Are US and Israel benefitting from 'migration blackmail' against Spain?

Are US and Israel benefitting from 'migration blackmail' against Spain? Questions continue to swirl around the flash flood of nearly 60,000 migrants who swam or walked from Morocco into Ceuta, a tiny Spanish enclave on the tip of Africa last week. How did so many migrants manage to breach Moroccan border security forces, who appear to have largely disappeared from their stations? Why had so many migrants received social media messages encouraging them to swarm the enclave? Analysts pointed their fingers at the Moroccan government, arguing it was once again deploying “migration blackmail,” as the practice has been dubbed, to punish its European neighbors and bend them to its will. But this time, Israel and the United States appear to be the principal beneficiaries. Indeed, they have seized on the politically embarrassing episode to weaken a Spanish government they view as one of their principal European antagonists. This was not the first time Ceuta’s border had been breached, nor the first time that Morocco was accused of opening its borders to allow streams of migrants to enter European territory. In 2021, Ceuta and Melilla, Spain’s other enclave in Africa, also saw a mass incursion of 6,000 people into their territories; Spain explicitly blamed Morocco for deliberately relaxing its migration controls to punish the government for criticizing Trump’s 2020 recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara, which Trump did in exchange for Morocco entering into the Abraham Accords with Israel. The pressure worked, as Spain acquiesced in 2022 to support Morocco’s autonomy plan for the occupied territory, in exchange for Morocco’s promise that it would not allow further incursions into the enclaves. France too has often found itself facing down Moroccan tactics to weaponize migration for political concessions. Rabat long refused to accept French returns of undocumented migrant children from Morocco until it secured a package of trade and investment concessions from Paris in 2020. To reward Morocco for acting as Europe’s external border police, the European Union also has time and again rewarded Morocco with hundreds of millions of Euros in aid, most recently as part of the 2024 “EU Migration Pact.” This time, the exact reasoning behind Morocco’s actions remains unclear. Some analysts wondered whether the move was meant to pressure Spain as a first step toward an attempted annexation of Ceuta, which the Moroccan government views as illegally occupied. While officially, the U.S. government recognizes Ceuta as sovereign Spanish territory, voices in the U.S. and Israel have increasingly encouraged Morocco to claim the enclave. The timing is uncanny. For example, the 2027 U.S. House Appropriations Bill passed in July included a report specifically asserting that “Spanish-administered cities of Ceuta and Melilla are located in Moroccan territory,” and urged the State Department to encourage talks over their “future status.” As far back as 2019, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s son Yair tweeted a map of Ceuta and Melilla, saying, “Dear Arabs and Muslims. Want to free occupied Arab Islamic lands? Here’s a good start!” In March, Michael Rubin, a longtime neoconservative analyst with the American Enterprise Institute, openly [urged](aei.org › morocco should send a new green ma