The story that went around the world about Ceuta was not the story that happened. Two camps with nothing else in common ended up telling the same kind of tale: that the migration was planned, paid for, orchestrated. One camp called the planners globalists. The other named Israel outright. Both were wrong, both were antisemitic in the oldest sense of the word, and the facts of what actually happened were public from the first day.
Here is what happened. On July 30, somewhere between fifty and sixty thousand people, most of them young Moroccan men, crossed into Ceuta, a Spanish sliver of land on the North African coast, by land and by swimming around the border. At least sixty-seven of them died. Spain sent in the military. Within days most of the survivors had been walked back to Morocco, with Madrid and Rabat cooperating to return them as fast as possible. The causes were documented: a Spanish Supreme Court ruling that barred the immediate return of migrants arriving by sea, an enclave whose reception system was already overwhelmed, a border that had seen thousands of crossings every year, and a generation of young Moroccans with no work and no future at home. The despair was not a secret. The NYT and Reuters both reported it on the record.
The two stories
The far right’s version was the familiar one. Migration is not migration; it is an invasion, engineered by shadowy elites to replace European society. The Great Replacement theory, and the older Kalergi Plan that feeds it, went straight from the fever forums into the mainstream argument. Italy’s prime minister threatened to suspend the Schengen open-border agreement with Spain, even though Italy shares no border with Spain. A letter from the Danish prime minister’s office to top EU officials warned of what it called the instrumentalization of migration. The crisis became the far right’s exhibit A: look, they said, this is what letting them in means.
The second version named Israel. The Combat Antisemitism Movement, a monitoring group, counted 173 posts from 119 influencer accounts on X that recast the border emergency as a Jewish plot, reaching an estimated 103 million people within 72 hours. The image that did the most work showed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with a line of migrants filing out of his open mouth onto a Spanish beach. One account claimed Israel had admitted engineering the crossing through Mossad; its evidence was a labeled parody account. Another put words in the mouth of the actor Javier Bardem, who said no such thing, and the claim was amplified by Mia Khalifa. The author Susan Abulhawa told her followers that the crossing was completely engineered by the US, Israel and Morocco. Morocco’s documented military cooperation with Israel was cited as proof of the plot. One thread concluded that an unnamed party wanted control of the Strait of Gibraltar now that the Red Sea is closed to Israeli shipping. The thread stopped short of naming Israel. Its readers did not need it to.
The same story, two costumes
Strip the names and the two versions are one version: the migrants did not come on their own. Somebody with power and malice sent them. The far right’s story and the Israel story are not enemies; they are the same story wearing different costumes, and Europe’s far right has promoted both, depending on the audience. The monitoring group found far-right, far-left, and Islamist accounts posting materially identical claims in the same news cycle, all concluding that Zionists caused the crisis. Antisemitism was the connective tissue between audiences that share no other political ground.
This is where the deeper argument comes in, and it is the argument the Al Jazeera opinion that started this debate makes: the narrative linking migration to antisemitism serves to undermine pro-Palestinian solidarity. Spain is Europe’s loudest critic of Israel’s wars. If the migrant surge was Israel’s revenge, then Spain’s pro-Palestinian politics look reckless, and the solidarity movement looks like a front for a foreign plot. Nobody has produced evidence that Israel organized, funded, or directed the crossings, and the claim does Israel’s work whether anyone in Israel pushed it or not. Effect, not intent. Meanwhile the far right gets what it always gets from a crisis like this: a country in chaos, a government on the defensive, and an argument for closing Europe that suddenly sounds reasonable.
The case for the skeptics
Before the verdict is sealed, the skeptic’s case deserves its say. Morocco and Israel do cooperate militarily, on the record. The timing was convenient for many parties. The court ruling removed a real deterrent, and Spain’s policy of regularizing undocumented workers who arrived before 2026 created an obvious pull. The far right’s exploitation of the crisis is documented and real; it is the main story, and it should not be diluted by symmetry. And the monitoring group’s numbers are its own methodology, produced by an advocacy organization with a stake in the conclusion. The reader should weigh them as such.
None of that changes the core fact. The people who swam to Ceuta were not following anyone’s script. They were following the only script available to young men with nothing: get out. The two stories that competed to explain them both had to deny that, because a crisis caused by ordinary despair and ordinary policy failure is a crisis that implicates the people in charge. The conspiracy version won on X because it is faster and more flattering than the truth. It let Europe’s leaders off the hook for a policy that has been failing for years, and it let the far right present its answer, close the border, as the only sane option. The facts about Ceuta were boring and available. That is exactly why so few people read them.
Source
- Al Jazeera (opinion): How Israel and the European far right tried to exploit Ceuta
- Combat Antisemitism Movement: X turned Spain’s Ceuta crisis into a global antisemitic conspiracy in 72 hours
- The Jerusalem Post: New CAM research on the Ceuta antisemitic conspiracy
- AP via 1011now: Death toll in Spain-Morocco border crisis in Ceuta reaches 67
- India Today (Reuters): Spain deploys military after thousands cross from Morocco