Pedro Sánchez has spent three years making Israel a fixture of Spanish politics. On Thursday, for once, Spain was handed a crisis entirely its own.

There was no Gaza angle. No Israeli was involved at any stage — no Israeli official, no Israeli weapon, no Israeli ship tied up in a Spanish port. Fifty thousand people came across the water into Ceuta, a city of 84,000 with a Spanish garrison in it, most of them swimming round the breakwater at Tarajal, dozens drowning in the attempt. The army was called out. Residents went into the streets to push people back with their own hands. The next day the prime minister flew down to be jeered out of the Palacio de la Asamblea by citizens calling him a traitor to his face.

Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations watched this from New York and decided it needed him.

Spain, Danny Danon posted, never misses a chance to lecture Israel, and had now declared a state of emergency over its own immigration policy; perhaps, before continuing, it might explain to the world why it still keeps colonial enclaves in Africa.

Spain had declared nothing at all. Juan Jesús Vivas, who runs the autonomous city, had spent two days pleading with Madrid for an emergency declaration and had been refused, which was the precise grievance that brought the crowds out to howl at Sánchez when he landed. The ambassador had reached for a fact that did not exist in order to mock a country for possessing it.

The repair work fell, as it usually does, to somebody who had nothing to do with the damage. Dana Erlich has run the embassy in Madrid as chargée d’affaires since Jerusalem recalled its ambassador in May 2024 over the recognition of Palestine; Madrid returned the compliment in March by winding up its own posting in Tel Aviv, so the two countries now conduct their business through deputies. By the middle of Friday she was posting in Spanish that the comment made by Israel’s ambassador to the UN does not represent the position of the State of Israel. She had settled the question once already: asked at a Madrid colloquium in April whether Jerusalem might support Moroccan claims on Ceuta and Melilla, she ruled it out on the spot as irrelevant. It took one afternoon on X to reopen a file she had closed in the spring.

Her statement held for about two hours. That afternoon, Itamar Ben Gvir, the national security minister, published his own message in Spanish, congratulating Sánchez on his profound commitment to immigration and “human diversity” and calling on him to translate words into deeds by opening Spain’s doors to the residents of Gaza who wish to emigrate. Spanish and Palestinian flags at the end, in case anyone had missed the joke. It is not even a new joke. When Madrid barred him from Spanish territory last September he replied, in Spanish then........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)