A crisis without Israel, briefly

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 too, that Spain should keep him out and let the people of Gaza in. Ben Gvir has no foreign policy brief of any kind; his ministry runs the police and the prisons. That is what makes it worse rather than better. A minister with no diplomatic authority whatsoever can spend an afternoon addressing a foreign government in its own language, on a matter in which Israel has no interest at stake, and nobody with the standing to stop him will spend the effort.

I have spent years writing against the Black Legend and years writing against the claim that Zionism is a colonial project, and the two labors have never once come into conflict, because they are the same labor. The method does not vary. A nation is selected, its past is rewritten as a charge sheet, and every subsequent fact is read backwards from a verdict reached in advance. Take one of those machines apart and you can hear the other running in the next room.

So, the colonies. Melilla has been Spanish since 1497, five years after Granada fell and Columbus sailed. Ceuta came to the Spanish crown in 1580 and stayed when the crowns parted in 1640. Both were Spanish before the Alaouites took Fez, and both predate Morocco in any form that would survive contact with a competent lawyer. The cities send deputies to the Cortes and senators to the Senate. Their inhabitants hold European passports and vote in Spanish elections, and a very large share of them are Muslims, which is why Danon’s replies filled overnight with Ceutíes writing in Spanish and English to inform him that nobody has colonized them and to invite him, in terms of varying courtesy, to stop speaking on their behalf. It is an unusual colonial situation in which the natives arrive to defend the empire by name.

Set the dates aside, though, because the dates are the smaller half of the problem. Consider the structure of the accusation. Length of tenure counts for nothing. Citizenship is a costume worn over a conquest. The historical grievance of a neighbouring state outranks the expressed wishes of the people living on the ground, and the map, consulted alone and without reference to anyone’s consent, disposes of the remainder. Change the place names and the case against Israel emerges intact, in the same sequence, with the same moves and the same silences.

Rabat has never recognized Spanish sovereignty over the two cities and shows no sign of intending to. That is not a legal case; it is a grievance, and grievances of that kind do not expire, because nothing in them can ever be satisfied. They are held in abeyance by whoever is strong enough to hold them there. Concede that five centuries of title can be voided by a neighbour’s sense of historical injury and you have not made a narrow observation about the Strait of Gibraltar. You have stated a general rule. General rules travel, and this one travels east.

I am prepared to believe he meant none of it. The likeliest reading of the episode is that Danon holds no view whatever on the Strait of Gibraltar and was simply enjoying himself at the expense of a government that has spent three years enjoying itself at Israel’s. From a private citizen that is sport. From the permanent representative of the State of Israel to the United Nations, it is a diplomatic act, because everything he writes arrives with a flag attached, and the Spaniard reading it at midnight in Ceuta has no way of knowing, and no earthly obligation to work out, where the man’s private amusement ends and his government’s position begins. Ambassadors exist to open doors in foreign countries. Nobody has ever been appointed to close them for entertainment.

The job he holds is among the hardest in Israeli public life. He spends his days in a building where the delegitimization of his country is a standing item on the agenda, argued by professionals and funded by states with nothing else to offer their populations. What they are paid to establish is that Israel is a colonial artefact whose borders are provisional. On Thursday they were sent a free sample, verified badge attached, at no charge and without anybody having asked.

And look what was standing open. Sánchez has spent three years as the most hostile government Israel faces in Europe: the full arms embargo, the ports and airspace closed to anything military bound for Israeli hands, the word genocide deployed in every second speech, the campaign in Brussels to suspend the association agreement, and finally the termination of his ambassador’s posting rather than the dignity of letting it lapse. He is also finished, and Madrid has known it for some time. The Partido Popular leads him comfortably, Vox has consolidated a hard third around seventeen per cent, corruption investigations have worked through his wife, his brother and his party’s former number three, and he must face voters by the summer of 2027.

The Spaniards who will inherit the country from him are the same ones who walk into Madrid television studios to defend Israel and pay a social price for the privilege. They are also, to a man, people for whom Ceuta and Melilla are not a subject that admits of discussion. On Thursday they watched their own government fail to hold a border while people came across it in their tens of thousands — an experience with which Israelis have a certain familiarity — and for a few hours Spanish anger was pointing in exactly the direction Jerusalem has spent three years failing to point it. Danon spent that on a joke, and the joke was not even accurate.

Spanish commentary has already begun assembling a design out of this — Jerusalem and Washington and Rabat moving in concert against Spanish sovereignty, the whole thing arranged in advance. There is no design. Neither man has a Morocco policy or a Spain policy, and on the evidence neither has any particular interest in either country; they had phones and an audience. Two officials reaching the same joke inside a day without needing to consult each other is evidence of a shared reflex rather than a shared plan, and the reflex is the harder problem of the two, because a conspiracy would at least imply that somebody had weighed the consequences before acting.

Sánchez himself, standing in Ceuta on Friday with a crowd shouting at his back, called what had happened a violation of Spain’s territorial integrity. He has spent three years teaching the world that Israeli borders are a crime scene, and it took fifty thousand people on his own coastline to teach him the phrase.

There is a serious alliance available here, and nothing sentimental about it. Spain and Israel are the only two Western democracies whose territorial legitimacy is denied outright, as a standing matter of state policy, by a neighbour. Both are told in the same vocabulary, and frequently by the same institutions, that the ground they hold is held wrongly, that the citizens living on it are settlers under another name, and that any fence raised to defend it is a monument to the original crime rather than a border.

Gideon Sa’ar could have recalled Danon on Friday. Netanyahu could have dismissed a minister with no business speaking for Israeli foreign policy at all. Neither of them moved, and the instruments were all there, which makes the silence a choice rather than an incapacity. The timing accounts for most of it. The Knesset dissolved on 17 July and the country votes on 27 October, so for the next three months every Israeli official with an account and an ambition will be producing material for domestic consumption, and the damage abroad goes into somebody else’s file.

There is no adult in the room. Israeli diplomacy has degraded over three years into something with an entirely different function: a content operation, staffed by people who are rewarded at home for the harm they do abroad and who are never shown the bill.

Both of these governments are on their way out. Sánchez must face voters by the summer of 2027 and trails in every poll not run by the state; the Israeli coalition’s own numbers suggest it will not be forming the next government either. Whoever wins in Madrid and whoever wins in October will inherit two countries with every reason to be useful to each other and no functioning channel through which to try, and between them they will be clearing three years of wreckage that neither of them built. The Spanish right has been making that case for years and getting very little back for it: Ceuta and Jerusalem are defended by the same sentence.