The Border Went Viral: How Social Media Fueled the Ceuta Crisis | Amine Ghoulidi

One of your central arguments is that the public conversation quickly became overwhelmed by competing narratives and misinformation.

Right.

We had discussed from the beginning that right away people started claiming that it was Israel who was behind this or there was some sort of U.S. Israel plot against Sanchez, the prime minister of Spain.

What did that information environment look like and why is it so difficult or why was it so difficult rather to separate facts from fiction?

That is, I think, a central question to this issue.

Again, we need to go back a little bit back in time.

2021, Morocco, the U.S., and Israel signed the Tripartite Agreement as part of the Abraham Accords process.

It was perceived in Spain.

Excuse me.

perceived in Spain quite openly as a threat to Spanish national security because the idea was that the security apparatus, the security establishment, the military establishment in Spain never wants a country like Morocco with whom they share borders to be sort of qualitatively strong from a military standpoint.

So the idea that a stronger relationship with the state of Israel would make them less subordinated to the Spanish became a strategic issue for them.

We have to understand that Spain had A number of domestic issues, the Catalan issue, the ETA issue, they've dealt with those to a large degree.

What remains basically the soft and rebellious Spain, a country that sits comfortably in the southern western part of Europe, is Morocco, which is an African country.

with a young population.

The largest immigrant population in Spain is Moroccan.

And so if you look, really analyze the platforms of every single political party in Spain, Morocco is constantly a recurrent issue.

Whether you come from the left, where you feel strongly about Morocco's control over Western Sahara, or you come from the right, where you have a strong position about Moroccan migration to Spain, Morocco is always an issue that is always recurring.

So when you add the dimension of stronger U.S.-Morocco relations, stronger Morocco-Israel relation, qualitative advantage, potential advantage of the Moroccan military technology, thanks to Israeli technology, then you have that very influential military establishment being very nervous.

And therefore, when you see acts or actions or incidents like the Ceuta one, you automatically sort of start believing that there might be third parties involved in that kind of state.

I'll add one more thing.

Sure.

The Sanchez government position on Gaza and on Israel, it's openly antagonistic- Less than

friendly, some would say.

Openly antagonistic position to the Israelis has also created the sentiment that this could only have been led by a country like Israel, which seeks to undermine the Spanish government.