Pedro Sánchez’s former transport minister and right-hand man, José Luis Ábalos, has spent months in a cell, and prosecutors want to put him away for twenty-four years. The man who ran the Socialist party machine as its number three, Santos Cerdán, was jailed too, released only weeks before the law would have forced it. The prime minister’s wife has been indicted on four separate counts. His brother went on trial last week. His predecessor and political mentor, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, is under investigation over a murky airline bailout. And a businessman named Víctor de Aldama has gone before the Supreme Court and testified, under oath, that the man at the top of the whole operation — number one, above the minister and the minister’s bagman — is Pedro Sánchez himself.

On the 27th of May, the Civil Guard walked into the Socialist Party headquarters in Madrid and started carrying out boxes. They were after evidence of illegal financing, of bribery, of an organized effort to derail the corruption cases already bearing down on the party. A crowd gathered on the pavement and chanted a single word up at the windows. Chorizos. Thieves.

That is Pedro Sánchez at home. Now look at what he does abroad.

For two years, he has been the loudest anti-Israel voice in Western Europe. He recognized a Palestinian state in the middle of a war that Hamas started. After that came the demands for an arms embargo, the genocide accusations from one podium after another, the months-long effort to get the Jewish state barred from every gathering with a television camera nearby. Any time there was a chance to lecture Israel in the rented vocabulary of human rights, Sánchez took it. He was doing precisely that, as it turned out, while the Civil Guard was busy photographing his wife’s files.

This is seldom an accident. I’ve come to think it’s the most reliable rule we have in politics.

Where a man stands on Israel is the single most useful thing you can learn about him. Israel isn’t the only thing that matters, obviously. But hostility to it keeps very particular company, and it almost never shows up by itself. Find me a Western politician who built his brand on hating Israel, and I’ll show you, nine times out of ten, a country that came out the far end of his time in office poorer and more dangerous than he found it, with a fair slice of the public money gone missing on the way.

Let me be exact about this, because the rule only runs in one direction. Being pro-Israel doesn’t make a man good. There are pro-Israel politicians who are fools and grifters and worse — a soft spot for Jerusalem has never cured anybody of stupidity. So the test tells you nothing comforting about the people who pass it. Its whole force is in the ones who fail. The moment a politician makes anti-Zionism his public identity, you can bet the mortgage he is the worst option on the ballot, and that whoever stands against him, whatever that person’s........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)