Marrakech – There is no doubt that every state will move to guard its interests – legitimate or otherwise – because that is the elemental grammar of statecraft, the first axiom of an international order that remains, beneath its treaties and its niceties, anarchic. Nations bargain, coerce, cajole, and, when the ledger demands it, deceive.
The press has always belonged inside that arsenal. The word “propaganda” itself was minted in Rome in 1622, when the Church stood up its Congregatio de Propaganda Fide to shepherd the faith and, with it, opinion. The twentieth century then industrialized the craft: the Creel Committee marshaled American sentiment for the First World War, Walter Lippmann theorized the manufacture of consent, Edward Bernays baptized the whole enterprise “public relations,” and darker practitioners turned the newspaper and the wireless into instruments of mass suggestion.
Disinformation, agitprop, psyops, hybrid warfare, the weaponization of this and that, the megaphone – this is the lexicon of the trade. It is also, precisely, the lexicon that a battalion of Spanish commentators now empties over Rabat. The projection could not be more total.
Nowhere is that projection cruder than on Gibraltar. Samir Bennis, the Moroccan author and political analyst who took his doctorate on Morocco-Spain relations two decades ago and has since dedicated much of his intellectual work to exploring this relationship, has, since the late-July Ceuta crossing, spent the past weeks naming the pathology with clinical contempt.
Writing on his X account on August 29, he diagnosed “the same mirror-image syndrome” – Spaniards ascribing to Moroccans the misdeeds and the vices that are their own. His exhibit is a history Madrid would rather not recall. From the 1950s until 1984, Bennis recounted, Spain waged a campaign of economic asphyxiation against Gibraltar, choking off goods, blocking thousands of Spanish workers, severing telephone, land, and maritime links, a policy that culminated in the outright closure of the frontier in 1969.
Siempre el mismo síndrome del “mirror image”. Los españoles atribuyen a los marroquíes las fechorías que ellos mismos cometen y sus propios vicios. España, desde los años cincuenta hasta 1984, se lanzó en una guerra de asfixia económica contra Gibraltar, bloqueando la entrada de… https://t.co/PepD7m0ufQ
— Samir Bennis (@SamirBennis) August 29, 2026
That, he ventured, is what could fairly be called hybrid warfare – the very phrase that “hack analysts, stripped of any deontology,” now pin on Morocco, a country that “has never taken a single measure of economic coercion against Ceuta and Melilla,” even as the occupied enclaves lived for decades off a contraband that bled the Moroccan economy dry.
Behind that pressure lay a sovereignty claim Madrid has maintained since Gibraltar was ceded to Britain under the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht. Spain’s determination to recover the territory has at times produced striking contradictions: in 1917, General Miguel Primo de Rivera, then military commander in Cádiz and later Spain’s dictator, publicly proposed handing Ceuta and its bay to Britain in exchange for Gibraltar, even suggesting further concessions in North Africa if necessary. British officials themselves examined the possibility during World War I.
The irony he draws is sharp. El Español, a newspaper he provides as an example, that in a single month ran at least 200 pieces on Morocco – “almost all of them pejorative, accusatory, demonizing” – has the gall, in his telling, to cast Morocco as the aggressor. When Bennis ran his own tally of the Spanish press over the preceding month, he came back with more than a thousand articles, and called even that a conservative figure.
Este tipo de «análisis» refleja el preocupante deterioro y bajón intelectual que se ha producido en España durante las dos últimas décadas. La España de hoy, en lo que se refiere a la calidad del análisis académico y periodístico, ya no es la misma que conocí hace poco más de… https://t.co/0WwECSkHJO
— Samir Bennis (@SamirBennis) August 29, 2026
What lends the campaign its menace is its choreography. Bennis described a press moving in near-unison, an armada of analysts firing in the same direction, hour after hour, for the better part of a month – a machine that manufactures imaginary “proof” on a schedule and recycles it across outlets until repetition passes for evidence. The uniformity is the method.
The mastheads differ – El País, El Confidencial, El Mundo, ABC, El Español, La Vanguardia, the commentariat orbiting them – but the differences end at the logo. Read closely, they march in the same direction, reach for the same lexicon, summon the same roster of “experts” who share the same blindness toward Morocco and the same ideological closure, and arrive at the same foregone conclusion, now wrapped in the vocabulary of expertise and an appearance of objectivity. At that point, in his telling, there is no distinguishing one from another: the bylines change, the script does not.
A charge sheet that collapses on its authors
The charge sheet against Rabat collapses on contact with its own authors. Spanish officials, up to and including the government itself, have repeatedly disavowed the thesis of a Moroccan plot and thanked Rabat for its cooperation on migration. Yet the megaphone plays on. On August 25, Bennis described “a state of total, irrational, and remarkably interested hysteria” gripping much of the Spanish press: not an hour passes, he wrote, without fresh imaginary “proof” of a Moroccan design to “invade” the occupied cities, stage a second Green March, even overrun peninsular Spain – all while the Moroccan government has, by and large, held its tongue.
Pues este es el fondo del problema. A falta de pruebas fehacientes o, por lo menos, remotamente creíbles sobre una supuesta intención de Marruecos de utilizar la migración como arma de presión contra España o de querer «invadir» Ceuta u organizar otra «Marcha Verde», recurren a… https://t.co/SwKXInHVmM
— Samir Bennis (@SamirBennis) August 23, 2026
Bennis locates the real engine elsewhere. The frenzy, he argued that same day, springs less from the events at the Ceuta fence than from a paradigm shift in the relationship itself. Spaniards schooled since the mid-nineteenth century in an asymmetry that let Madrid dictate terms to Rabat have not absorbed that the era is finished.
Spain’s economy remains the larger, yet it no longer commands the levers to bend Morocco, condition its foreign policy, or bar it from defending its strategic interests. Hence, per Bennis, the reflex to read every dispatch about Moroccan growth, military modernization, or diversified alliances as a menace – a menace to Spanish interests and to a Mediterranean balance long assumed immutable. Beneath that reflex also lies a recurring fear of Moroccan irredentism, often imagined in its most maximalist form, as though every expression of Moroccan strategic ambition were merely a prelude to territorial revision.
Un estado de histeria total, irracional e increíblemente interesada se ha apoderado de buena parte de los medios de comunicación españoles desde hace ya casi un mes. No pasa prácticamente una hora sin que la prensa española eche más leña al fuego y aporte nuevas «pruebas»… https://t.co/raKU2yqr0N
— Samir Bennis (@SamirBennis) August 25, 2026
The manual Madrid never reads
Underneath the alarmism lies what he calls a grave deficit of comprehension. In a run of posts, Bennis laid out the manual of Moroccan foreign-policy decision-making that his adversaries never trouble to learn – a manual, as he framed it, for dummies. The supreme authority that sets and fixes the broad orientations is the King. Those orientations are then implemented and articulated, bilaterally and multilaterally and in the press, by the Foreign Ministry.
Una guía sobre la política exterior marroquí para los nulos
En la política exterior marroquí, y sobre todo cuando se trata de tomar alguna decisión sobre los diferendos territoriales de Marruecos con España, la máxima autoridad que establece las orientaciones generales de esta…
— Samir Bennis (@SamirBennis) August 29, 2026
Whenever King Hassan II or King Mohammed VI has meant to raise a territorial grievance, Bennis noted, he has done it first through the royal speeches – the Throne Speech, the address commemorating the Revolution of the King and the People, the opening of Parliament – and at times through the press directly. King Hassan II favored the second channel often, by television interview or press conference, as on September 17, 1974, when he announced Morocco’s intent to take its Sahara dispute with Spain to the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Only once the sovereign has drawn the agenda does the Foreign Ministry give it bilateral form, through statements carried first by the state agency MAP – the organ, in Bennis’s words, through which Rabat transmits a settled position to its partners.
The mechanics of escalation followed the same script. In the Hassan II years, when the occupied cities surfaced now and again – marginally – on the bilateral agenda, every royal mention was amplified by the Foreign Ministry: notes dispatched to the embassies of friendly states to internationalize the dispute, letters sent to the United Nations.
The clearest instance is the one Bennis returns to. On January 27, 1975, Morocco reactivated its claims over both occupied enclaves by letter to the UN. The aim, he explained, was neither ceremonial nor abstract. It was to pressure Madrid into abandoning its attempt to use the Sahrawi National Union Party – the PUNS, which Spain had stood up in the autumn of 1974 – as cover to prolong its colonial presence in the Sahara.
That is the decision-making manual and the messaging mechanism, Bennis argued: the channel by which Morocco sends unambiguous signals to Spain whenever it has chosen to revive its claims over the occupied cities. Until every one of those steps has occurred – and none has, nor shows any sign of occurring, because the two cities are no present priority for Rabat – whatever hack analysts who never read a line to instruct themselves may say is, in his verdict, speculation dressed as analysis.
What a pundit or a talk-show fixture pronounces, he wrote on August 28, is not the position of the Moroccan state; relations between nations are not conducted through journalists. The broad orientations issue from the King and are executed by the Foreign Ministry and no other body – not by a commentator, not by a translator turned expert, not by MAP acting on its own account. To convert conjecture into certainty, to impute hidden intentions to Rabat without a single document or proof, and then to serve those speculations to the Spanish public as accomplished facts is not rigorous analysis. It is, in his phrase, the work of a charlatan whose object is to manufacture hostility.
Atentos a este megáfono que lleva tiempo difundiendo la propaganda argelina. El mismo megáfono que hace cinco años, en un programa emitido por la televisión israelí i24, reconoció cuál era su verdadera posición sobre Ceuta y Melilla al afirmar que «son ciudades ocupadas» y… https://t.co/VPcOgcQubZ
— Samir Bennis (@SamirBennis) August 28, 2026
By that measure, the invasion narrative has no anchor. Under King Mohammed VI, across twenty-seven years, Ceuta and Melilla have vanished from the royal speeches entirely; not one Throne or Green March address has named them. The question that recurs, systematically and centrally, is the Sahara. That silence, Bennis cautioned, is not renunciation – the claims persist, and will persist so long as Spain clings to the españolidad of both cities – but prioritization.
Rabat spent its diplomatic capital instead on moving Madrid off its ambiguity, an effort that reached its inflection in 2022, when Spain embraced the Moroccan Autonomy Plan as “the most serious, realistic, and credible basis” for resolving the Sahara file. Of a secret scheme to “dislodge” Spain from the occupied cities there is, he wrote, absolutely no proof – and the insinuations of a commentator do not amount to the strategy of a state.
He reserved a particular scorn for one such commentator, Taleb Alisalem: a figure he cast as a megaphone of Algerian propaganda, “this translator at a Madrid hospital turned expert,” who five years ago, on the Israeli channel i24, conceded on air that Ceuta and Melilla “are occupied cities” and suggested Morocco had parked its claims in exchange for Spanish backing on the Sahara – before reinventing himself as the prophet of a Moroccan conspiracy. The selective memory, in Bennis’s account, is the tell.
Migration, amnesia, and the nouveau riche
The migration coverage draws the same charge. Bennis catalogued the reductive, sensationalist, and often racist register – avalancha, invasión, barbarie – that saturates the Spanish treatment of people reaching for a better life, many of them Moroccans who have become a pillar of the Spanish economy. This set of triggers was deployed less to explain what happened at the Ceuta fence than to inflame, to swell audiences, and to reward the ultra-nationalists with the terrain on which they harvest votes. The result, as Bennis reads it, is not journalism failing at its task but propaganda succeeding at another one.
Hay un problema fundamental en el debate mediático español sobre la cuestión de la inmigración. Primero hay la manera reductora, sensacionalista y, menudo, racista, cómo los medios de comunicación españoles describen a todos aquellos que tratar de llegar a España en busca de una… https://t.co/upFCTJPFpF
— Samir Bennis (@SamirBennis) August 23, 2026
He set against it a figure Madrid prefers to forget: to sustain its welfare state and its weight within the Union, Spain will need to draw between 200,000 and 250,000 immigrants a year through 2050. A nation that not long ago exported its own people to Algeria, to Morocco, to Europe and the Americas under Franco – with more than three million Spaniards still living abroad – now, in his phrase, behaves like the nouveau riche.
What alarms him most is the domestic tinder. On August 28, he warned of a lavado de cerebro, a brainwashing about Morocco so complete that an outbreak of xenophobia, or an attack on a Moroccan somewhere in Spain, would not surprise him, particularly after such violence had already been reported in Ceuta the previous week; the right and the far right, he observed, are rubbing their hands, having steered the debate onto the terrain that yields them votes. And he traced the intellectual rot to what he termed the Algerianization of Spain’s academic and cultural landscape – a fall to depths he found hard to imagine three decades ago, when at least some voices offered a counterweight to the commonplaces peddled about Morocco.
El lavado de cerebro que hay en España con respecto a Marruecos es increíble y al mismo tiempo preocupante para la convivencia entre ambos países y sobre todo para los marroquíes que viven en España.
Habida cuenta de cómo los tertulianos y los medios de comunicación están…
— Samir Bennis (@SamirBennis) August 28, 2026
There is, finally, the matter of the self-inflicted wound. The campaign meant to destabilize and demonize Rabat, Bennis observed on August 29, achieved neither; what it achieved was to internationalize the very colonial question Spain wished buried. Millions who never gave the enclaves a thought are discovering that a European state still exercises colonial sovereignty over two cities in North Africa.
Ceuta y Melilla y el bochorno mundial
La ironía de la historia es que la prensa española, en su mayoría, y su armada de analistas se han pegado un tiro gratuito en el pie. Al lanzar desde hace un mes una campaña mediática sin cuartel contra Marruecos, su objetivo era…
— Samir Bennis (@SamirBennis) August 29, 2026
Twenty years after his thesis, he had never fielded so many queries about the history and legal status of the occupied cities. That, he concluded, is the real bochorno – the real disgrace: a crisis that demanded serenity, turned into a spectacle whose consequences may prove the very opposite of what its authors intended.
