I am late to this – partly because I was away on summer vacation, but also deliberately so, because the sheer density of bad analysis, conspiratorial reasoning, and historical amnesia that followed the events of July 30-31 in Ceuta required something that the commentariat has been conspicuously unwilling to provide: patience.

So here, two weeks after approximately 70,000 Moroccans crossed into a city that sits on Moroccan soil and has sat on Moroccan soil since before Spain existed as a unified kingdom, is what the Ceuta episode actually reveals – and it has nothing to do with the fantasies that consumed social media in the days that followed.

The first revelation is the one that Madrid has spent five centuries avoiding: Spain is a colonial power in Africa, and no amount of progressive rhetoric about Palestinian liberation can obscure this fact. Pedro Sánchez is the same prime minister who recognized the State of Palestine in May 2024, labeled Israel a “genocidal state,” canceled arms deals with Tel Aviv, dispatched a Spanish naval vessel to escort the Sumud Flotilla, joined South Africa’s genocide case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), and positioned himself as one of Europe’s most vocal champions of anti-colonial principle.

I anatomized this contradiction at length in September 2025, in a more searching indictment published on The Times of Israel Blogs under the title “Spain Condemns Israel While Occupying Moroccan Land.” The paradox was no less damning then; time has merely stripped it of whatever fig leaf of plausibility remained.

Yet his government rules two cities on the African continent acquired by Spain through conquest centuries ago, and has refused, with a consistency that transcends left and right, every suggestion that this arrangement might constitute precisely the kind of colonial occupation he so readily denounces when Israel does it.

The historical irony is sharper than the familiar claim that “modern Morocco only appeared in 1956” suggests. Morocco’s political history stretches back to the Idrisid state founded in 788, making Moroccan statehood centuries older than the political unification of Spain. Spain itself emerged gradually: the dynastic union of Castile and Aragon began with the 1469 marriage of Isabella and Ferdinand, Granada fell in 1492, and political centralization remained incomplete until the Nueva Planta decrees of........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)