.

There are 80 Islamic religion teachers in Spain (the Bishops' Conference estimates that there are 34,000 Catholic religion teachers in the country).

Ramadan 2020 began with the death from the pandemic of Riay Tatari, president of the Islamic Commission of Spain for several decades, a respected person and a regular interlocutor of the administration. It turns out that his successor, Aymán Abdli, was arrested last March and released after making a statement. He is under investigation for his involvement in a network of financing jihadist organisations, for sending money to Syria for this purpose.

The event, which the victim denies and in any case dissociates himself from his role as a representative, brings confusion to the representation of Islam in Spain, traditionally divided between UCIDE and the Spanish Federation of Islamic Religious Entities (FEERI), the two large organisations united in the Islamic Commission of Spain; It also comes down to linking Islam to terrorism, a mantra that clearly seemed to be on the wane as the cause of all our fears after having triumphed since the beginning of the century, recently replaced by cyber-panic.

Another question worth exploring is whether these organisations faithfully represent Hispanic Muslims and whether the administration has other ways to reach out to certain groups regardless of their faith, thinking of the immigrant population.

Moving to a more festive environment, we find the chapter on congratulations. In addition to the traditional informative report on Ramadan by Televisión Española from Morocco, and not from closer up, Atlético de Madrid FC deserves its appearance in this section, which this year congratulated Muslims from Twitter in English and Arabic, following the false belief that Islam is something foreign to Spain and ignoring the two million people who could fill the Wanda Metropolitano one Sunday after another.

Real Madrid congratulated Muslims from Saudi Arabia on Ramadan in 2017 with part of the squad, a suggestion from the sponsor that had to change this season.

The sports press is no stranger to dealing with this issue, the same newspaper As published an article this month on the Real Madrid-Liverpool match and the circumstances of Benzema and Salah, always coming to the conclusion that elite sport is not affected by these things for obvious reasons.

Leaving football, institutional congratulations to Muslims are something usual in other latitudes, here they are rare and, therefore, we have to acknowledge it to the military commander of Ceuta, general Alejandro Escámez, who taking advantage of the pages of the newspaper El Faro shared on April 12th that, despite the COVID, "it is still a very special date for the Muslim community, for the military of the garrison that profess this religion, and for all the people of Ceuta that live together in this beautiful city. However, it will be a celebration in which patience, recollection and individual prayer, help for those in need and hope will take on a greater meaning because of this particular situation".

General Escámez took the opportunity "to wish, on behalf of all the members of the General Command, the whole family that makes up the Muslim community of Ceuta, a happy and fervent Ramadan with a happy Aíd al Fitr, bringing peace and joy to their homes and the hope that soon we will see the end of this pandemic and with it the fullness of this celebration will be recovered. Ramadan mubarak". The general knows that there are Spanish soldiers of the Muslim faith in some units, and that it is perfectly compatible to be a Muslim, a soldier in the Spanish army, and to be moved to the point of having a lump in the throat and feeling the Christ of the Good Death of Málaga as his own.

The pandemic caused by COVID-19 has left the way in which religiosity evolves in Spain somewhat open to question, the clear trend of a decrease in religious practice (Catholic marriages, for example) compatible with the boom in participation in its festive expression as a symptom of cultural identity, as it happens with the Holy Week processions. Organised confessions without social rites - limited in times of pandemic - lose much of their meaning, and it is suspected that many participants in religious celebrations do so for reasons other than faith.

In view of the somewhat sterile controversy over whether organised religion favours or penalises individual freedoms, let us say that the Spanish legal framework does not facilitate the social imposition of more or less justified restrictions on religious grounds.

It is different to be a Muslim in Spain or in a mainly Islamic country, the religious offer in Spain is wide, the social pressure is lower, the identity of citizens is diverse and can even change over time, not of confession, but of alternating processions with football matches, political vindication or social or cultural practice.

Silvio Rodríguez used to say: "Where does the common, the everyday go? The barefoot at the door, the friendly hand? Where does the almost daily surprise of the sunset go? Where does the tablecloth on the table, yesterday's coffee?

For two million of our fellow citizens during these days, Ramadan is part of the small and in some cases the large, amidst the disinterest of society and its spokespersons.

Finally, a non-religious reference: the recent birth of the digital newspaper Baynaná (meaning 'between us'), "a bilingual online medium - in Arabic and Spanish - that is committed to social journalism and public service. Our magazine - they define themselves - aims to offer useful information to the Arabic-speaking community in Spain and, at the same time, to build bridges between migrants, refugees and Spanish people of foreign origin and the rest of society".

An example of a rare cultural initiative by the Arab immigrant community in Spain. Religions at their best are culture; and there is also a lot of non-religious culture. 

All bridges are welcome.

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Original text in Spanish. Translation is courtesy of Atalayar magazine, a journalistic bridge between shores and cultures where this article was also published.

Related in Atalayar

• Ramadan in Spain: the balance between religious freedom and restrictions (13.4.2021).
• The month of Ramadan and its celebration during the pandemic (12.4.2021).

Algeria from literature

 

There are few paths like literature for moving through time and space, and for questioning one's own ideas, those of others, whether pinned down or long thought out

The above and the following arise from the novel "Our Riches", by the Algerian Kaouther Adimi, published in Spain in 2018, originally in French a year earlier. The author takes us on a journey to a bookshop in Algiers, from the 1930s to the present, and raises questions.

Literature - Is literature the best way to get to know other cultures? Do the novels of Juan José Millás reflect present-day Spain? Is the aim of a writer artistic or didactic? The reality of Arab societies is generally so intense that it seeps into fiction, although we should probably not ask the novelist to specialise in social, historical or sociological sciences, beyond a certain rigour in his references, the absence of which could call into question the story. Let us enjoy reading fiction, and let us pull the real threads with other disciplines.

Settlers - No two colonial experiences are the same, imposed or suffered, none of them exemplary, and it is often forgotten that past and present colonialism has a fundamental actor in the form of the settlers, up to a million in Algeria, more than a tenth of the population, most of whom left with independence in 1962. The settler is part of a system of institutionalised racism, for which he or she may not be responsible but is often a humble beneficiary. The poor economic profitability of certain colonies for the metropole, such as Algeria or Morocco, is sometimes pointed out, as if greater economic efficiency would have better justified occupation and repression. All colonialisms have fuelled violence plus militarism, and reactionary contestation in the metropole, in France for example behind two coups d'état in 1958 and 1961, linked to Algeria.

One may wonder whether an independent Algeria was ever possible, with that million settlers included, not under apartheid, but as part of a new independent state, all together in a country governed by the laws of electoral majorities; probably violence prevented such a solution, which in other geographies such as Palestine has already become the only option, the alternative being ethnic cleansing.

Adimi's novel reflects in its past references to the Algeria of the colonists, the only ones to enjoy French nationality, which excluded Arabs, indigenous people, Muslims, and included Christians and Jews. In a way, Adimi, born twenty years after independence, can appropriate a cultural tradition that non-French Algerians contemporary to colonisation have not felt as their own. In the novels of Camus or the Tangier-born Ángel Vázquez, the Arabs have no name, they are part of the landscape.

Spaniards in Algeria - The relationship between what is now Spain and Algeria is intense, ancient and unknown, and includes Cervantes held captive in Algiers, Camus' Minorcan mother (Catalina Elena Sintes), Lole Montoya's grandmother (Antonia La Negra, from Oran), Republican exiles, leftist military (some fell there in the seventies), economic immigration for centuries, occupation by the Spanish crown of Oran from 1509 to 1792 (Cisneros, cardinal, inquisitor, regent, went from Toledo to Granada and then to Oran in his own campaign as a conqueror); The Saharan Villa Cisneros, now called Dakhla, pays homage to the man named Captain General of Africa by Ferdinand the Catholic). Spain and Algeria are also linked by two underground gas pipelines, and that unites a lot; although it should also be acknowledged that energy and security issues bring some people, companies and governments closer together, but less so between citizens.

Mediterranean - From Serrat to Camus, there is a Mediterranean myth. Many Arabs know Spain through Barcelona, Alicante has a ferry with Algeria. There are political initiatives between the two shores that fail to weave a network that does exist in regular and irregular labour, sentimentally and culturally.

Identity - Algeria cannot be understood without colonialism (no Arab country, nor France), any more than the US without slavery or Spain without the Civil War, and anyone wishing to approach these countries has to study these phenomenal phenomena, without coming to categorical conclusions, but the approach does shed some light on the scenario.

From possibly opposing camps, colonialism being one of them, it is claimed that Algeria is a French creation, there is no prior Algerian identity, and it is sometimes questioned whether there is even a subsequent one.

Identity is multiple and changing, and as a general rule, Algerian identity is therefore not immutable, one can never say it does not exist. If we refer to national identity, it obviously exists today, but two centuries ago in North Africa it was different, as it was in Spain, with many subjects and few citizens.

Let us recognise that Algeria has a pending transition, the national political references are linked to the war of independence (with an expiry date, that of those who lived through it), where those who do not have it through votes seek their legitimacy (another way is religion) and those who seek the purity of the early days, which does not question the Algerian identity, today with 130 years of colonialism behind it, a violent eight-year process of independence, the revolutionary and non-aligned myth of the 1960s and 1970s, the repression of a particular spring in the late 1980s, a civil war in the 1990s and half of the current population under the age of 25 - all of this is identity, including the hirak, as the popular protest movements that have emerged since February 2019 and forced Bouteflika out of office after two decades at the helm of the country are called.

In contrast to colonial illiteracy, the majority literacy in Arabic and French, total bilingualism, will also have some influence on Algeria's current identity. Spanish is as American language today as French is North African.

All of the above appears on reading the novel by the Algerian Adimi, and also arises thanks to the work of cultural promotion carried out by Silvia Rubio and Maribel González from Separata Árabe, a website and reading club, who recently organised a digital meeting on the novel by Kaouther Adimi with the energy policy specialist Aurelia Mañé; thanks to the four women in this paragraph, Algeria is closer to us today, because we understand it better.

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Original text in Spanish. Translation is courtesy of Atalayar magazine, a journalistic bridge between shores and cultures where this article was also published.

Disinformation and national security

Moncloa (Spanish presidential department) and Defense place the fake news in the field of espionage and cybercrime. 

Image posted in The Economist.

This spring 2020, with the health crisis caused by the disease known as COVID-19, a health specialist - I am sorry I can’t remember her name - commented that we are accumulating information about this coronavirus and its behaviour at a very fast pace, something that was not usual in the past. Globalisation and the speed with which information travels are in favour of health research today; Therefore, we have more and more data, cases and information; but we lack knowledge - she added - we have not yet integrated these initial data into a system of understanding that would allow us to draw conclusions and reduce the risk in decision-making thereafter. Something similar could be said about disinformation / fake news: we have the diagnosis, which is no small thing, we have some partial and decontextualised data, we know the symptoms of the disease but we lack knowledge, analysis and preventive treatment.

It is a fact that distorted information with a specific objective - usually economic and/or political - is a widespread and negative phenomenon of our time, and therefore it is common to see how it appears in every circumstance we live, either in electoral processes, the emergence of political trends, or crises of various kinds that always have political and social effects, regardless of their economic origin or, in this case, regarding health. We therefore now welcome the disinformation linked to the coronavirus, whose less interesting effect is the list of nonsense that has arisen, whether it be the disinfecting power of bleach in the diet, ultraviolet light or the intrigues of the Bill Gates-Miguel Bosé conspiracy.

The treatment of disinformation from a public perspective is of greater interest, whether it is from the field of security, international relations, from the technological point of view, from the European Union or from the essential analysis required by the journalistic profession and those of us who work in some aspect of communication. 

From the security point of view, the Spanish 2020 National Defence Directive was signed at the beginning of June, a document that establishes the lines of action and objectives that the Government-Ministry of Defence is pursuing for the legislature. It is a political communication, always generalist, and novel this time because the document that sets the general lines on defence policy was not elaborated since 2012 (María Dolores de Cospedal went through the Ministry of Defence without setting its political priorities on paper). 

The 2020 National Defence Directive says in a somewhat alarmist way that "the last decade has witnessed substantial changes in the international security architecture, which has resulted in a remarkable erosion of the international order and an unusual prominence of the use of force. It has also profoundly changed the relationship between governments and the governed. The media and digital communications have contributed to these changes. 

Up to this point, a somewhat defeatist and descriptive text, which immediately advances towards not very reassuring statements: "Security challenges now come from both state actors, among whom there is intense strategic competition, and non-state actors (terrorism and organized crime), with a great capillarity between all of them, especially evident in disinformation actions and aggressions in cyberspace". There is no document on security that does not refer today to disinformation, which always appears mixed with cybercrime in an already multiple and powerful threat, without determining the weight of each of the parties. 

"There are no longer problems exclusive to Defence, but Defence is part of the solution to any Security problem" (capital letters in the original), the 2020 National Defence Directive states categorically in a quite successful play on words, adding that "in the scenario that includes the national territory and the spaces of sovereignty and interest -sea, air, and those of cyberspace with a defence dimension- one will usually act with one's own capacities". Defence must then be in the response to disinformation as a threat to our security, with instruments shared within the framework of the EU and NATO, but above all with national means.
We therefore understand that the Ministry of Defence is preparing itself against disinformation, we assume that it will do so by employing hundreds of journalists, however, if the response does not include a specialist in communication on the payroll, we suspect that the interest of Defence is centred on networks, through which information, disinformation, data and the command and control of military systems circulate: "Secure access to networks and the protection of private data, and cyberspace in general, is a key element in the security of the 21st century", adds the 2020 National Defence Directive. 

"The action scenarios for the Armed Forces have increased in complexity since the publication of the last 2012 National Defence Directive (...). In cyberspace and in the field of information it is common for some adversaries to mask their action and keep the application of their strategies within a grey area, located below what they have identified as our response threshold". This means that hybrid conflicts and disinformation are ambiguous scenarios, chosen to avoid direct conflict, which is somewhat contradictory to the alarmist vision oozing from the 2020 National Defence Directive. 

Disinformation is a phenomenon that mainly affects communication, so the Directive is right when the goals are placed there: "In order to deal with hybrid strategies, the aim will be to achieve an appropriate integration of available resources in all areas, whether civil or military, national or multinational, in order to preserve security, improve strategic communication, increase confidence in institutions and foster social resilience". 

An action criterion that must also be shared between departments: "The Government will provide decisive support to the work of the Ministry of Defence for the promotion of the Culture and Awareness of Defence, within the framework of the National Security culture, offering truthful and attractive information, and favouring the knowledge of all Spaniards about the daily activity of their Armed Forces and its repercussion on the protection and promotion of social progress and citizen welfare".
This is the most interesting aspect of the Directive: the Government's commitment to offer truthful and attractive information, the only way to gain credibility and become a reference when we are attacked by a disinformation campaign.

National Security Report

A second indicator after the 2020 National Defence Directive on how disinformation is viewed from the public sphere is the 2019 Annual National Security Report, approved in March, released in May and presented to Parliament in June 2020. In the introduction, the report states that "special mention should be made of hybrid threats, one of its components being disinformation, which, through the manipulation of information on the Internet and social networks, leads to the polarization and radicalization of citizens". Disinformation is therefore defined not as a threat or a challenge, but as an ingredient of hybrid threats. 

"The consolidation of the 'grey zone' on the strategic game board has been established. The new normality (sic) registers daily operations of information, subversion, economic and financial pressure together with military actions, to mobilize and take public opinion to extreme positions, and to destabilize and discredit the institutions that sustain the political regimes of liberal democracies". It is therefore a phenomenon to be taken into account, especially during the last year: "Hybrid threats and disinformation have been elements of priority attention in 2019 in general, as a vector of concern for the citizens; and specifically, with regard to the protection of the integrity of the electoral processes". 

Over the last year, the report mentions some moments in which special caution should be taken, such as the Spanish general elections in April and November; the municipal, regional and European elections in May; a G7 summit in Biarritz in August; and something undetermined in October that seems to be related to the Supreme Court's ruling on the independence process in Catalonia, foreseeing some kind of digital consequence that did not occur: "In the various calls for elections in 2019, information manipulation activities have been detected, which, however, have not constituted sustained or massive disinformation campaigns". In the conclusions, the National Security Report places disinformation -in the company of others- at the head of our concerns: "The factors of greatest concern are those derived from the malicious use of cyberspace. Data theft or access to sensitive information, cyber attacks on critical infrastructure or disinformation are perceived as risks of high impact and high probability of affecting society, businesses and the public administration".
Disinformation is not central to any of the 15 areas of national security developed in the Report, although it appears in many of its 280 pages. Where does the Department of Homeland Security/Government place the disinformation? Preferably in two areas: counter-intelligence, that is, foreign intelligence services, and the field of action of the National Intelligence Centre (CNI) in Spain; and cyber-security, critical infrastructure, computer security, communication networks, a very broad field with a technological-industrial character in terms of the physical channels that support and defend it. 

It would be difficult to include in the previous approach very specific phenomena of disinformation coming from, for example, the extreme right-wing in the country or from allies, or those who practice it for reasons of economic profitability, sometimes combined. With regard to counter-intelligence, it is stated that "disinformation actions deployed mainly in the large online communication platforms, social networks and also in digital spaces" are of particular importance. It is therefore aimed at the stage, not at those who place it there. "This is because of their potential for political destabilization, since they generally seek to discredit democratic institutions by generating mistrust and social polarization, which encourage radical responses and extremist ideologies". 

Therefore, the political polarization pursued by these disinformation campaigns has not acted in the various calls for elections in 2019, which is its time, always considering that the rise of the extreme right in Spain does not rest on these instruments, which it uses profusely, but on others that are unspecified. 

Those responsible for national security who jointly prepare this report do not seem to be very interested in national actors. "The report adds that the case of the different aspects of the so-called Hostile Intelligence Services is particularly relevant, as they began to increase their activity in Spain prior to the crisis in Catalonia, in line with the greater dynamism seen in other Western countries (Germany, the United States, France and the United Kingdom), centering their actions on disinformation campaigns that focus on domestic policy issues, especially in the area of cyberspace". By exclusion, the writer refers to Russia.  

And what has been done? Of special relevance has been the approval by the National Security Council, on March 15, 2019, of the Action Plan against Disinformation. This document does not seem to be one issued at that time by the National Cryptologic Centre (CCN) -attached to the CNI- with some useful tips to deal with disinformation, but rather a document of internal functioning that is not public. The creation of a contact cell recommended by the European Union to countries in order to exchange alerts and information may be related to this Action Plan. With regard to cyber security, the report points out that the vulnerability of cyberspace is the most dangerous risk, given the level of impact and possibility of occurrence. 
Among the achievements, it mentions "combating online disinformation and false news through the Secretariat of State for Communication and the Department of National Security, both belonging to the Government's Presidency". The latter makes more sense, that in the face of an information problem the Secretariat of State for Communication should act, even if it has less glamour than other departments of the General State Administration. 

In various sections of the National Security Report, reference is made to the actions of the European Union on disinformation, as a framework and as national development of guidelines from Brussels, which has been particularly active since 2017 on these issues and drew up an Action Plan at the end of 2018 and recently, on June 10, approved a Communication on the subject. It is not possible here to analyse the development of the EU in this field, of great interest, only to note that the Union has left reports with content on the subject and has focused much of its action on the large digital platforms that support information, disinformation and entertainment.

An important new feature of the 2019 National Security Report is that it incorporates for the first time a perception survey in which a hundred specialists have participated, a kind of analysis of future risks (Horizon 2022), with impact and degree of probability of threats, in which cyberspace occupies the first position. 

The prospective refers to the "analysis of five factors of a predominantly technological nature associated with the vulnerability of cyberspace: access to sensitive information and data, cyberattacks, the illegitimate use of cyberspace to carry out illicit activities such as disinformation, propaganda or the financing of terrorism, cyberattacks specifically directed against critical infrastructure, and threats to security and economic competitiveness arising from disruptive technologies". Too many ingredients in this paragraph to give him accommodation in the same house (in a similar case, El Gran Combo de Puerto Rico sang 'no hay cama pa' tanta gente' (there is no bed for so many people). 

To sum up, the 2019 National Security Report places disinformation as a threat coming from foreign states/intelligence services; and as one of the dangerous phenomena of the digital ecosystem, at the same level as, say, computer viruses that could attack or control a nuclear power plant, the drinking water supply of a large city or the military command and control of a weapons system. 
The previous interpretation would leave out of the phenomenon the national dimension of disinformation (local actors), it does not enter in the way of reinforcing the credibility of the institutions (and of the traditional mass media) or the capacity of the citizen to interpret the avalanche of digital contents; it is also obvious the business dimension that affects today in the form of existential crisis to many of the information producing agents. 

We are told that disinformation is something that comes from outside, it is digital and also extremely dangerous, capable of altering choices and even minds, gigantic generalizations and unproven threats. References to disinformation in national security documents often resemble a rhetorical device, made important by the company because of the cocktail it is said to contain with other dangerous ingredients. 

Disinformation fulfils all the requirements to be used as an almost existential threat, in the heat of the digital ecosystem in which we live; omnipotent, we are told, omnipresent and 24 hours a day active through our mobile phones, and if it is diffuse it is even more threatening, but we can object that as citizens we lack concrete examples that would allow us to gauge its effects; and furthermore we understand that those responsible for public security will have set in motion a response proportional to such an enormous threat, of which we also have no proof. We suspect that our state and armed forces are better equipped for anti-submarine warfare in the mid-Atlantic than for the threats that headline strategic documents. There are undoubtedly studies of interest in the military field on the hybrid threat, the operations of information and influence, the Russian action in Ukraine and China in its waters and islands of interest, we take it for granted that Spain-NATO analyses and applies it in its foreign policy. 

However, perhaps it should be considered a national security objective to empower the citizen to be able to discriminate reliable information from the hoax (media literacy); to promote strategic communication ("truthful and attractive", reliable we would add) of public bodies; critical spirit and knowledge/culture about the cyber-information ecosystem in which we move. Also in this field of disinformation, security seems to move away from the citizen it protects. 

Confusion is the main objective of disinformation and clearing up the confusion should be the first element to fight it.
We must ask each actor, agent, field, for what they are capable of. The media do not have the mission of transmitting reality, but rather exceptionality. The field of security does not seem to be called upon to explain to us what we are facing in terms of disinformation, but rather to warn of the risks, presented with others in a way that is as grey and ambiguous as the threat in which it is framed. 
We will keep on searching.

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Original text in Spanish. Translation is courtesy of Atalayar magazine, a journalistic bridge between shores and cultures where this article was also published.