The recent refugee flow from Morocco to Spain and … Israeli involvement??

I have my reservations these days about the reporting from The Young Turks, especially from their two leading reporters, Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian.

But Cenk and John Iadorola here have a decent discussion of the circumstantial evidence that Benjamin Netanyahu’s government in Israel had something to do with the strange flood of refugees this weekend from Morocco to the adjacent Spanish city of Ceuta.1

A blog entry by Jose Lev Alvarez Gomez at the Times of Israel website also attacks the Spanish government over its handling of the crisis this weekend.2 He sneers out this silly claim: “The Sánchez administration’s border mess is a shameful abdication of constitutional duty that signals a profound strategic weakness. While Morocco’s demographic pressures are real, Spain’s vulnerability is entirely self-inflicted and the direct result of a hollowed-out border security apparatus.”

What is the lesson Alvarez Gomez takes from this? “Morocco should propose a comprehensive Western Mediterranean Security Pact to the United States and the State of Israel under the Abraham Accord framework.”

Yes, Morocco is a participant in the Abraham Accords, one of the seven signatories, the others being Bahrain, Israel, Kazakhstan, Sudan, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and the US.3

It’s important to remember that Ceuta and Melilla are legally parts of Spain, whatever nationalist or moral claims Morocco may assert. The United Nations current list of Non-Self-Governing Territories, i.e., those with unresolved colonial status. Ceuta and Melilla are not among them. Gibraltar, the nearby island territory of Britain, is claimed by Spain. Western Sahara, the territory involved in the dispute between Morocco and Algeria that probably played some role in the short Ceuta crisis over the weekend, is also a Non-Self-Governing Territories on the list.

Alex Milan Durie writes:

Some observers believe that if Morocco did orchestrate the mayhem, it may have been encouraged by others, pointing at two leaders with a particular grudge against Sanchez – US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

[Spanish Prime Minister Pedro] Sanchez is one of Europe’s most consistently pro-Palestinian voices. He has explicitly said Israel’s war on Gaza is genocide, has been highly critical of the US-Israel war on Iran, and refused to allow jointly operated US-Spanish military facilities to be used to facilitate that war. …

Morocco was one of the signatories to the Trump-brokered Abraham Accords, which saw the country normalise relations with Israel in 2020. In return, the Trump administration has provided crucial support to Morocco at the United Nations and through bilateral channels, bringing Rabat closer to securing greater control over Western Sahara.

There is no evidence that Morocco orchestrated events in Ceuta partly on behalf of Israel, just a lot of interesting coincidences.

But whether or not there was any conspiracy, one consequence of the episode is clear – the already frosty relations between the left-wing Spanish government of Sanchez and the far-right Israeli government of Netanyahu are now even chillier.4 [emphasis added]

Ynet News Global, the English online site for the Israeli news agency Yedioth Ahronoth, reports that Morocco is also angry with Israel. Or maybe that’s diplomatic cover for Morocco cooperating with Israel.

Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations Danny Danon also criticized Sánchez on Friday. “Spain, which never misses an opportunity to lecture Israel, has declared a state of emergency in Ceuta following the crisis surrounding its migration policy,” he wrote on X. “Perhaps before it continues lecturing us, it is time for Spain to explain to the world why it still maintains colonial enclaves in Africa.”

Following Danon’s remarks, a Moroccan news site accused Israel of “exploiting the migration crisis in Ceuta to settle scores with Spain.” A Moroccan source told ynet that many Moroccans rejected the description of the event as illegal migration. “Many Moroccans said the incident had nothing to do with illegal immigration, but rather with Moroccans crossing the border into a Moroccan city under Spanish occupation,” the source said.

“They argued that the problem is the occupation itself, not the arrival of Moroccans on their ancestral land [Ceuta].”5

Another Ynet News Global report from April also references the diplomatic opportunities presented to Israel by the cities of Ceuta and Mellilla:

The geopolitical earthquake shaking Washington’s relationship with Madrid has opened an unexpected window for one of the Arab world’s oldest territorial grievances. Spain’s refusal to allow the United States access to its Rota and Morón military bases during the Iran campaign, its consistent failure to meet NATO defense spending targets, and Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s confrontational posture toward the Trump administration have collectively generated something rare in North African affairs: a genuine crack in Spain’s strategic armor over Ceuta and Melilla. Into that crack, Morocco’s most consequential new partner, Israel, is uniquely positioned to press.

The pieces have been assembling for months. In March 2026, Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute, writing through the Middle East Forum, called on the Trump administration to formally recognize Ceuta and Melilla as occupied Moroccan territory, branding Spain “a colonial power running colonies across the Strait of Gibraltar.” Days later, Representative Mario Díaz-Balart, chairman of the House Subcommittee on National Security and one of Marco Rubio’s closest congressional confidants, declared publicly that the enclaves “are not in the geographic territory of Spain” but rather in Moroccan territory, and that their fate should be “established, negotiated, and discussed between friends and allies.” This was not the fringe speaking. This was the architecture of a coordinated strategic repositioning.6 [emphasis added]

Israel even cynically advocates for Muslim Morocco to occupy and annex Ceuta and the similar Spanish enclave of Melilla. Because that’s what Israel has been doing since 1948, just seizing and taking over areas it wants? Like in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and Syria right now?

Not that Spain handling of Ceuta and Mililla has been an example of sterling government. Quite the contrary.

In a 2022 incident, Moroccan police killed at least 27 emigrants trying to leave Moroccan territory to enter Spain. That was the opposite situation to what happened this past weekend, when it’s pretty clear that Morocco actively encouraged a mass rush of refugees into Ceuta – most of which were immediately returned to Morocco.

“It is horrible that the government would congratulate the Moroccan police,” tweeted progressive [Spanish] MP Íñigo Errejón. “Is this what the abandonment of the Saharawi people bought us?” Here he referred to Sánchez’s historic foreign policy shift this February with respect to the former Spanish colony of Western Sahara, which saw him back a plan to formalize Morocco’s brutal occupation regime in exchange for the normalization of diplomatic ties with the authoritarian monarchy [i.e., Morocco’s monarchy]. The move broke with decades of Spanish foreign policy and goes against international court rulings and the position of the United Nations General Assembly that recognizes Western Sahara’s right to self-determination.

In this respect, outsourcing its border security to Morocco has left Spain open to repeated blackmail as Mohammed VI’s government has sought to leverage the issue of irregular immigration against its European neighbor. In May 2021, Morocco opened the border at the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, allowing eight thousand people to cross in just forty-eight hours. This was, in part, retaliation for Spain’s condemnation of Donald Trump’s unilateral recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara. Then in March this year, Sánchez chose to sue for peace after one thousand migrants unsuccessfully tried to scale the fences in Melilla. Spanish intelligence believed that this could be the start of further mass incursions — and in the context of the Ukraine war, a destabilized border was not something Sánchez wanted to countenance.

Although it pulled out in 1975, Spain remains, under international law, the administrative power in Western Sahara, legally responsible for completing the decolonization of this resource-rich territory the land area of Britain. In exchange for selling out the Sahrawi people and turning his back on his country’s historic mandate, what Sánchez got from Morocco was an increased crackdown against irregular immigration, stopping people reaching Spain, with Morocco’s cooperation formally secured in a bilateral agreement on immigration in April. The immediate background to Friday’s killings was the violent dismantling of an immigrant camp close to Melilla on Thursday night by Moroccan police while Spanish and Moroccan police operated together on Spanish soil to immediately remove the vast majority of the five hundred people who scaled the fence. PSOE’s own electoral program contains the promise to end these types of migrant pushbacks, which deny those arriving any due process over the right to seek asylum.7 [emphasis added]

Linda Dyan describes the incident in Haaretz.8 According to her account, there was as many as 60,000 migrants/refugees coming into Ceuta. By seemingly all account, most of them had returned within a day or so, with only a few thousand of the tens of thousands that quickly crossed the border. Given the numbers involved, it’s very reasonable to assume that the Moroccan government actively encouraged the influx, though exactly how is unclear in the reporting.

Whatever role Israel may have played diplomatically is not clear from the current reporting. There are differences between Morocco and Spain over the Western Sahara and Israel does have criticisms of Spain over its public criticism of the genocide in Gaza and Spain’s refusal to allow the US to use its airspace for flights connected to the US-Israel War on Iran. Israel’s government has also shown sympathy for far-right parties in Europe like Germany’s AfD, with whom they find common cause in their Islamophobia – and demagoguery over immigration is a central part of those parties’ political strategies.

So those are legitimate question about Morocco’s and Israel’s role in Ceuta flap this past weekend, so long as we remember the skeptic’s adage that “correlation is not causation.” Dyan dismisses the questions about Israel’s role as a “conspiracy theory.” But she herself speculates that this represents a “weaponization of migrants by Morocco” while citing only the plausible Moroccan motivations already referenced above, including the fact that Morocco is one of the five signatories to the pro-Israel Abraham Accords. Dyan also writes:

… Morocco is a signatory to the Abraham Accords, and the two cooperate on defense and security.

Israel’s Ambassador to the UN Danny Danon didn’t do much to quell the theories. “Spain, which never misses an opportunity to lecture Israel, has declared a state of emergency in Ceuta following the crisis over its immigration policy,” he wrote. “Maybe before it continues lecturing us, it’s time it explained to the world why it still maintains colonial enclaves in Africa.”

In a very recent article for the EJIL: Talk! Blog of the European Journal of International Law, Desislava Dimitrova goes a bit more into some of the international legal issues around refugees in Ceuta and Melilla. Even though Spain has had a more practical and humane policy for normalizing the residency of refugees, the larger problem remains of the EU’s protracted failure to adopt more pragmatic and humane policies for handling refugees:

Border management in Ceuta and Melilla cannot be reduced to mechanisms for the summary return of intercepted migrants. Instead, it must be grounded in safeguards that ensure the effective protection of fundamental rights, while fully complying with the law of the sea. In this context, technological developments can play an important role. Rather than being conceived solely as instruments of border enforcement, they should also be recognized for their potential to protect human life at sea. Realizing that potential, however, requires the prevailing securitarian approach to give way to one centred on the protection of life.9