CEUTA, SPAIN, ISRAËL,Palestine
Ceuta: When Spain Is Caught Up by History
Colonial Spain, Israël, Palestine : the language of occupation
The spectacular migrant influx that has just hit Ceuta is more than another crisis on Europe’s borders. It highlights three issues that should not be considered separately: the vulnerability of Europe’s border with Morocco, the possible use of migration as an instrument of political pressure, and, more fundamentally, the question of sovereignty over Spain’s two enclaves in North Africa.
That last issue inevitably leads to an uncomfortable comparison for Madrid.
Under Pedro Sánchez, Spain has become one of the European countries most critical of Israel, regularly denouncing the “illegal occupation” of Palestinian territories and Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
Yet when it comes to Ceuta and Melilla, Madrid invokes precisely what it tends to downplay when discussing Israel: history.
Ceuta: A Border That Vanished Within Hours
On July 30, 2026, tens of thousands of people, primarily Moroccans, entered Ceuta from Morocco within a matter of hours.
The scale was extraordinary. The most recent estimates put the number of entries at approximately 72,000 in 24 hours — nearly equivalent to the population of the Spanish city itself.
Most subsequently returned to Morocco. But the episode left dozens dead, mainly from drowning, while Ceuta was forced to deal with a large number of unaccompanied minors.
How could an external border of the European Union, normally closely monitored on both sides, virtually disappear for several hours and then become controllable again?
The question remains open.
A Court Decision Turned Into a Pull Factor
A few weeks earlier, Spain’s Supreme Court had issued an important ruling concerning migrants attempting to reach Ceuta or Melilla by sea.
The court did not, of course, rule that entering Spain illegally by sea had suddenly become legal.
It did, however, hold that people intercepted at sea could not automatically be subjected to the special “border rejection” procedure applicable to certain attempts to cross the land barriers.
Instead, they must be handled under the ordinary return procedure and receive the legal safeguards that come with it.
The distinction is important in law.
It becomes far less clear when compressed into a few seconds on social media.
Messages quickly circulated in Morocco suggesting that reaching Ceuta by sea would now make it possible to avoid immediate return.
Testimony gathered after the events indicates that this interpretation contributed to the movement.
Spain’s Regularization Program: Beware of Shortcuts
Another piece of information was circulating at the same time: the Sánchez government’s decision to carry out a major regularization of undocumented immigrants.
The measure is real and could affect several hundred thousand people.
But it does not apply to migrants who have just arrived.
Applicants must, among other requirements, demonstrate that they were present in Spain before January 1, 2026.
It would therefore be inaccurate to claim that the regularization program legally opened the door to migrants arriving in Ceuta in July.
Its psychological impact is harder to measure. Between the precise content of a law and the way it is perceived hundreds or thousands of miles away, there can be a considerable gap.
Was Morocco Simply Overwhelmed?
A much more sensitive question remains.
How were tens of thousands of people able to converge on one of Morocco’s most closely monitored border areas without being stopped by Moroccan authorities?
There is currently no publicly available evidence proving that Rabat organized the operation.
It would therefore be imprudent to make that claim.
But the speed with which Morocco subsequently restored control demonstrates at least one thing: Moroccan cooperation is indispensable to protecting this European border.
More importantly, there is a precedent.
The 2021 Precedent
In May 2021, thousands of people had already crossed into Ceuta from Morocco.
The episode occurred during a serious diplomatic confrontation between Rabat and Madrid after Spain agreed to provide medical treatment to Brahim Ghali, the leader of the Polisario Front, the Western Sahara independence movement opposed by Morocco.
At the time, the European Parliament used unusually explicit language.
In a resolution adopted on June 10, 2021, it condemned Morocco’s use of border controls and migration as an instrument of political pressure against a European Union member state.
The possibility that migration can be used as leverage is therefore not a theory invented after the latest crisis.
There is a precedent, and it was formally acknowledged by a European institution.
A European Border Whose Key Lies in Morocco
Ceuta reveals a reality that is rarely expressed so plainly.
Spain’s border is not protected solely by Spanish police officers, fences and surveillance technology.
It also depends on Morocco’s willingness to prevent departures.
When Rabat cooperates, the border holds.
When that cooperation weakens, Spain immediately discovers its vulnerability.
Morocco therefore possesses a particularly powerful means of leverage. It does not need to challenge Spanish control of Ceuta or Melilla militarily. It need only demonstrate what could happen if it stopped preventing people from entering the European Union.
This is where the migration crisis intersects with the territorial question. One more question is raised : is the European Union associated with colonialism remnants ?
Ceuta and Melilla: Who Owns History?
For Spain, the answer is straightforward: Ceuta and Melilla are Spanish.
Melilla has been under Spanish sovereignty since 1497. Ceuta was conquered by Portugal in 1415 before eventually passing under Spanish rule, which Portugal formally recognized in the 17th century.
Madrid therefore emphasizes that its presence in these territories predates the independence of modern Morocco in 1956 by several centuries.
That is not an insignificant argument.
In effect, Spain is saying that a sovereignty established over several centuries cannot simply be dismissed as a contemporary colonial occupation.
But the argument becomes politically interesting when compared with Spain’s rhetoric toward Israel.
Spain, Israel and the Language of Occupation
Under Pedro Sánchez, Spain has adopted one of Europe’s most critical positions toward the Israeli government.
Madrid formally recognized the State of Palestine in May 2024. The Spanish government condemns Israeli settlements in the West Bank and refers to an illegal occupation of Palestinian territories.
It should immediately be noted that Spain also recognizes Israel’s right to exist and condemned the massacres perpetrated by Hamas on October 7, 2023.
The issue, therefore, is not Spain’s right to criticize Israeli policy.
It is the reasoning it employs.
If historical continuity is an essential element in Spain’s defense of Ceuta and Melilla, history can hardly become irrelevant when the subject turns to Israel.
The History of the West Bank Did Not Begin in 1967
One simplification must first be discarded.
Israel did not conquer the West Bank in June 1967 from a sovereign Palestinian state.
Following the 1948-49 war, the West Bank and East Jerusalem came under Jordanian control.
On April 24, 1950, Jordan formally united the two banks of the Jordan River, effectively annexing the West Bank.
That annexation received extremely limited international recognition and was itself challenged by several Arab states.
For nearly 19 years, therefore, the West Bank was administered by Jordan. No sovereign Palestinian state existed there.
Then came June 1967.
During the Six-Day War, Israel captured the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan.
The situation created by that war forms the basis for the contemporary international legal characterization of the West Bank as occupied territory. That designation is used by the United Nations and has been affirmed by the International Court of Justice.
The point here is not to dispute that legal characterization.
But a current legal classification and the historical chronology that preceded it are not the same thing.
Describing the West Bank today as occupied territory does not mean that, before 1967, it was the sovereign territory of a Palestinian state whose existence Israel then extinguished.
The history is considerably more complicated.
Nor Did That History Begin in 1948
One must go back much further.
The Jewish people’s connection to this region did not begin with the establishment of the State of Israel.
The kingdoms of Israel and Judah are part of the documented history of the ancient Near East.
Jerusalem was already the political and religious center of the Kingdom of Judah centuries before the Christian era and more than a millennium before the emergence of Islam.
Successive Babylonian, Persian, Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Crusader, Mamluk, Ottoman and British rule profoundly transformed the region.
The Jewish population experienced conquest, destruction, expulsions and diaspora.
But the Jewish people’s historical and religious connection to the land never disappeared, nor did Jewish presence in the region disappear entirely.
None of this means that antiquity alone can determine the borders of the 21st century.
No contemporary territorial conflict can be resolved simply by identifying which people arrived first.
But that argument cuts both ways.
When Madrid Chooses the Date on Which History Begins
This is where Spain’s contradiction becomes apparent.
When discussing Ceuta and Melilla, Madrid asks Morocco to look back five centuries.
When discussing Israel, European political debate is far more inclined to begin the clock in 1967 — sometimes in 1948.
History cannot be divided into convenient segments according to the conclusion one wishes to reach.
If five centuries of Spanish sovereignty are relevant when answering Morocco’s accusations of colonialism, nearly three millennia of Jewish history in the region cannot simply be treated as irrelevant when the vocabulary of colonialism is applied to Israel.
That does not automatically legitimize every Israeli settlement in the West Bank.
It does not determine the borders of a future Palestinian state.
Nor does it erase Palestinian history or Palestinian rights.
But it does make historically problematic any narrative in which Jews are portrayed simply as European outsiders who arrived in the 20th century to colonize a land to which they had no previous connection.
Israeli government policy can be condemned without rewriting Jewish history.
From Ceuta to Jerusalem: The Limits of the Colonial Paradigm
Ceuta thus holds up an unexpected mirror to Spain.
Madrid rejects the Moroccan argument that because Ceuta and Melilla are located in Africa, they naturally belong to Morocco and Spanish sovereignty must therefore be a colonial remnant.
Spain answers with law — but also with history.
It points to five centuries of sovereignty, a Spanish population, Spanish institutions, and political and territorial continuity.
That defense is perfectly understandable.
But it should also encourage Madrid to exercise greater caution when applying the concept of colonialism elsewhere.
Israel differs fundamentally from the classic European colonial model in one essential respect: the Jewish people have a historical, religious, cultural and political connection to the land that predates the modern State of Israel by millennia.
The legal status of territories captured in 1967 can be debated.
Borders can be debated.
Settlements can be debated.
The right of Palestinians to a state can be defended at the same time.
But describing Jewish presence in the region indiscriminately as a colonial enterprise requires erasing an essential part of history.
Ceuta, Europe’s Laboratory
The current crisis ultimately extends far beyond the few square miles of Ceuta.
First, it demonstrates Europe’s dependence on neighboring countries that, in practice, hold back migration flows before they reach European borders.
Second, it shows how rapidly migration can become an instrument of foreign policy.
But it also reminds us that a border is never simply a line on a map.
It is the product of law, war, history and power.
Spain understands this better than many European countries. It possesses two cities on the African continent whose sovereignty it defends in part by invoking centuries of history.
Ceuta and Melilla are not the West Bank, and their legal situations are not identical. Any attempt to equate them would be artificial.
But the intellectual principle remains.
One cannot invoke history when it strengthens one’s own sovereignty and then decide that history begins in 1967 when it complicates someone else’s.
Ceuta ultimately reminds us of a simple rule: history alone does not create contemporary law.
But once history is called as a witness in defense of one’s own borders, it becomes difficult to ask it to leave the courtroom when someone else’s borders are at issue