Soccer Football – Champions League – Paris St Germain v Atletico Madrid – Parc des Princes, Paris, France – November 6, 2024 A banner on support of Palestine is displayed in the stands before the match. Photo: Reuters/Stephanie Lecocq

In 2019, former Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador formally asked Spain to apologize for abuses committed during his country’s conquest of Mexico. At the center of that request is Spain’s role in the destruction of the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, in 1521—an event that marked the beginning of Spanish colonial rule on the site of what is now Mexico City.

Current President Claudia Sheinbaum has continued to press the issue, and Spain’s King Felipe VI recently said that the conquest “didn’t work out as originally intended and there was a lot of abuse.”

Sheinbaum acknowledged that the remark fell short of a full apology, but nevertheless called it a gesture of reconciliation that would help improve relations between their two countries. For her, this gesture served to validate and dignify Mexico’s indigenous population, and help ensure that history is viewed not only from the perspective of the colonizers but of the colonized as well.

Even though these events occurred centuries ago, the argument for apology rests on the idea that nations, like corporations, have a kind of legal and historical continuity. States endure beyond the lifetimes of their citizens. Laws persist, institutions evolve rather than disappear, and national identity is transmitted across generations. Spain’s monarchy, like the Spanish state itself, presents itself as an institution of deep historical continuity. With that comes responsibility as well.

But this logic raises a fundamental problem. The individuals responsible for the conquest are long dead, and those offering apologies today played no role in those events. If individuals cannot inherit guilt from their parents, on what basis can entire nations inherit moral responsibility for actions taken centuries ago?

This sits uneasily with a core principle of modern human rights: that individuals are born free and equal, responsible for their own actions, and should not be judged based on the deeds of others. Once we depart from that principle, we begin to assign moral status not by what people have done, but by who their ancestors were.

More broadly, an emphasis on inherited guilt encourages us to look backward for solutions to present problems. When we encounter injustice today, should our first question be who to blame in the distant past — or what we can do now to make things better? A politics rooted in historical grievance risks creating an endless cycle of accusation and counter-accusation, with no endpoint.

This dynamic is visible in debates over Israel and the Palestinians. Some Palestinian activists center their narrative of the “Nakba,” arguing that peace requires addressing what they view as historical injustices from 1948. On the other side, many emphasize Jewish historical and indigenous claims stretching back millennia, arguing that recognition of that history is essential to any resolution, as well as Jewish presence in the land before 1948. These competing historical frameworks can be difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile.

It would be more fruitful to focus on what political arrangements would best advance the rights of all people living today, regardless of ethnicity. But we can only do that if we are willing to recognize each person as a new individual, equally worthy of freedoms and protections, regardless of what we believe their ancestors may have done.

If we extend the logic of historical responsibility consistently, it becomes impossible to sustain. For example, at the Passover seder we recount the story of the ten plagues. If modern Spain bears responsibility for destruction five centuries ago, should Israel, by the same logic, be forced to apologize to Egypt for the excess suffering described in that story?

And if Israel must apologize for the plagues, then Egypt should also apologize for its original enslavement of the Israelites. How would such a process begin — and where would it end? Is this really what we want to argue about? Current times present us with enough problems without importing conflicts from the past as well. The question for Spain and Mexico, as well as Israelis and Palestinians, is not how to assign guilt for the distant past, but how to uphold the rights and dignity of people living today.

Shlomo Levin holds a Master’s in International Law and Human Rights from the United Nations University for Peace and uses fiction to examine the tension between human rights theory and practice. Find him at www.shalzed.com.