Welcome to the Eurointelligence podcast. My name is Wolfgang Munchau and with me are Susanna Monsenk and Jack Smith.

Today we would like to talk about Europe and the Israel-Palestine conflict. We hear from Spain that Petro Sanchez may be ready to recognize Palestine, a position that is clearly not supported by a majority of EU member states.

Also, the student demonstrations that started on U.S. campuses

have now spilled over to European universities.

All of this will have consequences for European politics

and for European foreign policy.

Jack, what happened in Spain?

The Spanish government has basically taken a stance that's kind of more overtly in favor of recognizing a Palestinian state than other large EU countries.

And we've seen kind of basically media reports in Spain over the last

day or two that the Spanish government might consider with a few other EU countries unilaterally

recognizing Palestine, and that this could happen relatively soon. I think it was El Pais that

was reporting that they were considering the date, which coincides

with the last kind of EU council meeting before the European elections as the 21st of May.

Now, this is kind of interesting because the general consensus position within the European

Union on recognizing a Palestinian state is that they all view the two-state solution as like a desirable

angle, but it is an angle for some time hypothetically in the future when there is a more

definitive peace agreement between Israel and Palestine, and it's not for, you know, now, which is

incidentally also the position that the Spanish opposition takes. But this would be kind

of breaking cover on it.

It would be a really big step, but I guess from this particular Spanish government, not

particularly surprising. Also, it's worth saying we've talked in the podcast before about

deadlock and basically the political environment in Spain. In some ways, parliamentary room for

...