In the small Basque town of Otxandio, there is a plaque to mark the first ever bombing of a civilian population in Europe from the skies. The slaughtering of sixty-one residents on July 22, 1936, heralded a new type of warfare that is today all too familiar.

The Basque Country, which spans the Spanish-French border, was then a key front in the fighting between Francisco Franco’s fascist forces and the Republican-led resistance. Just over a year after the bombing of Otxandio, Pablo Picasso painted his Guernica about another Basque town razed to the ground by the Nazi Luftwaffe.

Today, replicas of Picasso’s painting appear in Palestinian colors in the many Basque protests against Israel’s aerial slaughter of Gaza. Given Basques’ own modern history, they are reliably found countering the drums of war, wherever they are beating. When Spain voted to join NATO in a 1986 referendum, its Basque territory (known as the Basque autonomous community) and Catalunya alone said “no.”