The Ceuta migrant surge was sold as a border panic. The harder question is who benefited from lighting the fuse.
The recent burst of illegal migration into Spain’s Moroccan exclave of Ceuta was, above all, a sensational media event produced for political effect. It will have lasting consequences, but not in terms of who ended up where: Of the about 50,000 migrants who suddenly, as if on command, stormed Ceuta by land and sea, almost all quickly went back to Morocco. According to the EU’s home affairs commissioner, not a single Ceuta-crasher made it to the European mainland.
In that sense, the whole thing might as well not have happened. Apocalyptic fantasies of Ceuta turning into a wide open gate to the rest of fortress Europe were always, at best, silly: no, you can’t just travel on into Spain from there or to British Gibraltar, for that matter.
Worse, there have been many deliberate attempts at political profiteering by spreading panic. All through the West, figures from across the political spectrum did not miss a beat trying to exploit the Ceuta emergency: In America, President Donald Trump – under pressure from his self-imposed fiasco in Iran – spoke of a “catastrophe” for Spain and predicted even worse to come in the US if voters dare abandon his Republicans in the upcoming midterms. Elon Musk, richest oligarchs in the world, shared a fragment of the not-so-subtly Zionist horror epic “World War Z” to compare the migrants to Zombies.
Meanwhile in NATO-EU Europe, Italy’s leadership under Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni staged some grand, irrelevant theater about the country’s perfectly unaffected borders, while making sour sounds about Schengen this and Schengen that. Not to be outdone, in France the Rassemblement National’s number two Jordan Bardella charged with equal absurdity that Spain’s socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez and his liberal policies had “opened the doors of Europe.”
While especially strident, the EU’s new right was representative of almost everyone else: 22 governments signed a letter “implicitly criticizing” Spain rather than show solidarity with a fellow-EU member. Spain, meanwhile, is not prepared to meekly submit to this intra-Western hazing session. Sanchez has called out international reactions “driven by prejudice, fake news, ignorance or political interest.”
None of the above means that this fresh and unprecedentedly massive – five or six times as large as previous peaks, according to the Wall Street Journal – Ceuta crisis wasn’t real. Indeed, it was real enough to leave at least 67 casualties behind, namely, those migrants who did not manage to breach the Spanish border fortifications and drowned or were crushed to death.
They, however, have met with little interest and no human compassion. Clearly, under Western eyes they are negligible. Western mainstream media and politicians have treated their lives as if they hardly mattered. Almost as if they were, say, Palestinians in Gaza or the West Bank, killed, robbed, and displaced by Israeli genocide and ethnic cleansing.
Which brings us to an especially intriguing aspect of this manufactured panic: Curiously, Israel’s UN representative Danny Danon has felt it is his job to go after Spain as well. “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 declared, adding “maybe before it continues lecturing us, it’s time it explained to the world why it still maintains colonial enclaves in Africa.”
Ceuta and its sister exclave Melilla really are odd historical remnants, no doubt. But to hear an official representative of Israel, a genocidal settler colony led by an indicted war criminal, go on about colonialism is rich. But then, that is Danon’s default style: aggressive, shameless, and dirty.
More serious is the fact that Israel’s UN ambassador has chosen to make this statement when social media are already abuzz with theories pointing to Israel as somehow behind – if not necessarily alone – the storming of Ceuta. In essence, the idea is that the Zionist apartheid state and its international networks have found a way to pay Spain back for its far from perfect but – in NATO-EU Europe – unusual solidarity with Israel’s Palestinian victims. No wonder that many Spanish observers, including the Minister of Transport, believe Israel’s involvement is real in this assault on Spain’s territorial integrity and standing within the EU.
Indeed, Danon’s comment was so revealing that Israel’s ambassador to Spain, Dana Ehrlich, went into damage control mode, posting that Israel’s UN representative does not represent the position of the Israeli government. Make it make sense.
So, what are we supposed to think? That the Israel connection is a mere conspiracy theory? That Danny Danon is simply a self-important and nasty man who couldn’t resist what seemed, to his narrow mind, like a good trolling opportunity? That Israel would never meddle abroad so crudely? Or, perhaps, the Israeli representatives at the UN and in Spain are really delivering a well-coordinated performance where Danon implicitly takes the credit for the Ceuta pay-back and Ehrlich adds the plausible-deniability?
Clearly, there are other causes and culprits in play: Recent Spanish legislation and a finding of the constitutional court are said to have attracted the migrants, even if through a massive misunderstanding or deliberate misrepresentation by migrant smuggling networks. Morocco, too, has a well-deserved reputation for “weaponizing” migrants against Spain to make a point. This time, Rabat may have been sending a signal against Spain’s recent rapprochement with Morocco’s opponent Algeria.
Yet there is substantial circumstantial evidence pointing to Israeli sabotage. For one thing, Israeli and Israel-linked think tankers, such as Michael Rubin at the American Enterprise Institute and Amine Ayoub at Ynet, have a record of suggesting to use US influence and Morocco to, in effect, storm the two Spanish exclaves with the help of civilian masses. Likewise, the son of Israeli Prime Minister and wanted war criminal Benyamin Netanyahu has urged “Arabs” and “Muslims” to “free” the Spanish territories. In general, Morocco and Israel are indeed close de facto allies, connected through security, intelligence, and arms production projects.
The likeliest explanation for the Ceuta assault and its lethal consequences may well be a combination of factors. Yet the real question is not simply which causes contributed to this fatal outcome, but whether they came together spontaneously or by design. Was there a trigger or a catalyst? If there is one thing the genocide in Gaza should have taught everybody then it is that when Israel announces a crime, it will follow through and commit it. With that in mind, it is naïve to rule out the very real possibility that Ceuta was an Israeli psy-op against Spain, at the cost of dozens of lives no one in Europe seems to care about.
