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    Ceuta: Should Morocco Have Killed Migrants at the Fence to Satisfy Spain?
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    Ceuta: Should Morocco Have Killed Migrants at the Fence to Satisfy Spain?

    Marrakech – “Apparently, the Spanish wanted Moroccan police to use live ammunition and kill people to feel satisfied.” With that line, posted September 5 on X, Moroccan author and political analyst Samir Bennis compressed a month of accumulated grievance into a single, unsparing charge.

    He was reacting to footage circulated by a Spanish user, Francisco (Peperufo2), showing Moroccan security agents standing in the water off Tarajal, waving swimmers back and pulling drowning people out, as they moved to halt the July 30 rush toward occupied Ceuta.

    For Bennis, the images demolish the script Spain built. Madrid, he reasoned, would only have been satisfied had Rabat opened fire – the one outcome that would have spared Spanish commentators from accusing Morocco of engineering a crisis “to use it as a weapon of ‘blackmail.’”

    That inversion – Morocco damned for restraint, damned for force – sits at the center of his argument. In the same September 5 thread, Bennis cast the videos as evidence “passed over by a press more interested in discrediting Morocco than in shedding light on what really happened,” part of “one of the most malicious and perverse demonization campaigns of our era.”

    Much of Spain, he wrote, now looks at its neighbor “through blinders, from ideological closure and ignorance,” as if the country “lived in an open asylum” and Morocco were “the only medicine” it can reach for. He went further, urging the Moroccan state to “form a team of lawyers and take legal action against this whole band of propagandists,” while faulting Morocco’s own state media, flush with resources, for going on vacation instead of answering the Spanish narrative with documentation.

    A press that lives in an imaginary reality

    The charge did not appear from nowhere. A day earlier, Bennis had written that “a state of total, irrational, and incredibly self-interested hysteria” had gripped the Spanish press for nearly a month, minting imaginary “proofs” by the hour that supposedly revealed Morocco’s intent not merely to “invade” Ceuta and Melilla and stage a new Green March, but even to invade peninsular Spain itself.

    The irrationality had reached such a pitch, he wrote, that “one begins to wonder whether those who feed this discourse live in our world or in an imaginary, alternative reality.” What makes Madrid’s Ceuta-Melilla hysteria particularly telling is that Rabat – for now at least – has characteristically kept its silence and made no declaration announcing any intent to reopen the Ceuta and Melilla file. In this sense, Morocco’s composure and restraint have given the Ceuta crisis and its immediate and distant aftermaths the uncanny feel of Spain being at war and in a tense debate with itself.

    Indeed, Bennis has located the true source of Spain’s ongoing delirium over Ceuta elsewhere. The hysteria, he argued, owes less to the enclave than to “the change of paradigm” underway between Madrid and Rabat. Many Spaniards, accustomed since the mid-nineteenth century to “a profoundly asymmetrical relationship” in which Madrid could dictate terms to Rabat, have not grasped that the era is over: Spain “no longer has the same levers to bend Morocco,” and today’s Morocco “is not the same as three decades ago.” That, he wrote, is why almost any news of Moroccan economic progress, military modernization, or diversified alliances is read in certain Spanish circles “as a threat.”

    Sánchez supplies the rebuttal

    The irony he presses is that Spain’s own prime minister supplied the rebuttal. In his September 3 appearance before Congress, Pedro Sánchez conceded that Spanish forces on the Ceuta breakwater had eased their containment as thousands surged forward, because forcing back a crowd that size risked a massacre. Bennis fastened on that admission, and on the media’s near-total silence about it.

    The detail “has gone almost completely unnoticed,” he wrote, “perhaps because it does not fit the narrative that has been constructed over the past few weeks.” His question followed inexorably: “If we consider that decision legitimate and reasonable when it is made by the Spanish security forces, why do we not at least give Morocco the benefit of the doubt?” That, for him, is “the double standard that angers many Moroccans.”

    Bennis anchored the point in memory. He recalled that between late September and early October 2005, successive mass attempts to scale the fences around Ceuta and Melilla left several people dead and many injured, and that Morocco then “faced severe criticism from Spanish media outlets, non-governmental organizations, and international human rights organizations over the use of force.”

    As he noted, those events “inflicted considerable reputational damage on Morocco” and did so “during a particularly sensitive period for Rabat regarding the Sahara issue.” For Bennis, that precedent may well have weighed on the choices made on July 30 and 31. “If Morocco uses force and people are killed, it is accused of brutality and human rights violations,” he explained. “If it refrains from using force against a crowd that overwhelms the security deployment, that decision is automatically interpreted as evidence that Morocco deliberately opened the border in order to blackmail Spain.”

    Sánchez sharpened the point himself when he rounded on the opposition. “What would you have done? Ordered the police to shoot the civilian population?” he asked Alberto Núñez Feijóo, before invoking José María Aznar and Iraq – “others led us into a war with false evidence” – to explain why he would not move against Rabat absent proof.

    The prime minister granted that on July 30 Morocco’s Gendarmerie let crossings through and then reasserted control, leaving open whether that was inability or inaction. But he refused the rupture demanded by the Partido Popular (PP) and Vox, the latter branding the events an “invasion” and the prime minister a “traitor.” “We have to keep collaborating with Morocco,” he told the chamber, adding that after what happened “this cooperation has to be different.”

    Bennis pushed the mirror further in a later September 5 post, turning the interrogation directly on Madrid: let “the armada of Spanish talk-show pundits” explain why the Guardia Civil at the border opened the gate and let everyone through – why they did not keep it shut. “Was it not precisely their responsibility to prevent those people from entering Ceuta? So why did they let them pass?” The answer, he wrote, is the one Sánchez already gave – a “desbordamiento” the forces could not contain without risking a “massacre.”

    Judging identical conduct as understandable from Spain but as proof of guilt from Morocco is “the real heart of the problem between us and you: the double standard.” Relations, he insisted, must rest on “respect, reciprocity, and equal treatment” – “why? Because you are Spanish and we are Moroccan?”

    To those hunting escalation, Sánchez offered a blunt rebuttal: “Today in this chamber we have heard many who want to blow up our relations of good neighborliness. Their proposal is to escalate a conflict without restraint. I cannot do that, I should not do that, and I will not do it.”

    Bennis reads that belligerence as theater with a short shelf life. The Spanish political class, he argued September 5, has already absorbed a reality that academics, media, and “the irreducible idealists of the left” have so far depressingly failed to register. And that reality is that the balance has shifted and Spain now needs Morocco to protect its interests across Africa.

    He is “not worried in the slightest” by Feijóo’s warlike register: like Mariano Rajoy in opposition, the PP leader “will have no choice but to recalibrate his discourse” in power and make Morocco the destination of his first foreign trip. Absent that ballast, Bennis warned, “thank God ordinary people do not hold power. Otherwise, we would already be at war.”

    No gendarme, no concierge

    Beneath the polemic lies the structural claim Rabat has pressed for years: it is not Europe’s border guard. Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita drew the line as early as October 2018, declaring that Morocco “has never been, is not, and will never be anyone’s gendarme.” He again repeated the same forthright warning in May 2021, this time stressing that the kingdom is “neither the gendarme nor the concierge of Europe.” Morocco guards its own frontier, not Spain’s, and refuses to seal a border that is not its own at the cost of its people, its resources, and the lives massed against the fence.

    The money exposes how lopsided the bargain has been. Brussels committed roughly €222 million to Moroccan migration management between 2021 and 2024, with about €190 million more pledged through 2027. Türkiye, by contrast, drew some €1.19 billion for migration management alone – a €220 million border-surveillance project and a €398 million package in 2025 among them – atop close to €12.4 billion for refugees and host communities since 2011.

    Morocco polices one of the most sensitive corridors of the Western Mediterranean and the only land border between the EU and a non-European state, yet is paid a fraction of what a larger transit partner receives, and is still cast as the culprit whenever the wall is breached.

    Bennis has answered the deeper accusation elsewhere. In a September 4 essay, he dismantled the “hybrid war” thesis as mirror-imaging, observing that the clearest precedent for strangling a contested enclave is not Moroccan but Spanish – Madrid’s siege of Gibraltar.

    Beginning in the mid-1950s, Franco’s government throttled the Rock by degrees: it froze work permits for Spanish laborers, cut commercial and telephone links, and in 1969 sealed the land border outright, barring some 4,666 Spanish workers – roughly a third of Gibraltar’s workforce – from crossing. That closure held for sixteen years, until 1985, dwarfing anything Morocco has imposed on Ceuta and Melilla.

    He has also gone after the police report now driving the far-right querella. The document – the same CENIF report Bennis derides as “infamous” and “plagued with lies and approximations” about Morocco’s alleged authorship – leans on footage of Moroccan gendarmes near the border to build its case.

    Yet Spanish fact-checkers Newtral and Maldita.es, both members of the International Fact-Checking Network, established through geolocation that the gendarmes were pushing trucks away from Ceuta, toward Tetouan – the reverse of what the report alleges. Bennis noted that the report’s authors, whose aim was “not to inform but to disinform,” never consulted those verifications, and that the National Police chief himself contradicted the findings.

    His sharpest warning is reserved for the crown, should King Felipe VI visit the occupied cities. Sánchez called for such a visit in his speech to the Spanish MPs, appearing to suggest that such a development would appease locals in Ceuta and forcefully project Madrid’s commitment to the region. But Bennis, recalling that the 2007 royal trip cost Madrid its ambassador in Rabat for two months, argued that such a visit would be “a serious error and an act of immense imprudence that would, in all likelihood, provoke a reaction from Morocco.” The through-line, in his telling, is a Spain still reading its neighbor through a nineteenth-century, atavistic prism, unwilling to grant that Morocco has changed, and that the balances have changed with it.

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