- Hostile and conspiratorial commentators have rushed to cast the mass crossing into Ceuta as a calculated Moroccan maneuver, yet a sober reading of the facts shows a state doing its best to manage an unprecedented dilemma
From a political and geopolitical perspective, there is no doubt that Ceuta and Melilla are an integral part of the territorial dispute that has long persisted between Morocco and Spain, and especially since Morocco’s independence. Yet for several decades now, Moroccan foreign policy has given absolute priority to the Western Sahara question, treating it as the North African kingdom’s foremost national cause. This is a point I have made at length elsewhere, and it bears repeating here because it is the interpretive key to what follows. My point, to put it bluntly, is that whoever sets out to make genuine sense of what has happened in Ceuta ought to know or have a historical sense of how Morocco operates as a state. Rabat does not improvise its grand strategy, and it does not sacrifice decades of careful diplomatic sequencing for a single tactical opportunity, however tempting that opportunity might appear to outside observers scrambling for a narrative.
It is against this historical and strategic backdrop that I want to examine, soberly and methodically, the events that unfolded around Ceuta between July 29 and 30, when tens of thousands of people crossed into Spanish territory in the span of roughly forty-eight hours. It is hardly a surprise that the episode has generated a cascade of conspiracy theories, each more creative than the last. Some claim Morocco engineered the crossing to force progress on Ceuta and Melilla. Others allege coordination between Rabat, Israel, and Washington to punish Madrid for its positions on Palestine and the raging – and stagnating – war on Iran. Still others insist Morocco used migration as blackmail to remind Spain’s prime minister, who recently visited Algiers, Rabat’s nemesis in the Western Sahara file and the larger struggle for regional primacy, of the critically strategic leverage Morocco holds over Spanish security policy. I intend to examine each of these theories in turn, and to show why none of them survives serious scrutiny once placed within their proper legal, historical, and political context.
A partnership of equals
Before fully addressing any of these specific theories, it is worth restating a structural fact that most media coverage conveniently omits. And this is that the success of the entire Spanish and European approach to irregular migration in the western Mediterranean depends overwhelmingly on Morocco’s good faith and active cooperation. And this is a reality Morocco has upheld even though the financial support it receives from the European Union bears little relation to what it actually spends. By most estimates, the EU’s annual migration-related funding to Morocco represents no more than roughly a fifth of what the kingdom spends every year policing thousands of kilometers of coastline, land borders, and desert routes against irregular crossings.
In this sense, the media coverage and political commentary on the Ceuta crisis has regretfully tended to sideline or ignore that while Morocco goes to great lengths to hold its end of the migration management bargain with Spain and Europe in general, it is not Europe’s or Spain’s border gendarme. It does not patrol its own coastline and cracks down on irregular crossings because Brussels or Madrid instructs it to. It does so because it has chosen to honor the spirit of partnership that binds it to its European neighbors. And as Rabat sees and demands it, this is – or should be – essentially a partnership built on the simple but indispensable spirit of reciprocity. But reciprocity is a two-way obligation. If Morocco is expected to uphold its side by containing irregular migration, its partners are equally expected to refrain from any act that could undermine Moroccan sovereignty or territorial integrity, whether on the Sahara file or on the status of the two occupied cities on its northern coast.
This is precisely what makes recent events so revealing, though not in the way conspiracy would like us to imagine. One is entitled to wonder, and I think it is the right question to ask: where, exactly, was the Spanish Guardia Civil when tens of thousands of people converged on Ceuta’s shoreline? Their conspicuous absence during the peak of the crossing is a structural symptom. It indicates that Spain has, over the years, effectively delegated the near-totality of frontier vigilance to Moroccan forces. And it does not take a seasoned security expert or an accomplished foreign policy specialist to see or understand that such an arrangement is obviously abnormal for any state serious about controlling its own borders. And so, far from proving Moroccan complicity in what has been taking place at the Ceuta crossing point, this absence underscores the exact opposite. It demonstrates the indispensability of Rabat’s cooperation to the entire architecture of Spanish and European border management. But even more critically, this episode has once again laid bare how exposed Spain becomes the moment Morocco’s security cooperation falters even briefly under extraordinary pressure.
Given this context, any sober, fact-driven analysis of the situation at hand would easily land on the conclusion that the claim – voiced by some in Spanish media and amplified across social platforms – that Morocco deliberately allowed the crossing to happen is absurd. Anyone with a passing familiarity with the sociology of the Moroccan-Spanish border knows about what is commonly called the “effet d’appel,” or “call effect:” the persistent pull exerted by the mere proximity of European territory on young Moroccans facing unemployment or economic precarity. For years, thousands of these young men have lingered around Fnideq and the hills overlooking Ceuta, quite literally testing the waters in hopes of a favorable moment. That they have historically failed to cross in large numbers is not for lack of desire but because of the sustained, costly presence of Moroccan police and auxiliary forces in the area. Morocco maintains that presence at its own expense, and largely for the benefit of a European neighbor that has not always reciprocated in kind.
The two irritants Rabat could not ignore
None of this means Morocco had no grievances with Madrid in the weeks preceding the crossing. Two developments deserve particular attention. First, because they are the only concrete, verifiable elements that lend even superficial plausibility to the “punishment” theories. And second, because, on close inspection, they still fall well short of explaining what happened.
The first was the reception by the Speaker of Spain’s Congress of Deputies of a delegation of children from the Tindouf camps on July 15. The Spanish press coverage of this event presented it as part of the long-running “solidarity summer holidays” program that numerous Spanish associations, many sympathetic to the separatist Polisario Front’s cause in southern Morocco, have organized since the years following Morocco’s recovery of the Sahara in 1975. The Speaker, who had personally hosted a child from the camps years earlier, used the occasion to call for Sahrawi self-determination. Her rhetoric, historical interpretation, and even apparent recommendations sat flatly at odds with Spain’s own official position. Indeed, since March 2022, Madrid recognizes the Moroccan autonomy initiative as the “most serious and realistic” basis for a lasting and politically feasible settlement of the Sahara file. That a senior official from the governing party would contradict her own government’s stated policy is the kind of contradiction that causes understandable concern in Rabat.
The second was the July 23 vote by the Justice Committee of the Spanish Parliament on a bill, expected to reach the full chamber roughly three months later, that would grant Spanish nationality to Sahrawis who resided in the territory before 1977. From Morocco’s vantage point, this initiative reads as a thinly veiled act of interference in its internal affairs. This is because Sahrawis living in Morocco’s southern provinces under Moroccan administration are, as far as Rabat and international law post-Resolution 2797 are concerned, simply Moroccan citizens. It means the bill’s language, particularly its repeated invocation of “the Sahrawi people” as a category distinct from the Moroccan population at large deliberately legitimizes the very separatist framing that the UN Security Council has spent the better part of two decades dismantling.
While these two developments are real irritants for Rabat’s Sahara stance, they do not rise to the level of provocation that would push a state as strategically disciplined as Morocco to weaponize the uncontrolled movement of sixty thousand people. Not only is Morocco fully aware of all the reputational, humanitarian, and diplomatic risk that such a reactionary move entails, the kingdom also understands that a sizable segment of Spanish public opinion – particularly on the left – will continue to sympathize with the separatist Polisario’s narrative regardless of what Rabat does or how much Spanish-Moroccan relations improve.
Yet Rabat also knows, as a matter of hard legal and political fact, that the Spanish government is exceedingly unlikely to reverse its formal support for the Moroccan autonomy initiative. Because the centrality of Morocco’s proposal as the only practical and viable route to lasting political resolution of the Sahara dispute is now anchored in bilateral commitments and in the broader legal current set by Resolution 2797 and its predecessors since 2007. Rabat thus knows that retreating from that position would carry real political and legal costs for Madrid. And this is why, from both a strategic and reputational standpoint, the theory that Morocco lashed out over two comparatively minor irritants does not hold much water.
The immediate trigger was a Spanish court ruling
If these political irritants do not explain the scale of what happened in Ceuta, the actual trigger is both considerably more mundane and more revealing of how little control any single actor actually exercised over these recent events.
Fnideq, also known as Castillejos, sits barely 300 meters from Ceuta by sea, and in places the distance is shorter still. In practical terms, this means anyone capable of swimming a few hundred meters has a route into European territory. Pressure on this stretch of coastline rises predictably every summer, and despite considerable and sustained Moroccan efforts, Morocco has for roughly two decades functioned as a major transit corridor for both its own citizens and sub-Saharan migrants hoping to reach Europe. Even at its historical peak, this seasonal pressure rarely exceeded some 1,500 attempted crossings – a volume Moroccan and Spanish authorities have generally managed through routine coordination.
What changed this year was not Moroccan policy. It was Spanish jurisprudence. On July 8, Spain’s Constitutional Court ruled that individuals reaching Spanish territory by swimming could not be subject to immediate, summary return to Morocco. This means only those crossing overland through the fenced perimeters, who remain subject to what Spanish law calls “devoluciones en caliente,” or “hot returns.” At sea, the Court reasoned, there exists no equivalent physical barrier, and therefore no legal basis for treating a swimmer the way one would treat someone scaling a border fence. Anyone arriving by water, the ruling held, is entitled to have their legal situation reviewed before any decision on their status is made.
This ruling did not stay confined to legal circles. It spread within days across Moroccan social media, reaching thousands of young men already lingering near the border, already primed by the effet d’appel. This ruling landed in their minds and hearts like a legal loophole tailor-made for their situation. And Spanish outlets themselves began describing the resulting spike in crossing attempts between July 8 and July 27 as approaching a state of emergency. By July 29 and 30, the belief that swimming into Ceuta guaranteed at least temporary reprieve from removal had become widespread enough to draw in not only Moroccans but sub-Saharan migrants and Algerians as well. The result was a human wave of somewhere between fifty and sixty thousand people over one or two days. But it is ludicrous and disingenuous to pretend that this fortyfold increase over any previous year was produced by Moroccan neglect or complicity. Rather, a more honest assessment of the Ceuta tragedy should be that what we have witnessed over the past few days is the unwitting culmination of a Spanish court decision colliding with geography, social media velocity, and economic desperation.
Throne Day and the absurdity of the timing argument
That said, it is also worth pausing on the timing of recent incidents. Not least because most spinners and sympathizers of the “deliberate provocation” theory have curiously invoked the “coincidence” between the crossing and Morocco’s Throne Day celebrations on July 30. Every year, Throne Day follows a carefully choreographed state protocol, broadcast in full and patriotic fanfare across Morocco’s public media. The occasion is anchored by an official royal address and followed by roughly ten days of nationwide ceremonies, homages, and celebrations. It is arguably the single most important date on the Moroccan political calendar during the summer. For politically conscious Moroccans, it is the occasion on which King Mohammed VI takes stock of the government’s performance and the country’s socioeconomic trajectory over the preceding year, and sets the tone for the year ahead.
Given this deeply entrenched, decades-old tradition, there is simply no plausible scenario in which Moroccan authorities would engineer a diplomatic crisis with Spain in order to dominate headlines during, or overshadow, this particular week. Doing so would amount to an auto-sabotage of Throne Day, a near-sacred occasion in Morocco’s political imaginary. If anything, it is more logical to contend that Morocco could not have orchestrated or staged this crisis. Because the mass crossing, and the resulting scramble to manage tens of thousands of people, ended up overshadowing the coverage that would normally be devoted entirely to the King’s address and the ceremonial weight of Throne Day. Morocco, in other words, could not have championed anything that would divert international attention away from the very moment Rabat would have wanted to use it to center national attention and international media coverage on the King’s visionary leadership and forward-facing development projects over the past nearly three decades. Quite simply, a state apparatus capable of the kind of long-horizon strategic patience Morocco has displayed on the Sahara file for five decades does not accidentally step on its own most sacred civic occasion.
There is no doubt that, politically and strategically, the Ceuta crisis can legitimately be read as a message to Madrid about Morocco’s indispensability to Spain’s border security architecture. But, in the current context, it might have been an unintended message. For what Ceuta experienced is far more consistent with the evidence to conclude that rather than deliberately choosing this moment to send Madrid a message, Rabat was blindsided by the scale of the crossing and forced into crisis management during the very week it least wanted to be managing a crisis. It is this same timing, incidentally, that should once and for all settle the “blackmail” theory. Again, a strategically disciplined state like Morocco does not sabotage its own most solemn occasion to score a short-lived tactical point against a partner.
Simply put, Morocco could not have engineered this crisis to punish Madrid, to pressure it over Ceuta and Melilla, or to overshadow a rival’s diplomatic itinerary. Instead, it found itself, rather abruptly and at the worst possible moment on its own calendar, managing an unprecedented humanitarian and security dilemma with the tools available to it. And Moroccan authorities chose the path that minimized loss of life over the route that would have maximized short-term control.
Morocco faced a strategic dilemma between force or cooperation
Indeed, once the human wave was already in motion, Moroccan authorities confronted a genuinely difficult choice between two costly options. The first option was to use force to physically halt or reverse a crowd of roughly sixty thousand people converging on a narrow stretch of coastline within a matter of hours. Given the density and speed of the movement, this course carried a serious risk of stampedes, mass injury, and mass fatalities. Such outcomes would have generated video footage circulating within hours across every global news platform, which would have been followed by an international campaign accusing Morocco of human rights violations and the use of excessive, brutal force. Rabat knows that this would have carried lasting damage to the kingdom’s international standing.
The second option was to allow part of the wave to pass, absorb the immediate reputational cost of the images that resulted, and then move rapidly into close operational coordination with Spanish authorities to contain, process, and return as many people as possible. This was the better of two bad courses of actions, and it is exactly what Moroccan authorities opted to do. Following the first waves of crossings, Morocco moved quickly to cooperate with Madrid. And according to figures that have since circulated publicly, this course of action succeeded in taking back more than sixty-nine thousand people in the aftermath of the mass crossings. More precisely, several reliable reports have converged in indicating that roughly forty-eight thousand returns were handled through direct security coordination in the earliest phase of the joint Moroccan-Spanish response. Shocking as the initial images were, this outcome was considerably less damaging than the alternative scenario of mass casualties, military deployment against civilians, and the sustained humanitarian and diplomatic fallout that would have ensued.
The 2021 incident has been invoked for the wrong reasons
Skeptics will inevitably point to a similar episode from April and May 2021. This was when Morocco did in fact use migration as a pressure tool against Spain, allowing thousands to cross into Ceuta in the context of an acute diplomatic rupture triggered by Madrid’s unilateral and provocative decision to quietly host the Polisario’s leader for medical treatment. Yet that episode is instructive because of how different it was. In 2021, Morocco was responding to roughly three years of accumulated grievances and a specific, identifiable provocation. For Morocco, Spain’s collision with Algeria to covertly provide a safe haven to the leader of a separatist entity that has killed Moroccan soldiers, tortured Moroccans, undermined Morocco’s territorial integrity, and still occasionally terrorizes residents of some southern Moroccan cities, was unforgivable.
Madrid had crossed a red line, Rabat fumed while following the diplomatic procedure of summoning the Spanish ambassador in Morocco, recalling its ambassador from Madrid, and demanding that the Spanish government make amends for its unacceptable conduct. Yet Madrid dismissed Rabat’s frustration while belittling Morocco as a junior partner who should do better to know its place in their bilateral relationship. In response, Morocco played one of the strategic cards it could muster to remind Spain of its invaluable strategic significance, and this included a deliberate reduction in security and migration cooperation to force Madrid to reconsider its earlier dismissive attitude.
But nothing comparable defines the current episode. Once the latest mass crossings began, Morocco’s posture was immediate cooperation. Moroccan authorities coordinated swiftly with their Spanish counterparts, facilitating an extraordinarily high rate of return within days. That behavior is simply incompatible with the theory of a premeditated punitive strategy. States that plan to use migration as leverage do not, as a rule, turn around and hand back the very leverage they supposedly just created.
A strategic signal, but not a deliberate plot
Still, this is not to say that the current episode is entirely without strategic resonance. Instead, my point is that the current crisis’s resonance is structural rather than orchestrated. In other words, it would be a mistake to read the events at the Ceuta crossing purely as an accident and nothing more. Morocco has, for decades, linked the resolution of dispute between Spain and the UK over Gibraltar to the broader unfinished business of decolonization on its own shores – Ceuta, Melilla. A centuries-old nation with a long memory, Morocco treats these occupied shores as present expressions of a historical anomaly: the illegitimate persistence of European enclaves on North African soil.
This parallel regained relevance last month, when the border fence separating Gibraltar from Spain came down for the first time in its history. This was done under the UK-EU treaty on Gibraltar finalized in 2025 and provisionally implemented this summer, establishing free movement of people between the Rock and the surrounding Campo de Gibraltar. Tellingly, all sides – London, Madrid, and Gibraltar’s own government – insisted the arrangement changes nothing about sovereignty. It is about people and not jurisdiction, they insisted. How can Spain advocate the free movement of people between its territory and Gibraltar while continuing to cling to an outdated conception of sovereignty over Ceuta and Melilla, refusing even to contemplate a comparable arrangement with Morocco?
If Spain, and its political, academic, and media elites, are genuinely committed to addressing the recurring migration surges along the border between northern Morocco and Ceuta in an effective and lasting manner, they should seriously consider engaging Morocco in negotiations on a sui generis framework that would facilitate the free movement of people across the border while fully respecting the interests of both countries. Such an arrangement would ultimately serve Spain’s long-term interests far better than the current status quo.
On the one hand, facilitating the legal movement of people across the border would substantially reduce the burden Morocco has borne for more than three decades in containing the continuous flow of would-be migrants seeking to reach Ceuta and Melilla in the hope of eventually making their way to mainland Spain. Rather than remaining recurrent flashpoints marked by periodic migration crises and political tensions, Ceuta and Melilla could evolve into spaces of coexistence, economic interdependence, and shared prosperity between Moroccans and Spaniards.
On the other hand, opening the border under a jointly negotiated framework would fundamentally alter the incentives that have driven irregular migration for decades. If residents of northern Morocco were able to enter Ceuta and Melilla legally while understanding that entry into the enclaves would not confer any right or realistic possibility of onward travel to mainland Spain, the powerful pull factor that has fueled repeated attempts to cross into the enclaves would gradually disappear. In other words, legal mobility across the local border would deprive irregular migration of one of its principal attractions.
The fundamental obstacle, however, lies elsewhere. Much of Spain’s political, media, and academic establishment remains trapped in an outdated strategic mindset shaped by historical distrust toward Morocco. Within this framework, Ceuta and Melilla continue to be viewed primarily as military and security outposts whose principal function is to deter and contain a neighboring country that is still perceived with suspicion. As long as this securitized vision prevails, Spanish policymakers are unlikely even to entertain the possibility that the two enclaves could instead become bridges of cooperation rather than fortified frontiers.
Read in that light, the scale and visibility of what unfolded at Fnideq, even without any evidence of deliberate orchestration, inevitably functions as a kind of signal to Madrid.
The content of that message is that the status of Ceuta and Melilla remains an open historical account for Morocco, and that Spain’s long-term security and prosperity are bound up with Moroccan goodwill in ways that make indefinite postponement of that conversation increasingly untenable. Yet Morocco does not need to engineer a crisis to make this point, because the structural dependence Spain reveals every time Moroccan cooperation even briefly falters makes the point on its own.
Going forward, Rabat would do well to make explicit what has so far remained implicit. That its cooperation with Spain – and Europe, at large – on migration is neither automatic nor cost-free. And that a genuine partnership requires Spain to shoulder greater responsibility in securing its own borders, its own frontier.
At the same time, Morocco should remind Spain of the urgent need to finally settle, seriously and without further delay, the unresolved question of Ceuta and Melilla’s status. Morocco has once again shown that it can absorb an extraordinary shock without abandoning either its humanitarian restraint or its strategic composure. But it should not be expected to do so indefinitely without its partners recognizing, in discourse and in policy, exactly what that restraint has been worth to them.
Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not necessarily reflect The Times Union‘ point of view
