Ceuta as a geopolitical lesson: how the US and Israel “punish” Spain

In Ceuta, Israel and the United States are sanctioning Spain for its support of Palestine and its refusal to join the war against Iran.

An ambassador hurling insults on one side; on the other, a president issuing threats. Following this, a border that collapses overnight. None of this is a coincidence. Madrid is paying a price. The price of its refusal to kneel. This price, presented on the beaches of Tarajal, bears a three-pronged signature: Rabat, Tel Aviv, Washington.

The night Morocco looked away

On Thursday, July 30, the Tarajal River collapsed. Sixty thousand people crossed in twenty-four hours what years of police cooperation had kept hermetically sealed. Dozens of bodies were recovered from the sea. The Spanish army was overwhelmed. A coincidence, some might say. But in geopolitics, coincidence always carries a date. And this date came four months after Madrid closed its ports to Israeli ships. Three months after Spain proposed suspending the association agreement between the European Union and Israel. Morocco didn’t improvise that evening. It simply withdrew its hand. And since 2020, that hand has held a specific deal: American recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara in exchange for guarding the Spanish borders. Rabat is doing a favor for whoever has rewarded it. And this favor is paid for in bodies thrown into the water, in teenagers rushed toward fences, in a diplomacy that prefers drowning lives to admitting its calculations. The US House of Representatives had already prepared the ground by describing Ceuta and Melilla as “Moroccan territory”: an apparently innocuous phrase, in reality a signal sent to Rabat, a blank check distributed ahead of time.

This critical situation has provoked immediate reactions. Juan Jesús Vivas, president of Ceuta, warned: “The situation is untenable.” Pedro Sánchez, the Spanish Prime Minister, denounced “an attack on Spain’s territorial integrity” and a “rather asymmetrical” European response. Óscar Puente, the Spanish Minister of Transport, observed, “Well, everything seems to be becoming quite clear,” while Santiago Abascal, leader of Vox, called the influx an “invasion.” The CIDOB (a Spanish think tank) saw it as an “instrumentalization of migration” between states, and the Northern Observatory for Human Rights (a Moroccan NGO) criticized: “This silence constitutes a disregard for society’s right to........

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