In late July, tens of thousands crossed from Morocco into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, and at least 72 died. Carlos Martinez asks who really opened the border – and why the resulting crisis fitted so neatly into a wider campaign to punish Spain for its independent stance on Palestine, Iran and China.
This article was first published in the Morning Star.
On 30 and 31 July, something in the region of 60,000 Moroccans crossed into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta. At least 72 died on the Spanish side of the border, drowned in the Mediterranean or crushed in the attempt. Within days, the great majority had returned to Morocco, many of them voluntarily, on account of Ceuta having no work, food or shelter to offer them.
They were overwhelmingly young, poor and unemployed. “Everyone came because there is no work in Morocco”, one 24-year-old told the New York Times. They were not “invaders”; they were workers looking for work, and dozens of them died for it. They deserve our sympathy and our solidarity.
But this was no ordinary movement of people. Tens of thousands do not converge on one of the world’s most heavily fortified borders in a matter of hours by coincidence. The immediate spark was a flood of online messages falsely claiming that a Spanish Supreme Court ruling meant anyone reaching Ceuta by sea would receive papers and employment. The ruling said no such thing.
Besides, rumours alone do not open a militarised border. The decisive factor was the conduct of the Moroccan state. Its normally formidable border apparatus stopped functioning; the authorities failed to warn Madrid about the online mobilisation; and numerous accounts suggest that Moroccan officers actively encouraged people to cross. Indeed, Spanish intelligence has reportedly concluded that Rabat permitted and exploited the crossing.
There is a precedent. In 2021, Morocco relaxed its border controls and thousands entered Ceuta after Spain admitted Brahim Ghali, leader of the Polisario Front (Western Sahara’s liberation movement), for medical treatment. Rabat was using desperate people to punish Madrid over Western Sahara.
The provocation this time was very similar. On 20 July, just ten days before the crossing, Pedro Sánchez travelled to Algiers to announce a “new phase” in relations with Algeria, Morocco’s principal regional rival and the main supporter of the Sahrawi struggle for self-determination. Algeria is also Spain’s largest supplier of natural gas this year, giving the rapprochement considerable economic and strategic weight.
Rabat, then, had reasons of its own to open the border. But the resulting crisis fitted seamlessly into a wider campaign against Spain’s increasingly independent foreign policy.
Madrid recognised the Palestinian state in May 2024 and intervened in support of South Africa’s genocide case against Israel. It has described the destruction of Gaza as genocide, imposed an arms embargo, banned imports from illegal settlements and repeatedly called for European sanctions against Israel.
Spain also refused Washington the use of the jointly operated Rota and Morón bases for attacks on Iran, subsequently closing its airspace to US aircraft involved in a war it described as illegal. It was alone within NATO in rejecting Donald Trump’s demand for military spending to rise to 5 percent of GDP. And on China it has been almost alone in Europe in resisting the tariff war, opposing the EU’s duties on Chinese electric vehicles and treating Beijing as a partner rather than a threat. For a medium-sized member state, this is a remarkable degree of insubordination – and it has not gone unpunished.
Washington’s response has been explicit. Trump threatened to cut off trade with Spain over its refusal to facilitate the attack on Iran. After the Ceuta crossing, he and JD Vance immediately presented the episode as an “invasion” caused by “weak and very liberal laws”, instructing the US right to turn the deaths into a domestic political weapon. Italy’s quasi-fascist prime minister Giorgia Meloni suspended Schengen arrangements with Spain and demanded its expulsion, regardless of the fact that Ceuta and Melilla are not part of the Schengen zone.
The Israeli response was also revealing. Israel’s UN ambassador, Danny Danon, used the crisis to taunt Spain over its “colonial enclaves”. Pro-Israel commentators had already advocated a new Moroccan “Green March” into Ceuta and Melilla as a means of punishing Sánchez and strengthening an ally controlling the entrance to the Mediterranean. Such interventions demonstrate how neatly the resulting crisis aligned with the strategic interests of Israel and the United States.
Morocco has been drawn ever more deeply into that system of strategic interests. In December 2020, it normalised relations with Israel under the Abraham Accords. The price was US recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over occupied Western Sahara, overturning decades of international consensus. Israel followed with its own recognition in 2023, while Israeli drones, air-defence systems and surveillance technology have become pillars of Morocco’s armed forces.
Washington has now begun applying pressure directly to the status of Ceuta and Melilla. In April, a US House appropriations committee described them as cities “under Spanish administration” but “located in Moroccan territory”. This was not the adoption of a new US policy, still less an outbreak of anti-colonial principle. The same administration recognises Morocco’s occupation of Western Sahara and maintains its own colonial possession at Guantánamo Bay – not to mention a global empire of military bases, alliances and client states.
It is of course the case that Ceuta and Melilla are colonial enclaves, relics of the Iberian conquest of North Africa. Like the six counties of the north of Ireland, the Malvinas and the Chagos Islands, they are unfinished business that will eventually have to be settled. But the colonial question must not be reduced to an instrument for disciplining a government that has broken ranks over Palestine and Iran.
The external pressure, moreover, has a domestic twin. For two years the Spanish right has sought to bring the Sánchez government down by means other than the ballot box. A judiciary that the country’s transition to democracy left substantially intact – the same courts that pursued Catalonia’s elected leaders into prison and exile – has opened a cascade of investigations into the prime minister’s wife, his brother and his attorney general, on transparently political charges. The neo-fascist Vox party has made common cause with an international far right movement which cannot tolerate the kind of independent, mildly redistributive government that Sánchez represents. A “mass immigration crisis” is the perfect tool for presenting the government as weak, incompetent and incapable of protecting Spain’s borders.
Morocco has shamelessly exploited the poverty of its own people for its immediate geopolitical purposes, while the US, Israel and the European right are exploiting the resulting spectacle against Spain. None of them care about the lives of the young workers who died in the Mediterranean, nor about the thousands that have lost their lives in the wars the Sánchez government has stood up against.