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Marrakech – Inside Amphitheatre No. 7 at Cadi Ayyad University’s Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences, a packed hall of researchers, faculty members, and students gathered Wednesday morning for what amounted to a forensic dismantling of the prevailing international narrative on the Western Sahara conflict.
The occasion was the academic presentation of “The Unholy Alliance: The Hidden Conspiracy Behind the Spanish-Algerian Plot Over Morocco’s Sahara (1965–1979),” a 15-chapter, 512-page work by Dr. Samir Bennis that mines UN archives, CIA assessments, US State Department cables, and General Franco’s personal papers to reconstruct a period its author considers the most consequential – and most deliberately obscured – in modern Moroccan history.
With Cadi Ayyad University and Morocco World News (MWN) joining forces to organize the seminar, the stage prominently featured Bennis together with Professor Mohammed El Ghali, Dean of the Faculty of Legal, Economic and Social Sciences of Kelaat Sraghna, and Professor Mohammed Bentalha Doukkali, Director of the National Center for Studies and Research on the Sahara.
In a session packed with tantalizingly insightful remarks about the history, present, and potential future of the Sahara dispute, the ensuing conversation and the general mood inside the amphitheater stretched well beyond diplomatic pleasantries into the contested terrain of historical memory, collective psychology, and the mechanics of narrative warfare.
Opening the proceedings, Cadi Ayyad University President Blaïd Bougadir framed the seminar within his institution’s longstanding commitment to the national cause, noting that Cadi Ayyad was the first Moroccan university to host a national center dedicated to Sahara studies. “Universities bear a great responsibility in preparing a generation that is aware, armed with knowledge, and capable of contributing effectively to the defense of the nation’s constants,” he told the audience, stressing that the academic sphere must serve as a space for shaping national consciousness and safeguarding territorial integrity through rigorous research rather than mere political sloganeering.
Bennis, who co-founded MWN in 2011 with the explicit aim of challenging what he described as a persistently hostile Western media posture toward Morocco, traced his intellectual trajectory to a recurring frustration with the mainstream narrative’s distortion of the Western Sahara story and the history of Morocco’s unfinished struggle against Western colonization. In fact, the same concern would later shape his 2024 book, “The Self-Determination Delusion: How Activist Scholars and Journalists Have Hijacked the Western Sahara Case,” in which he explores how victim politics and feel-good advocacy have shaped Western narratives on the dispute.
“When I reviewed articles in The New York Times or in certain Spanish and French newspapers, I consistently encountered the same issue: a recurring hostile bias against Morocco,” he told the audience. “This was despite the fact that the historical and legal evidence available in United Nations archives, as well as in American agency records and the archives of the US State Department, clearly demonstrates without ambiguity that Morocco’s position has always been strong both legally and historically.”
That frustration, he explained, eventually crystallized into a broader scholarly mission. “Unfortunately, over the past five decades, Morocco has faced a persistent problem: while archives are full of documents confirming the legitimacy of the Moroccan position, the dominant academic and media narrative has largely been shaped in favor of the Algerian and Polisario perspective,” Bennis elaborated. “This is why I chose to write books on this subject – to deconstruct these narratives and build a strong intellectual arsenal that enables Moroccans to effectively respond to hostile discourse.”
The book’s central thesis posits that a strategic convergence between Spain and Algeria – two states with ostensibly incompatible ideological orientations – coalesced around a shared objective: the weakening of Morocco and the creation of a client state in its southern provinces. Bennis walked the audience through the diplomatic choreography that preceded the Green March, a period he framed as a high-stakes chess match in which King Hassan II outmaneuvered adversaries who held nearly every structural advantage.
A newly independent kingdom waged its battle with neither military muscle nor diplomatic depth
Bennis was careful to situate Morocco’s early diplomatic efforts within the constraints of the era. “We must remember that, in the Sahara context, Morocco was in a position of great weakness,” he noted. “The country was economically fragile. It had gained independence not long before. It had neither economic power nor military strength, nor even the diplomatic expertise needed to confront Spain, Algeria, France, Mauritania, and other countries” at the same time.
He cautioned against the temptation of retrospective judgment: “It is easy to say that King Hassan II or the Moroccan Ministry of Foreign Affairs made a mistake when looking from a 2025 lens. We must place ourselves in the political and geopolitical context of that period.”
The narrative Bennis constructed pivoted on a sequence of decisive moments – and a trail of UN resolutions that charted the conflict’s legal metamorphosis. He recalled how General Assembly Resolution 2072 of December 1965 had originally recognized the existence of a bilateral sovereignty dispute between Morocco and Spain, calling on Madrid to enter negotiations with both Rabat and Nouakchott over the Sahara and Sidi Ifni.
When Spain refused to comply, Morocco took a fateful step. At a Special Committee meeting in Addis Ababa in June 1966, the newly independent kingdom asked the General Assembly to pressure Spain into organizing a self-determination referendum for the territory’s inhabitants. This was a population that, as Bennis noted, numbered no more than 27,000 at the time.
The calculus appeared sound on its face: the Sahrawis operated within a tribal system that placed the tribe at the apex of political loyalty, and those tribes had historically pledged allegiance to Morocco’s sultans.
Rabat believed, with considerable confidence, that any genuine consultation would confirm what it considered self-evident. “However, unfortunately, Morocco’s reading of the situation at the time was not accurate,” Bennis conceded. In retrospect, the request unwittingly furnished Spain with precisely the procedural lever it needed to reshape the terms of the entire debate.
Yet barely a year later, Resolution 2229 of December 1966 marked what Bennis described as a rupture with that earlier framework, recasting the question through the prism of self-determination. This is the shift that handed Algeria the opening to insert itself as an “interested party” in the file.
Rather than complying with that resolution or any of the eight successive General Assembly resolutions adopted between 1966 and 1974, Spain pursued a decade-long strategy of obstruction. In particular, Madrid created a local assembly in May 1967 designed to manufacture the impression of an indigenous political identity distinct from Morocco, while exploiting tensions between Rabat, Algiers, and Nouakchott to isolate the kingdom diplomatically.
In Bennis’s telling, the turning point arrived in the autumn of 1974. When Spain announced its intention to hold a referendum in the first half of 1975 – one carefully engineered to produce a predetermined outcome – King Hassan II responded with what Bennis characterized as a stroke of political brilliance. On September 17, 1974, the King requested that the General Assembly refer the sovereignty question to the International Court of Justice (ICJ). “This was a fatal blow to Spanish and Algerian plans to create an artificial state in the Sahara,” Bennis declared.
Yet the diplomatic arithmetic initially worked against Morocco. Bennis recounted how Foreign Minister Ahmed Laraki arrived at the UN in early October to discover that even traditionally sympathetic Arab states had distanced themselves from Morocco’s position.
What followed, he argued, constituted one of the most pivotal backroom agreements in the dispute’s history: on the eve of Morocco’s General Assembly address, Laraki met his Mauritanian counterpart, Hamdi Ould Mouknass, and – although Rabat had long rejected the proposal – accepted in principle, without consulting the King, the idea of partitioning the Sahara between the two countries.
“Without consulting King Hassan II, Laraki responded positively in principle to the proposal,” Bennis recounted, adding that this act of diplomatic improvisation demonstrated the sovereign’s trust in his minister and ultimately swung the General Assembly behind Morocco’s ICJ referral.
The result was Resolution 3292, adopted in December 1974, which formally recommended referring the sovereignty question to the International Court of Justice – a moment Bennis cast as the opening salvo of the final diplomatic duel between Morocco and Spain, after nearly two decades of diplomatic siege.
“This was the first round of the final showdown between Morocco and Spain, because everything that took place from 1957 to September 1974 represented the opening round through to the semifinals, while the decisive final stage of the contest came in December with the adoption of Resolution 3292. Morocco became the leading party in the process,” he explained.
Franco’s personal grudge and a dying regime’s paralysis handed Morocco its opening
The book’s seventh chapter, which Bennis flagged as among its most original contributions, delves into the psychological architecture of Franco’s hostility toward Morocco. Drawing on the Spanish dictator’s personal archives, Bennis argued that Franco’s refusal to negotiate bilaterally over the Sahara was rooted not in strategic calculation but in personal resentment. The book casts this as a wound inflicted by King Mohammed V’s return and the March 1956 independence agreement with France, which Spain experienced as a humiliation it could neither accept nor metabolize.
Bennis also illuminated King Hassan II’s calculated use of rhetorical escalation in the months before the Green March, noting that the monarch deliberately cultivated the impression he might resort to military force – knowing full well that Spain had no appetite for armed confrontation.
“The objective of changing his tone toward Spain was to push it to soften its position and to compel the American administration, which did not want a military confrontation between its two allies, to pressure the Spanish government into accepting a solution satisfactory to Morocco,” he explained.
Archives that slept for decades now arm a new generation of Moroccan scholars
All panelists converged on a point that lent the discussion its deepest structural resonance: the ideological climate of the Cold War, saturated with revolutionary rhetoric and visceral hostility toward monarchical systems, created the very conditions that allowed Morocco’s adversaries to prosecute their campaign with impunity.
Leftist movements across the Arab world and Africa treated monarchies as anachronisms destined for the dustbin of history, and this zeitgeist furnished Algeria – styling itself as the vanguard of Third World liberation – with a readymade moral vocabulary to cloak what was, at bottom, a territorial power play.
The panelists agreed that Morocco’s fidelity to its monarchical identity, far from being a liability, ultimately proved its most durable source of resilience, providing the institutional continuity that allowed the state to absorb shocks that shattered republics built on revolutionary promises.
El Ghali situated this observation within the broader arc of Moroccan state-building, noting that the monarchy’s survival through two coup attempts, a constitutional state of exception, and ferocious ideological headwinds from Arab nationalism made the diplomatic triumph all the more extraordinary.
“The Arab states that criticized Morocco’s monarchical leadership now find that, despite all the shocks and upheavals, the most fortified Arab state is the Kingdom of Morocco,” he told the audience, before turning to the anatomy of the narrative war itself.
“Spanish civil society is structured through powerful NGOs that execute what are essentially governmental agendas under a non-governmental banner,” he observed. “How can the Moroccan state confront an association? It cannot – because the person behind it is a citizen, not a ministry.” The asymmetry, El Ghali argued, has allowed hostile narratives to proliferate through channels against which traditional state diplomacy is structurally ill-equipped to respond.
Professor Bentalha Doukkali added a deeper archaeological layer to this hostility, tracing it to what he called the enduring psychological imprint of more than eight centuries of Moroccan presence on the Iberian Peninsula. In his reading, this fact has bequeathed Spanish collective memory a civilizational wound that neither the passage of time nor the flourishing of bilateral trade has managed to cauterize. It is this ancient complex, Bentalha suggested, that continues to fuel the reflexive antagonism coursing through Spanish academic and media discourse toward Morocco to this day.
Approaching the work from a documentary and legal perspective, he hailed the book as a landmark in the academic defense of Morocco’s territorial integrity. He drew particular attention to the paradox embedded in the book’s title – an alliance between a colonial European power and a regime that styled and marketed itself as a beacon and cradle of national liberation.
“How can a state that claims to be the land of martyrs and liberation align with a colonialist, expansionist state?” Bentalha posed. “The fundamental objective for both was the same: weakening Morocco and obstructing the completion of its territorial unity.”
Bentalha also stressed the book’s methodological rigor, noting that Bennis had surfaced primary documents that had never previously been deployed in academic advocacy for Morocco’s cause. “The Polisario is an instrument of conflict, not an instrument of the principle it claims to serve – the right of peoples to self-determination,” he declared, adding that the work ought to be circulated across Spanish and international university networks where the counter-narrative it constructs is most desperately and urgently needed.
The question of narrative, indeed, ran like a live wire through the entire proceedings. In his book’s introduction, Bennis frames Morocco’s failure to invest in what he calls “the battle of narratives” as the single greatest liability accompanying its otherwise historic diplomatic gains.
Despite the kingdom’s remontada over the past two decades – culminating in UN Security Council Resolution 2797 – academic and media discourse internationally remains overwhelmingly tilted toward the Algerian-Polisario reading of the conflict.
The book, with its granular reconstruction of Spanish obstructionism, Algerian machinations, and American behind-the-scenes maneuvering, is designed as precisely the kind of primary-source arsenal that Bennis believes Moroccan researchers and advocates have lacked for half a century.
Warm diplomacy must never lull a nation into surrendering its right to historical truth
During the question-and-answer session, Bennis addressed a query from the audience by drawing a sharp distinction between the state of bilateral relations and the imperative of rigorous historical inquiry. Maintaining excellent ties with a country, he contended, should never become a pretext for abandoning the scholarly excavation of one’s own past.
Even as Morocco and Spain find themselves in what he termed a diplomatic honeymoon, the academic work of documenting, analyzing, and confronting distorted narratives must proceed entirely independent of political atmospherics.
Bennis pointed to the French case as a cautionary illustration: despite the reset in Moroccan-French relations since July 2024, French media outlets have shown no corresponding restraint, with Le Monde’s series of so-called “investigative pieces” in August 2025 mounting pointed attacks against Morocco and its sovereign. All of which, in his view, is ample proof that the narrative battlefield operates on a logic entirely its own, indifferent to the courtesies exchanged between foreign ministries.
Read also: Samir Bennis’s New Book Lays Bare the Conspiracy That Nearly Cost Morocco Its Sahara
