Danon Did Sánchez a Favor
Israel is right to despise Pedro Sánchez. But mistaking him for Spain, and cheering an assault on Spanish soil, is a gift to the very forces pulling the two countries apart.
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On July 30, I was in Cambridge for Jonathan Spyer’s lecture, “A Strategic Overview of the Middle East”, when my phone filled with images of Ceuta overwhelmed once again: within hours, tens of thousands of people crossed the Spain-Morocco border into a Spanish city of 85,000. By the time it ebbed, more than seventy were dead, shops had been looted, and residents had shut themselves indoors. Whatever one thinks of the Spanish government, this was no occasion for satisfaction.
I know Ceuta. I was there in 2025, and what stays with me is the depth of Spanishness packed into those nineteen square kilometers. This is a city whose people feel profoundly and proudly Spanish and have no intention of being anything else, and not only its Christians. I met Jews who still live there, and Muslims whose contempt for Mohammed VI and whose social conservatism had made the Spanish right their natural political home. That texture matters, because within hours of the crisis the city was being described from abroad as something it is not.
The description came from Danny Danon, Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations. As Spain deployed troops, he took to X to accuse it of hypocrisy and to ask why a country that “never misses an opportunity to lecture Israel” still maintains what he called “colonial enclaves in Africa”. Sánchez’s transport minister, Óscar Puente, amplified the moment by reposting Danon with the cryptic line that things were “becoming quite clear”, feeding a wave of conspiracy theories that Israel and the United States had somehow engineered the crisis.
Danon should know better, and as a diplomat he does. Ceuta has been Spanish since 1580, centuries before the modern Kingdom of Morocco existed and long before the nineteenth-century scramble for Africa the word is meant to evoke. It does not appear on the UN list of Non-Self-Governing Territories, unlike Western Sahara. Its residents are full (and proud) Spanish and EU citizens who vote and govern themselves. A Moroccan claim does not turn an integrated Spanish city into a colony.
What struck me about Danon’s post was not its content, which some of my Israeli friends and loved ones have unfortunately echoed since Sánchez made himself Israel’s noisiest adversary in Europe. It was how self-defeating it was. Israel’s own government moved to disown it: the mission in Madrid stated that the ambassador’s words did not represent the State of Israel. When your foreign ministry has to walk back your UN envoy within hours, you have not scored a point; you have handed one to your enemy. And the disavowal reached only so far: as it walked Danon back, National Security Minister Ben Gvir was sarcastically congratulating Sánchez on the influx, cementing the very impression Israel should have wanted to dispel, that its government was gratified by the ordeal of a Spanish city.
I know the damage that campaigns against Israel leave behind. During my years in academia, I could not stomach the Antisemitism that swept campuses after October 7. I condemned the “Zionists out of the university” signs, joined a network of scholars documenting the targeting of Jewish students and professors, and lived, alongside Spain’s Jewish community, through the graffiti, the slogans, and the fear that so many of us have carried since that day. I am not a hostile witness. And precisely because I am not, I want to be blunt: the strategy Israel’s government seems to be pursuing toward Spain is a mistake.
The provocation from Madrid is real. Sánchez and his hard-left partners have turned condemning Israel into a near-obsession, as the law closes in on his circle: his wife faces trial, his brother has been convicted in the first instance, and his former minister and closest lieutenant was just sentenced by the Supreme Court to more than twenty-four years for corruption. The incentive to change the subject is obvious. And every time an Israeli official treats Spain as an enemy, Sánchez wins the argument he has been making all along.
But look at what surrounds the quarrel. For six years Washington has drifted toward Rabat, beginning with Trump’s recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara, the price of Morocco joining the Abraham Accords. This spring a House Appropriations Committee report, carried by the Republican majority, described Ceuta and Melilla as cities “located in Moroccan territory” and backed diplomacy over their “future status”. Its author later insisted the language was merely geographic and did not question Spanish sovereignty; that a US congressional document required such a clarification at all is the point. As for what set off this particular crisis, most analysts point to Sánchez’s energy courtship of Algeria days before the border broke. None of this is new: migration is the lever Rabat reaches for whenever it wants to pressure Madrid. In 2021, Spain admitted the Polisario leader for medical treatment, Morocco opened the border, and within a year Madrid had dropped its neutrality on the Sahara. To many in Spain, the logic looks plain: Morocco gives Washington and Jerusalem what they want, and they endorse or stay silent on its claims. Spain pays for it.
This is the shift Spaniards are only beginning to grasp. Madrid long assumed that NATO made any real Moroccan move on Ceuta and Melilla unthinkable, an assumption that rested on the United States. When Washington tilts to Rabat and Israeli officials line up behind Morocco’s framing, that assumption erodes, and the natural constituency for a warm Spain-Israel relationship, the Spanish right and center-right, begins to cool. And not only in Spain: Ceuta is an EU external border, and its breach pulled in the whole Union, with twenty-two governments demanding emergency talks. The European right that has been Israel’s firmest friend on the continent is watching Israeli officials side with the state that just forced open Europe’s border. It has happened before: in 2019 the Spanish right itself condemned Netanyahu’s son Yair for suggesting Spain should “give away” Ceuta and Melilla. Today it is being told, by the very people it hoped to build with, that its borders are negotiable.
I understand the timing; Israel votes on October 27, and no candidate wants to be seen winking at Spain, least of all Netanyahu, whose word would carry the most weight. And I understand the feeling beneath it: after two years of Sánchez insulting and lecturing Israel, a wounded public may watch these images and feel a flash of vindication. The anger is legitimate; the impulse is human. But it should not be aimed at Spain, or at the many Spaniards who reject Sánchez and are working to repair the relationship. And the damage will outlast Sánchez. He may not last long, and the government likeliest to replace him, the very right Israel should want in Madrid, would inherit scorched earth. Rise above it.
Criticize Sánchez all you want, but distinguish the government from the people, and both from the country. The Spaniards still holding the door open are fewer than Jerusalem assumes, and fewer with every official who treats a Spanish border as expendable. Should the Spanish right conclude that Israel regards Spanish sovereignty as negotiable, the partnership will not outlast the conclusion, not as retaliation, but as arithmetic: too few will be left to make the case.
