Spain Tore Down the Wrong Wall
Gibraltar, Ceuta, Melilla, and the three laws of sovereignty Madrid cannot reconcile
I. Two weeks in July
On 15 July 2026, Pedro Sánchez stood at La Línea de la Concepción and watched cranes lift the iron gates away from the Gibraltar frontier. He declared the end of "the last wall in continental Europe." He said the removal closed an open wound. Madrid's official account of the treaty signed the previous day in Brussels stated that the agreement brings down the last wall in Western Europe, while leaving Spain's sovereignty claim over Gibraltar intact.[1][2]
Read the phrase again.
Continental Europe.
The qualifier is load-bearing, and it was written by people who knew exactly what it excluded. Spain's other barriers did not come down that day, and were never going to. They are not in continental Europe. They stand on the African continent, at Ceuta and Melilla, and they are Spanish.
Fifteen days after the cranes, on 30 July 2026, one of them was overwhelmed. Spain's Guardia Civil reported that people were entering Ceuta massively from the sea through the Tarajal breakwater, that officers at the breakwater had been overwhelmed, and that others had broken through a gate in the fence. Spanish state television estimated between two and three thousand crossings in a single day, a figure Reuters reported it could not confirm. Ceuta's own government put arrivals at fifteen hundred to two thousand over the preceding ten days. Juan Jesús Vivas, president of the autonomous city, declared an absolute humanitarian and social emergency and asked Madrid to deploy the army and close the border with Morocco. The Interior Ministry declined to declare a national emergency, explaining that the mechanism does not cover migration.[3][4]
Two weeks. One wall celebrated into rubble on European soil. Another failing on African soil, defended by the same government, on behalf of the same state, under a rule of law that Spain cannot state aloud, because stating it aloud would end Spain's case against the Jewish state.
Nothing that follows argues that Spain is Israel. It is not. Every territorial dispute differs from every other, and the legal regimes governing an international frontier, a colonial listing, and a territory held since 1967 are not the same regimes. This is an argument about the accuser. Spain has spent three years telling Israel what the law is. Spain is now going to be asked to state that law once, in a single sentence, and apply it to itself.
II. What Spain says about Gibraltar
Spain's Gibraltar doctrine is neither ambiguous nor new. Spain states it annually, in New York, before the United Nations Special Committee on Decolonization, the body known as the Committee of 24.
It has three parts. Gibraltar is a colony. The Gibraltarians possess no right of self-determination recognized by the United Nations. And the decolonization of Gibraltar must therefore be achieved not by the wishes of its inhabitants but by the restoration of Spain's territorial integrity, because the colonial situation destroys Spain's national unity.[5][6]
Spain has repeated this for six decades. In June 2026, weeks before the fence came down, Spain's ambassador Héctor Gómez told the Committee that Gibraltar remains a hindrance incompatible with international legality which violates Spain's territorial integrity. Fabian Picardo answered that the resolutions Spain relies upon were obtained in the 1960s under pressure from the Franco dictatorship.[7]
Spain does not use the phrase that follows. It is my characterization of what Spain's doctrine necessarily means if it means anything:
The inhabitants of a territory acquired by a European power in 1704 are colonial implants. Their wishes cannot defeat the territorial integrity of the geographically contiguous claimant state. Duration does not cure defect of origin. Three centuries of continuous residence, self-government, citizenship, and democratic expression are legally insufficient against the historical claim of the neighboring state.
If that is not what Spain means, Spain is free to say so, and to say what it does mean. It has had sixty years.
Hold the four operative propositions. Origin governs. Duration is irrelevant. Contiguity is decisive. The inhabitants do not count. Each is about to be pointed at Madrid.
III. What Spain says about Ceuta and Melilla
Now cross the Strait.
Ceuta and Melilla are Spanish cities on the African mainland, enclosed by Morocco and the sea. Their autonomy statutes define each as an integral part of the Spanish nation within its indissoluble unity.[8] Spain's position is that they are not colonies, not disputed, and not subject to any decolonization process whatsoever.
The chain of title is a matter of record and is not contested by Spain.
Ceuta was an established North African city under the Marinid Sultanate. Portugal took it by assault in 1415. During the Iberian Union from 1580 the two crowns were held by one monarch, and when Portugal restored its independence in 1640 Ceuta's authorities remained with the Spanish king. The Treaty of Lisbon of 1668 formalized Spanish retention. Melilla was occupied in 1497 by forces of the Duke of Medina Sidonia under Pedro de Estopiñán, acting with royal authorization, and was fortified as a military position on the North African coast. Boundaries were adjusted by later treaties, including after the war of 1859 to 1860, but those instruments confirmed a possession they did not create.[9]
Spain did not acquire either city by agreement with Morocco, by referendum, or by the consent of any indigenous population. Spain acquired them by fifteenth-century European conquest and has held them ever since.
Morocco says so at the United Nations, in language Spain finds intolerable. Rabat has described the cities as occupied and has denied having any land border with Spain, grounding its claim in historical connection and geographic contiguity. Morocco asked the United Nations to take up their status after independence.[10]
Examine the structure of Morocco's argument. Adjoining state. European conquest. Territorial integrity. Historical title. Rejection of the present inhabitants' capacity to defeat the neighboring state's claim.
It is Spain's Gibraltar argument with the names changed.
Spain calls that reasoning decolonization when it is aimed at London and irredentism when it is aimed at Madrid.
Spain's answer to Morocco is a serious answer. Spain says the residents are Spanish citizens who wish to remain Spanish. Spain says five centuries of continuous administration produced real institutions and real communities. Spain says people born in Ceuta and Melilla are not disposable remnants of an ancient conquest. Spain says geography does not determine sovereignty. Spain says a fortified border is not evidence of criminality.
These are legitimate considerations. They do not automatically resolve any particular dispute, because different bodies of law apply to different situations, and a consideration that is relevant is not thereby dispositive. But Spain does not treat them as merely relevant when Spain invokes them. Spain treats them as conclusive.
When Israel advances the identical considerations, they acquire no visible effect on any Spanish conclusion. Spain will say they are outweighed. Point to the Spanish position in which they weighed at all, and were found lighter. That is the contradiction, and it does not require anyone to agree with Israel about anything.
IV. What Spain says about Israel, precisely
Precision matters here, and vagueness would let Madrid escape. Spain does not deny that Israel exists, and Sánchez has expressly affirmed that the Jewish people deserve a state and deserve to be secure. Spain's accusations divide into two categories, and they should not be blurred.
The first is territorial. Spain treats Israeli presence in eastern Jerusalem and in the territories held since 1967 as colonial, illegal, and settler in character. Spain does not disregard every resident population there; it privileges one and discounts the other. What Spain permits no capacity to alter its conclusion is Jewish historical continuity, the Israeli sovereign claim, the existence of communities established over six decades, and the expressed will of the Israelis who live in them. Spain need not find those factors decisive. Spain treats them as incapable of weighing at all.
The second is a conduct allegation about Gaza, which belongs to a different area of law entirely and is not a doctrine of sovereignty at all.
Both are now in Spanish statute. On 23 September 2025 Spain enacted Royal Decree-Law 10/2025, signed by the King and by Sánchez as President of the Government, and convalidated by the Congress of Deputies on 8 October. Its title, in Spain's official gazette, is a decree of urgent measures against the genocide in Gaza. Its preamble asserts that the United Nations Special Rapporteur and the majority of experts have characterized Israel's conduct as genocide. It bans defense and dual-use transfers, denies transit to military fuels, prohibits importation of goods originating in Israeli settlements, and retroactively revokes existing authorizations.[11][12]
Three provisions deserve attention that they have not received, and precision matters, because Spain will answer imprecision with the text.
Article 4 declares that advertising the sale of goods originating in Israeli settlements, and of services provided there, constitutes unlawful advertising under Spain's General Advertising Act. The provision is limited to listed localities. Within that limit, Spain has converted commercial speech about certain places into a legal wrong.
Article 3 requires that every customs declaration for merchandise originating in Israel state the postal code and the locality of origin, and directs the state tax agency to approve a list of localities and postal codes against which shipments are to be sorted. Article 3.4 subjects breaches to Spain's Organic Law on the Repression of Smuggling. Goods from a listed locality are not merely refused entry. Bringing them in is handled under Spain's contraband regime.
The list exists. It was approved on 23 December 2025 and replaced, after updated information from the Foreign Ministry, by a resolution of the President of the State Tax Administration Agency dated 10 February 2026, published in the Boletín Oficial del Estado of 12 February 2026 across thirty-one pages. It sets out localities and postal-code ranges, one after another, with an official footnote explaining that the place names have been transliterated from the Hebrew alphabet. Hebron appears. East Jerusalem appears in several hundred separate entries.[13][14]
Spain will answer, correctly, that the underlying geography is drawn from a European Commission list of places ineligible for preferential tariff treatment under the EU-Israel Association Agreement. Concede it at once, because the concession sharpens the point. The European instrument withholds a tariff preference. Spain took the same geography and built three further things on it: an import prohibition, an advertising prohibition, and exposure to the contraband regime. Brussels declined to subsidize. Madrid prohibited and penalized.
The result is that a European state has published in its official gazette a thirty-one-page register of localities, transliterated from Hebrew, revised it once, and attached prohibition, advertising restriction, and contraband-law consequences to what those places produce. Spain is entitled to defend that policy as a lawful response to an advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice. It is not entitled to be surprised at how the document reads to a Jewish reader, and it should not pretend the reaction is manufactured.
The preamble also does something Spain appears not to have noticed. It grounds the measures in the proposition that Israel has violated the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination, and it treats that right as generating obligations for all states.
Spain therefore holds, in a statute of the Kingdom, that self-determination is an obligation erga omnes which third states must actively enforce.
And Spain holds, at the United Nations, that self-determination does not apply to Gibraltar at all.
Those are not two political positions. They are a statute and a diplomatic submission, issued by the same government within nine months of each other, about the same principle.
Madrid has an answer ready, and it should be stated before Madrid states it. Spain will say that United Nations practice has long treated Gibraltar as a special case in which territorial integrity displaces the ordinary self-determination model, so Spain is not inventing rules but applying different established doctrines to different colonial situations.
Take the answer at its highest and it still convicts. If two doctrines exist, and Spain selects between them, then everything turns on which doctrine governs a given territory, and that is a determination for international institutions rather than for the interested state. Spain has submitted Gibraltar to that determination for sixty years. Western Sahara has been before the United Nations decolonization system since 1963, following Spain's transmission. Spain has never submitted Ceuta and Melilla to it at all, and does not intend to, because Spain has decided by itself that no question arises.
A state that chooses which doctrine applies to its own territory, and then invokes the other doctrine against everyone else, has not applied international law. It has arbitrated its own case.
There is a second and better Spanish answer, and it deserves to be met head-on rather than ignored. Spain will say that Ceuta and Melilla were acquired in 1415 and 1497, centuries before the modern law of occupation existed, that no Spanish population was transferred into territory occupied after 1949, and that Israeli communities established after 1967 fall under a treaty regime, including the prohibition in Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which simply has no application to fifteenth-century possessions.
That is a real legal distinction and this article does not pretend otherwise. Ceuta is not a settlement and an Israeli town is not Ceuta. The law of occupation may well change the legal result in a particular case, and reasonable lawyers argue about how it applies where it applies.
But notice precisely how much that answer buys, and how much it does not. It might justify a different conclusion about the lawfulness of a particular community established after 1967. It does not justify treating three thousand years of Jewish history in Jerusalem as though it were not there. It does not, by itself, turn a security barrier into apartheid. It does not make self-determination an absolute obligation binding all states in one file and an inapplicable doctrine in another, decided by Spain, about Spain, without submission to any institution. And it does not explain why Israeli arguments from continuity, consent, security, or effective administration are dismissed rather than weighed.
Spain's occupation-law answer covers one question. Spain uses it as though it covered all of them.
V. Three territories, three tests, one variable
Set the files side by side.
In Gibraltar, Spain holds that territorial integrity defeats the inhabitants, that duration is irrelevant, that origin governs, and that self-determination does not apply.
In Ceuta and Melilla, Spain holds that the inhabitants defeat territorial integrity, that duration is decisive, that origin is spent, and that a contiguous state's historical claim is worthless.
In eastern Jerusalem and the territories held since 1967, Spain holds that duration is spent, that Jewish historical continuity cannot bear on the outcome, that the wishes of the Israeli residents cannot bear on it either, and that self-determination is an obligation the whole world must enforce.
These cannot all be law. The first two are the exact negation of each other. The third abandons both and adopts a principle that Spain, nine months later, told the United Nations does not apply to Gibraltar at all.
Three territories. Three mutually exclusive rules. One variable, and the variable is not the law. It is the identity of the state in the dock.
Spain does not have a doctrine of sovereignty. It has a menu.
VI. The disclaimer Spain cannot make
There is an obvious escape, and Spain cannot take it.
Spain could announce tomorrow that it now regards Ceuta and Melilla as colonial possessions and disclaims them. The pressure at the fence would become someone else's problem. Sánchez could deliver it as a moral triumph and would be applauded in the rooms that applaud his measures against Israel.
It would not work, and Spain knows it, because Spain has run the experiment.
On 14 November 1975, Spain signed the Madrid Accords and declared its resolve to decolonize Western Sahara by terminating the responsibilities and powers it held there as administering power. On 26 February 1976, Spain informed the Secretary-General that it had ended its presence and considered itself released from responsibility.
The declaration did not do what Spain wanted. The United Nations Legal Counsel, Hans Corell, concluded in his letter of 29 January 2002 that the Madrid Agreement transferred no sovereignty, that it conferred administering-power status on none of its signatories, that this was a status Spain could not have unilaterally transferred in any event, and that the transfer of administrative authority in 1975 did not affect the international status of Western Sahara as a Non-Self-Governing Territory. Fifty years later the territory remains on the list, its status unresolved, with roughly one hundred and seventy-six thousand Sahrawi in camps in the Algerian desert.[15][16][17]
The lesson is narrow and it is fatal. A state's unilateral declaration cannot complete decolonization, cannot transfer sovereignty, and cannot settle an unresolved international status. What Spain announced in 1976 is still, in 2026, not finished.
So the question everyone asks about Ceuta and Melilla has a short answer.
Who would own them if Spain walked away?
Nobody automatically. A declaration would not render the cities ownerless. It would not vest sovereignty in Morocco by adjacency. It would not extinguish the Spanish nationality of the residents, their property, or their political rights. It would not end Spain's obligations while Spain retained effective control, because human rights jurisdiction follows control rather than paper title. And it would not stop a single arrival, because a disclaimed Ceuta with no settled authority would be the most attractive point of entry in the Mediterranean, and most of those entering it would still be seeking onward passage into peninsular Spain.
Spain would purchase a sovereignty crisis and keep the border crisis.
The demand is therefore not a policy proposal. It is a consistency test, and its entire value lies in Spain's refusal.
Because when Spain refuses, Spain must explain why. The explanation will consist, without exception, of continuity, citizenship, effective government, institutional development, the attachment of the present population, security, and the legal significance of an existing border.
That is Israel's brief. Written by Madrid. Under duress.
VII. What Spain gave, and what Spain received
There is a harder fact in the Western Sahara file, and it is not historical.
On 17 May 2021, Moroccan police eased controls at the Ceuta frontier. Around nine thousand people entered the city within days. At least twelve hundred were unaccompanied children. The European Parliament addressed the episode formally, in a resolution of 10 June 2021, as a breach of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and as the use of minors by the Moroccan authorities. Spain's defense minister called it blackmail. The trigger was Spain having admitted the Polisario leader for medical treatment.[18][19]
In March 2022, Sánchez wrote to Mohammed VI. He informed the King that Spain now regarded Morocco's 2007 autonomy plan, which places Western Sahara permanently under Moroccan sovereignty, as the most serious, realistic and credible basis for resolving the dispute. Spain abandoned four decades of formal neutrality on the self-determination of a colonized African people, in favor of the state that had just used children as an instrument against it.[20][21]
Days later, standing in Ceuta, Sánchez defended the reversal and said that normalization with Rabat would allow matters linked to migration control to be consolidated on the Moroccan side.[22]
No secret bargain needs to be alleged, and none is alleged here. The sequence is public, and the benefit was identified by the man who obtained it. In my judgment the relationship functioned as an exchange: Spain gave ground on the self-determination of an African people, and Spain received border enforcement protecting Spain's own African possessions. The Polisario representative in Madrid called it a toll. Readers can weigh that characterization against the record and reach their own view.
Then Spain went to the United Nations and instructed the Jewish state on colonialism.
Self-determination, in Spanish practice, is an obligation binding on all humanity when Spain demands it of others, and a matter of realism when Spain must pay for it.
VIII. What Spain won at Strasbourg
Spain's most revealing statement of principle was not made in a speech. It was made in court, and Spain won.
On 13 February 2020 the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights delivered judgment in N.D. and N.T. v. Spain. Two men, one Malian and one Ivorian, had scaled the Melilla fence in a large group in August 2014 and had been returned to Morocco at once, with no identification, no procedure, and no legal assistance. They complained of collective expulsion under Article 4 of Protocol No. 4.
The Court found unanimously that there had been no violation of Article 4 of Protocol No. 4, and none of Article 13 taken together with that provision.[23][24]
The reasoning is what Madrid cannot survive having read back to it. The Grand Chamber held that the applicants had chosen to enter as a group, taking advantage of their large numbers and using force; that genuine and effective legal channels of entry existed which they had not used; that they had advanced no cogent reason for bypassing those channels; and that the absence of individual removal decisions was a consequence of the applicants' own conduct.
The judgment must be stated at its true width, because overstating it would be doing to Spain what Spain does to Israel. It is a ruling about an international frontier under the European Convention. It does not govern the law of armed conflict, and it is fact-bound: the reasoning turns on legal entry channels actually being effective, and later Strasbourg cases have said so.
What it does establish is enough, and it is precisely the thing Spain denies when the defendant is Jewish.
It held, on those facts, that immediate return without individualized process was not a collective expulsion, and that the conduct of those crossing was legally relevant to what the state owed them.
The fence itself, and the authorized crossing points through which entry could lawfully be sought, were the factual setting of the case. Their legality was not in issue, and the Court decided nothing about them. That is not a holding and it is not offered as one.
What the Court did decide is nonetheless the architecture of Israel's defense of its own barrier and crossing regime. Spain did not merely assert them. Spain litigated them to the highest human rights court in Europe, obtained a unanimous judgment, and has relied on it ever since.
Israel must still defend each of its own measures on its own facts and under the law applicable to them. Nothing at Strasbourg does that work for Jerusalem. But the vocabulary of apartheid, colonial violence, and collective punishment is applied to Israeli barriers and crossings within Spanish political discourse, including by parties of the governing coalition and in motions before the Cortes,[25] while the Spanish state defended a closely analogous architecture at Strasbourg as ordinary border administration and won. If the Government of Spain rejects that vocabulary, it should reject it publicly and state the distinction. If it endorses it, it must reconcile the endorsement with the case Spain argued and won at Strasbourg. What it cannot do is let the word circulate on the benches of its own coalition while relying on the opposite proposition in court.
Madrid's escape here is obvious and must be closed in advance. Spain will say the judgment concerned immigration at an international frontier under the European Convention and therefore says nothing about a barrier governed by other bodies of law. That is true, and it is not the question. The question is not whether the judgment binds Israel. It is whether Spain still believes what Spain successfully argued:
And Spain has not moved on. In a follow-up submission received by the United Nations Committee against Torture on 6 March 2026, the Government of Spain states that the Grand Chamber recognized that Spain ensures availability and genuine access to legal means of seeking admission to its territory, and that attempts to enter by scaling border fences, taking advantage of large numbers and using force, are not legitimate. Spain adds that denial of entry is a coercive measure intended to restore immediately the legal order violated by an irregular crossing.[26]
Those are Spain's words, in 2026, to a United Nations treaty body, about a barrier in Africa. Substitute the word Israel and Spanish ministers would call the same paragraph a confession.
A material premise of Spain's victory is that the lawful route works. In June 2023 the organizations representing a survivor of 24 June 2022 reported that his application for international protection, lodged at the Spanish Embassy in Rabat, had gone unanswered.[27] In March 2026 Spain told the Committee against Torture that it guarantees effective access to international protection procedures.[26] Spain has asserted the effectiveness of the channel. It has not, in any record identified here, reconciled that assertion with the evidence against it. Spain's reliance on N.D. and N.T. to justify immediate returns depends materially on that channel working in practice. Whether it does is a question of fact, and Spain's answer to it has not been set against the evidence that disputes it.
Does the Government of Spain accept, as general propositions, that a separation barrier is not inherently apartheid, that designated crossing points are not inherently racial domination, and that the lawfulness of a summary return depends on the facts, the available procedures, and the conduct of those crossing? If Spain accepts them, will it say so publicly and state the legal distinction that makes the contrary vocabulary appropriate for Israel? If Spain denies them, how does it explain the case it won at Strasbourg?
IX. What Spain owes at Melilla
On 24 June 2022, roughly two thousand people attempted to cross the Melilla fence at the Barrio Chino crossing. Human Rights Watch recorded at least twenty-three dead. Amnesty International recorded at least thirty-seven, all Black sub-Saharan Africans, with hundreds injured. Amnesty International reported in June 2024 that more than seventy men, principally Sudanese and Chadian, were still unaccounted for. The Global Torture Index factsheet on Spain published in 2025 recorded that the whereabouts of at least seventy-seven people remained unknown, that at least four hundred and seventy people were summarily returned that day, and that no independent investigation had been carried out.[28][29][30][31]
What followed is the argument.
Morocco opened an investigation only in early 2024 and communicated no result. Spain continues to deny formal responsibility and denies that any deaths occurred on Spanish territory. Spain holds at least two sources of aerial footage and has released only a partial account. Moroccan authorities have been reported burying unidentified remains at Sidi Salem without notice to families. United Nations special procedures raised allegations of excessive and lethal force and of racialized exclusion at European borders, and the Committee against Torture expressed grave concern at the absence of an effective investigation.
Spain's own account is now on the record, and it is the most useful document in this article. In its follow-up submission of 6 March 2026, the Government of Spain describes the events of 24 June 2022 as a massive, violent and to some extent coordinated assault in which migrants used axes, clubs and angle grinders; states that more than fifty of the hundred and twenty Civil Guard officers involved were injured; and maintains that the response was governed by consistency, appropriateness and proportionality. It records that the Attorney General's Office closed its inquiry on 23 December 2022 finding no evidence of wrongdoing by Spanish officers, that the Civil Guard's internal investigation ended with no disciplinary action, and that the Ombudsman closed its file in October 2022. It further states that Spanish courts lack jurisdiction over what Moroccan forces did on Moroccan soil.[26]
Then comes the sentence Madrid should have redrafted. Spain writes that it balances the protection of human rights with its legitimate obligation to preserve its national sovereignty, in accordance with the principle of respect for sovereign equality and territorial integrity proclaimed in General Assembly resolution 2625.[26]
Resolution 2625 is the Declaration on Friendly Relations. It is the instrument in which the General Assembly set out both the territorial integrity of states and the right of peoples to self-determination. Spain reaches into that declaration, takes out the territorial-integrity limb, and invokes it to defend its use of force at an African fence around a city Spain took in 1497, in an operation in which dozens of people died. Spain then reaches into the same declaration, takes out the self-determination limb, and turns it against the Jewish state. Royal Decree-Law 10/2025 cites resolution 2625 by name.[11] So does the submission to the Committee against Torture.[26]
One document. Two limbs. Spain selects by defendant. Spain will answer that different legal predicates activate different parts of the declaration: Melilla is sovereign Spanish territory, the Palestinian case is not. That answer only relocates the question. Who decided that Melilla is sovereign Spanish territory and no question arises? Spain did. Alone. Without ever submitting the matter to the international decolonization process, and while insisting that Gibraltar must go through exactly that process.
Spain has been asked to answer for this. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, United Nations special procedures, and the Committee against Torture have all demanded effective investigation and accountability.
Spain answered with closure. The prosecutorial file was shut without a finding of criminal conduct by Spanish officers. The Guardia Civil disciplinary inquiry was shut. The Committee against Torture, presented with those outcomes, expressed deep concern at reports that no effective investigation had been carried out and urged Spain to conduct a prompt and impartial one.
What Spain has not done is account. Four years, dozens dead, dozens more unaccounted for on the last published record, unnamed graves, nobody charged, and only a partial account of the aerial footage Spain holds.
Set that beside Spain's conduct in the Israeli file. Spain recognized a Palestinian state in May 2024, intervened at the International Court of Justice, supported the International Criminal Court's pursuit of an Israeli prime minister, and enacted a statute whose title asserts genocide and whose preamble rests that assertion on the opinion of a Special Rapporteur and of most experts.
State both cases fairly and the disparity survives. Spain's decree does not rest on expert opinion alone; it invokes the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice, General Assembly and Security Council resolutions, provisional measures in the genocide proceedings, and casualty figures. Spain's Melilla defense does not rest on territorial location alone; it invokes proportionality, the violence of the crossing, three closed inquiries, jurisdiction, and sovereignty.
The disparity is this. Against another state, Spain legislated the word genocide into the title of a statute before any court had ruled on the merits. For its own dead, Spain treats its own closures and its own jurisdictional objection as sufficient, against the demands of two international organizations and two United Nations mechanisms for an effective investigation.
Accusation requires no judgment. Exoneration requires only Spain's own.
This is where the word Afrophobia belongs, and only here. It is not a synonym for immigration control. A state does not become Afrophobic by maintaining a border or refusing unauthorized entry, and anyone using the term that loosely has destroyed it. It applies where Africans are treated as a collective danger, where Black migrants receive systematically different treatment, where dozens of African dead produce denial rather than prosecution, where the missing remain unidentified on the last published record, and where remains are buried without names. Whether the force used was disproportionate is precisely what no independent process has determined, and Spain says it was not. That is the point. Melilla meets the rest of the standard on the documented record, and Spain has not met the standard of accountability it demands of others.
For ordinary enforcement at the fence, the accurate formulation is narrower:
Under the vocabulary Spain applies to Israel, Spain's African fences would already have been called apartheid, collective punishment, and racialized colonial violence.
That does not assert that a Spanish checkpoint satisfies the Rome Statute definition of apartheid, which requires an institutionalized regime of systematic racial oppression and domination maintained with intent. It asserts something Spain cannot rebut: that Spain treats legal conclusions as political adjectives when the defendant is the Jewish state, and demands context, proportion, and evidentiary rigor when the defendant is Spain.
X. "But they are not on the list"
Madrid's first answer will be that Ceuta and Melilla do not appear on the United Nations list of Non-Self-Governing Territories, and that this settles it.
It does not, and Spain of all states cannot make the argument, because Spain's own history proves the asymmetry.
A territory is placed on the list when the administering state transmits information under Article 73(e) of the Charter, or when the General Assembly acts. Spain transmitted information on Western Sahara to the Secretary-General on 27 February 1963, covering the year 1961, and the territory has been on the list since that transmission.
Then, in 1976, Spain discovered that a Spanish declaration could not undo it.
Listing is an institutional act of the United Nations, not an automatic consequence of a state using the word colony. But an administering state's transmission is how the question reaches the institution, and that is how Western Sahara reached it in 1963. What Spain then discovered is that the reverse does not follow. A declaration cannot complete a decolonization, cannot transfer sovereignty, and cannot resolve a status.
Non-listing therefore reflects, among other things, what an administering state has never put forward. It is evidence of how a territory has been treated. It is not an adjudication, and it is not proof that cities taken by conquest in 1415 and 1497 have no colonial character.
Their absence from the list is not an adjudication rejecting Morocco's claim. Morocco asked in 1975. Spain has never transmitted, the General Assembly has never acted, and no United Nations decolonization body has ever put their status through a determination. Non-listing records a question that was raised and never answered.
XI. Four hundred and seventy-six years
On 8 September 2025, Sánchez announced nine measures against Israel in order to stop what he called the genocide in Gaza. He opened by acknowledging the historic suffering of the Jewish people. He referred to the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. He said that the Jewish people deserve a state of their own and deserve to feel secure.[32]
He then spent the remainder of the speech attacking the only state on earth constituted around Jewish national self-determination.
Consider the credential he reached for. The Alhambra Decree of 1492 was not revoked in 1500, or 1700, or 1900. It was formally rescinded on 16 December 1968. Four hundred and seventy-six years. And the rescission was issued by the government of Francisco Franco.[33]
It will be said that the decree had long ceased to have practical effect. That is beside the point, and the point is the arithmetic. Spain did not get around to formally rescinding the instrument that expelled its Jews until four hundred and seventy-six years had passed, and when Spain finally did, the signature was Franco's.
Spain is entitled to invoke 1492. It is not entitled to invoke it as a credential. A state with that record has selected an unfortunate century in which to instruct Jews on the moral urgency of ethnic cleansing.
XII. Spain's own criteria, applied honestly
Everything above is negative. It shows that Spain's standard is not a standard. On its own it acquits nobody, and an argument that stopped here would deserve the charge of whataboutism.
So take the criteria Spain nominates for itself, and apply them without adjusting them. The claim is not that Israel wins every conceivable comparison. It is narrower and harder to escape: on the criteria Spain has selected, Israel is not the weaker case, and on several it is plainly the stronger.
Continuity and duration. Spain has held Melilla since 1497 and Ceuta since 1668, on a continent where Spain is not indigenous, over cities taken by force from an existing polity. Jerusalem was the seat of a Jewish monarchy in the early first millennium before the common era, the site of two Jewish temples, and the destination of a documented Jewish return from Babylonian exile in the sixth century BCE. That record predates the emergence of Islam in 610 by roughly sixteen centuries, and the beginning of Muslim rule in Jerusalem in 638 by rather more.[34] Duration settles no sovereignty by itself, in Africa or in Judea. But Spain cannot rank it decisive at Melilla, where Spanish possession is five hundred and twenty-nine years old, and incapable of weighing in Jerusalem, where the Jewish record is measured in millennia.
The wishes of the population. Spain treats the will of the residents as controlling in Ceuta, and tells the Gibraltarians that their wishes cannot determine their own status, after three hundred and twenty-two years, in a territory that has voted on the question more than once and answered it decisively both times. Israel is a democracy in which Arab citizens vote, sit in the Knesset, and have sat in a governing coalition, an Arab party having joined the coalition formed in 2021. Arab justices have sat on the Supreme Court, among them Salim Joubran, George Karra, and Khaled Kabub.[35] The status of populations who are not Israeli citizens is precisely what a negotiated settlement exists to resolve, and every party to this argument says it wants one. What is not in dispute is that of Spain, the United Kingdom, and Israel, the one government that has told a settled European population outright that its expressed will cannot govern its own future is the government in Madrid.
Security necessity. State Spain's case at its strongest. Spain's fences at Ceuta and Melilla address organized mass crossings, smuggling and trafficking networks, public order in two small cities, the integrity of the external border of the European Union, and a neighboring state that has opened the gates as an instrument of diplomatic pressure. These are real interests and Spain is entitled to defend them. Israel's barrier was built during a campaign of suicide bombings against buses, restaurants, and a Passover seder, and peer-reviewed evaluation has attributed a substantial share of the subsequent decline in suicide attacks to the barrier, alongside other measures.[36] Reasonable people can weigh causation. Nobody can seriously maintain that Spain faces the graver threat, which is what Spain's asymmetric vocabulary implies.
Judicial supervision. Here the record on both sides has just been enlarged. Israel's Supreme Court, sitting as the High Court of Justice, ordered the state to reroute roughly thirty kilometers of the barrier in Beit Sourik Village Council v. Government of Israel in 2004, on a petition brought by Palestinian villagers, and ordered reconsideration of the route around Alfei Menashe in Mara'abe v. Prime Minister of Israel in 2005.[37][38] An Israeli court compelled the Israeli army to move the wall because Palestinian farmers sued and won.
On 29 June 2026 the Fifth Section of the Administrative Chamber of the Spanish Supreme Court gave judgment 814/2026 in cassation 3795/2025, reported publicly on 8 July, three weeks before the Ceuta breakwater was overrun. An Algerian man had been intercepted at sea off Ceuta by the Guardia Civil and handed to the Moroccan authorities without a lawyer and without any formal procedure or decision. The courts of Ceuta and the High Court of Justice of Andalusia held that this was administrative action taken without legal basis. The Supreme Court agreed, dismissed the appeal, and fixed binding doctrine: summary rejection at the border may not be applied to persons intercepted at sea attempting to reach Ceuta or Melilla, and the ordinary removal procedure applies instead. No further appeal lies. The organizations that brought the litigation describe it as the first of five such cases pending.[39]
Note who stood on the other side. The appeal was brought by the State Attorney, for the General State Administration, arguing that the summary return of that man had been entirely lawful. Sánchez's government litigated to Spain's Supreme Court to defend the summary return of an African, and lost. In January 2024 the same court had already confirmed that the return of Moroccan minors from Ceuta in August 2021 was unlawful for failure to follow the statutory procedure.[40]
Concede at once the point Spain will want made, because it is true and it matters. Spain has real judicial supervision. Spanish courts constrain Spanish border practice. Claimants drawn from the affected population sue the Spanish state and win.
Now set that beside Beit Sourik and Mara'abe. Two states. Two supreme courts. Two governments defeated in their own courts by claimants drawn from the very population whose treatment was at issue.
Neither set of judgments disposes of a charge of apartheid, which turns on an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination maintained with intent, and not on whether a claimant has ever won a case. That is exactly why the symmetry matters. Spain treats a judicial defeat of the Spanish government as evidence that Spain is a state under law. It treats judicial defeats of the Israeli government as though they carried no weight whatever. The evidentiary value of a supreme court ruling against its own government does not vary with the nationality of the government.
There is a coda. Within weeks of that judgment, Spain's Interior Ministry was attributing the surge at Ceuta to smuggling networks exploiting the ruling, and the Government of Ceuta was asking Madrid for soldiers.[4] Spain is entitled to say that criminal networks exploit a judgment while Spain complies with it. Israel says precisely that about its own courts and its own security constraints, most weeks, and Spain has never once extended it the same courtesy.
Spain has named plenty of principles. Occupation, acquisition of territory by force, settlement, self-determination, humanitarian law, proportionality. What Spain has not produced is a single neutral treatment of continuity, resident population, borders, security, and self-determination that it applies without alteration across Gibraltar, Ceuta, Melilla, Western Sahara, and Israel.
Spain has not identified a rule. Spain has identified a defendant.
XIII. Eight answers Madrid will give
“Ceuta and Melilla predate the modern Moroccan state.” Then pre-existence and duration carry legal weight, and Spain must stop treating Jewish historical continuity in Jerusalem as carrying none. Spain may argue that other factors outweigh it. Spain may not argue that it counts for nothing while five centuries in Africa count for everything.
“The residents are Spanish citizens who wish to remain Spanish.” Then the will of the inhabitants carries legal weight, and Spain has conceded the decisive argument in Gibraltar to the United Kingdom in the same breath.
“They are autonomous cities under the Constitution, not colonies.” Domestic constitutional classification does not determine international status. Spain refuses to accept Britain's domestic characterization of Gibraltar as dispositive, and cannot claim for its own statutes an authority it denies to another state's.
“They are not on the United Nations list.” Answered above. A transmission under Article 73(e) is how the question reaches the institution, and unilateral withdrawal cannot transfer sovereignty, complete a decolonization, or resolve a status. Morocco raised Ceuta and Melilla in 1975 and nothing was ever determined. Non-listing is the record of a question left open, not a finding that it was closed.
“Morocco's claim is irredentist.” Spain's claim to Gibraltar is structurally irredentist by the very features Spain invokes against Morocco: contiguity, historical title, and the refusal to let a settled population's wishes be decisive. Spain has institutionalized that structure at the United Nations and calls it decolonization.
“There is no occupation because there is no armed conflict.” Spain's Gibraltar doctrine does not depend on armed conflict. It depends on colonial origin and territorial integrity. Spain cannot require a war for one colonial accusation and dispense with it for another.
“Genocide is a legal determination, not a rhetorical comparison.” Agreed, and it is the most important sentence Spain could utter. Then Spain should apply the same rigor to the Melilla dead, the men still unaccounted for, the unnamed graves, the withheld footage, and the absence of a single prosecution. Spain enacted an accusation into the title of a statute before any court had ruled on the merits. At its own fence it produced three closed files, a denial, a jurisdictional objection, and a submission to a United Nations torture body invoking national sovereignty and territorial integrity. It still holds the video.
“This is whataboutism.” It is not, and the distinction is the whole point. Whataboutism would mean defending Israeli conduct by pointing to Spanish conduct. Nothing here does that. Israel answers for its own actions on its own facts, and does so in its own courts, which have ruled against the Israeli state on the very barrier that Spanish political discourse calls illegal. The argument concerns the validity of the accuser's test.
If Spain's test is universal, it convicts Spain. If it cannot be applied to Spain, it is not a test. It is a verdict chosen in advance and reasoned backward.
Spain applies one rule to Britain, its exact negation to itself, and a third to the Jewish state. Spain is invited to explain what distinguishes the third case, in law, in one sentence, without using the name of the defendant.
XIV. Six questions for Madrid
Addressed to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, European Union and Cooperation, and to Spain's permanent mission to the United Nations. They contain no adjectives.
1. Does Spain maintain that the principle of territorial integrity overrides the right of self-determination of a territory's present inhabitants? If so, identify the beneficiary of that principle in Ceuta and Melilla. If not, will Spain amend its annual submission on Gibraltar?
2. Does duration of continuous possession carry legal weight where the origin of possession was conquest? If it does, why can it carry none in Jerusalem? If it does not, identify the sources of title Spain relies upon in Melilla, state the weight Spain assigns to each, and state the neutral rule that determines when such a source may count.
3. Does absence from the United Nations list of Non-Self-Governing Territories establish that a territory is not colonial, given that Spain's own 1976 declaration did not remove Western Sahara from it?
4. Does Spain accept, as general propositions, that a separation barrier is not inherently apartheid, that designated crossing points are not inherently racial domination, and that the lawfulness of a summary return turns on the facts, the available procedures, and the conduct of those crossing?
5. Does the Government of Spain endorse the apartheid vocabulary applied to Israeli conduct by parties of the governing coalition and in motions before the Cortes, alongside their condemnation of the barrier and of movement restrictions? If yes, what legal element distinguishes them from the barrier, the designated crossings, and the immediate-return practice accepted on the facts of N.D. and N.T.? If no, will Spain say so publicly?
6. What steps has Spain taken since 24 June 2022 to identify the men still unaccounted for at Melilla, to determine criminal responsibility for the deaths, and to prosecute where the evidence supports it, and will Spain release the aerial footage in its possession?
An answer is publishable. A refusal is publishable. Silence is publishable, and silence is the likely outcome, because there is no set of six consistent answers that leaves Spain's Israel policy standing.
XV. Choose one law
None of this requires Spain to agree with Israel. Spain is a sovereign state and may hold whatever foreign policy its electorate tolerates. Spain may criticize Israeli conduct, advocate Palestinian statehood, and vote against Israel in every forum on earth.
What Spain may not do is operate three incompatible laws of sovereignty and present the result as principle.
Spain is entitled to defend Ceuta and Melilla. It is entitled to invoke the identity and the wishes of the people who live there. It is entitled to argue that centuries of administration, citizenship, and institutional life carry legal weight. It is entitled to control entry at its borders, subject to human rights law. It is even entitled to maintain a sovereignty claim against Britain while dismantling a fence and calling the dismantling historic.
It is not entitled to reserve every one of those arguments for itself.
On 15 July, Spain removed a fence at Gibraltar and called it the fall of the last wall in continental Europe. The phrase was true, and that is the indictment. Spain's walls are in Africa. On 30 July one of them was overrun. The government of Ceuta declared an absolute emergency and asked for troops. The government in Madrid, which had spent three years explaining to Jerusalem what a barrier signifies, refused to declare an emergency at all and said the mechanism does not cover migration.
Madrid had legal machinery enough for an arms embargo, a decree-law, a customs prohibition, an advertising ban, and a thirty-one-page register of localities, already reissued once. For Ceuta it had a statutory objection.
Spain need not agree with Israel.
It must agree with itself.
Choose one law. Apply it everywhere. Or stop sermonizing.
Notes
1. Government of Spain, official account of the signing of the EU-UK agreement on Gibraltar, 14 July 2026. https://www.lamoncloa.gob.es/lang/en/gobierno/news/paginas/2026/20260714-gibraltar-eu-agreement.aspx
2. Euronews, Sánchez at La Línea de la Concepción on the removal of the frontier gates, 15 July 2026. https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2026/07/15/gibraltar-and-spain-end-border-checks-as-territorys-chief-minister-says-europe-is-back
3. Reuters, Guardia Civil on mass entry through the Tarajal breakwater, Ceuta, 30 July 2026. https://www.aol.com/articles/thousands-migrants-cross-spains-ceuta-121806000.html
4. Al Jazeera, Ceuta authorities declare humanitarian and social emergency; Interior Ministry declines a national emergency, 30 July 2026. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/7/30/spanish-enclave-of-ceuta-raises-alarm-as-thousands-cross-morocco-border
5. United Nations, Special Committee on Decolonization, statement of the representative of Spain on Gibraltar and territorial integrity, 6 June 2002. https://press.un.org/en/2002/gacol3064.doc.htm
6. United Nations, Special Committee on Decolonization, Spain on decolonization by territorial integrity, 2004. https://press.un.org/en/2004/gacol3099.doc.htm
7. Statement of Ambassador Héctor Gómez before the Committee of 24, June 2026, and the response of the Chief Minister of Gibraltar. https://www.democrata.es/en/politics/spain-urges-the-united-kingdom-to-face-the-decolonization-of-gibraltar-a-hindrance-contrary-to-international-law/
8. Ley Orgánica 1/1995, de 13 de marzo, de Estatuto de Autonomía de Ceuta, and Ley Orgánica 2/1995, de 13 de marzo, de Estatuto de Autonomía de Melilla, at https://www.boe.es/buscar/act.php?id=BOE-A-1995-6358 and https://www.boe.es/buscar/act.php?id=BOE-A-1995-6359
9. On the chain of title, see Las raíces históricas de Ceuta, Melilla y el resto de los territorios españoles del Norte de África, catalogued in the library of the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, European Union and Cooperation; and the Treaty of Lisbon of 1668, by which Portugal formally acknowledged Spanish retention of Ceuta following the Portuguese Restoration of 1640. https://biblioteca.exteriores.gob.es/bib/305509
10. Letter dated 27 January 1975 from the Permanent Representative of Morocco to the United Nations addressed to the Chairman of the Special Committee, requesting inclusion of Ceuta, Melilla and the associated islands on the list of Non-Self-Governing Territories, UN document A/AC.109/475. https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/4063520
11. Real Decreto-ley 10/2025, de 23 de septiembre, por el que se adoptan medidas urgentes contra el genocidio en Gaza y de apoyo a la población palestina, Boletín Oficial del Estado núm. 230, 24 September 2025. Preamble and Articles 1 to 4; Article 3.4 applying Ley Orgánica 12/1995 de Represión del Contrabando. https://www.boe.es/eli/es/rdl/2025/09/23/10
12. Al Jazeera, convalidation of the decree-law by the Congress of Deputies, 8 October 2025. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/10/8/spains-parliament-formally-approves-israel-arms-embargo
13. Resolución de 10 de febrero de 2026, de la Presidencia de la Agencia Estatal de Administración Tributaria, aprobando el listado de localidades y códigos postales, Boletín Oficial del Estado núm. 38, 12 February 2026, pp. 22652-22682. https://www.boe.es/diario_boe/txt.php?id=BOE-A-2026-3268
14. Resolución de 23 de diciembre de 2025 de la misma Presidencia, superseded by the resolution of 10 February 2026. https://www.boe.es/buscar/doc.php?id=BOE-A-2025-26944
15. Letter dated 29 January 2002 from the Under-Secretary-General for Legal Affairs, the Legal Counsel, addressed to the President of the Security Council (the Corell opinion), UN document S/2002/161. https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/458183
16. United Nations and Decolonization, Western Sahara territory page, recording listing since 1963 following Spain's transmission of information under Article 73(e). https://www.un.org/dppa/decolonization/en/nsgt/western-sahara
17. Real Instituto Elcano, fifty years since the Spanish withdrawal from Western Sahara. https://www.realinstitutoelcano.org/en/analyses/between-principles-and-national-interest-50-years-since-the-spanish-withdrawal-from-the-western-sahara/
18. European Parliament resolution of 10 June 2021 on the breach of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the use of minors by the Moroccan authorities in the migratory crisis in Ceuta, 2021/2747(RSP). https://oeil.europarl.europa.eu/oeil/en/document-summary?id=1666096
19. Spanish defense minister's characterization of the May 2021 Ceuta crossings. https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/1434666/spain-accuses-morocco-of-blackmail-over-ceuta-migrant-surge/amp
20. France 24, Spain's reversal on Western Sahara and the visit to Rabat, April 2022. https://www.france24.com/en/africa/20220407-spain-s-sanchez-on-historic-morocco-visit-after-western-sahara-reversal
21. Reporting on the terms of the Sánchez letter to Mohammed VI, March 2022. https://thediplomatinspain.com/en/2022/03/24/sanchezs-volte-face-on-the-sahara-receives-the-rejection-of-all-the-parliamentary-arc-except-psoe/
22. Government of Spain, official record of the President's visit to Ceuta, 23 March 2022: the agreement with Morocco “opens a new stage that consolidates several aspects of the relationship between the two countries; linked to security, to migration control, and to economic and commercial relations.” https://www.lamoncloa.gob.es/presidente/actividades/Paginas/2022/230222-sanchez-ceuta.aspx
23. European Court of Human Rights, press release, Grand Chamber judgment in N.D. and N.T. v. Spain, 13 February 2020. https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng-press?i=003-6638738-8816756
24. N.D. and N.T. v. Spain, applications nos. 8675/15 and 8697/15, Grand Chamber, 13 February 2020. https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng?i=001-201353
25. For the vocabulary in Spanish parliamentary practice, see the non-legislative motions published in the Boletín Oficial de las Cortes Generales, Congreso de los Diputados, XV Legislature, serie D, including núm. 201 of 24 September 2024 and núm. 314 of 1 April 2025, which apply apartheid vocabulary to Israeli conduct alongside condemnation of the barrier and of movement restrictions. https://www.congreso.es/en/busqueda-de-publicaciones?_publicaciones_id_texto=BOCG-15-D-314.CODI.&_publicaciones_legislatura=XV&_publicaciones_mode=mostrarTextoIntegro&p_p_id=publicaciones&p_p_lifecycle=0&p_p_mode=view&p_p_state=normal
26. Committee against Torture, Information received from Spain on follow-up to the concluding observations on its seventh periodic report, UN document CAT/C/ESP/FCO/7, date received 6 March 2026, issued 6 May 2026, paragraphs 8, 9, 11, 13 to 15 and 28. https://docstore.ohchr.org/SelfServices/FilesHandler.ashx?enc=xSpdC61z9Z5uHg%2Fgsjyaa3Ync4ra8aZ3OcxCJ%2BTk81qoGpZaZJeniHzJH%2Bwx20wRD30C4ui6WdDaZURzjf9ATQ%3D%3D
27. European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, on the practical availability of the legal-entry route relied upon by Spain in N.D. and N.T., including the reported embassy application of a survivor of 24 June 2022 that received no answer. https://www.ecchr.eu/en/press-release/melilla-massacre-a-year-without-justice-a-year-of-impunity/
28. Human Rights Watch, on the deaths at the Melilla border, 29 June 2022. https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/06/29/morocco/spain-horrific-migrant-deaths-melilla-border
29. Human Rights Watch, on the absence of credible investigation one year later, 22 June 2023. https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/06/22/spain/morocco-no-justice-deaths-melilla-border
30. Amnesty International, on the missing, the closure of investigations, and reported burials, June 2024. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/06/morocco-spain-reveal-fate-of-migrants-who-remain-missing-two-years-after-deadly-melilla-border-incident/
31. World Organisation Against Torture, Global Torture Index 2025, Spain factsheet. https://www.omct.org/site-resources/files/factsheets/Factsheet-Spain.2025-2.pdf
32. Institutional declaration of the President of the Government of Spain announcing measures, 8 September 2025. https://www.lamoncloa.gob.es/presidente/intervenciones/Paginas/2025/20250908-declaracion-pg-medidas-genocidio-gaza.aspx
33. World Jewish Congress, on the formal rescission of the Alhambra Decree on 16 December 1968. https://www.worldjewishcongress.org/en/about/communities/es
34. On Jewish historical continuity, see the Palestine Royal Commission Report (Peel Commission), Cmd. 5479, London, 1937, chapter I, for the external official acknowledgment; and, for the archaeological and historical record of Iron Age Jerusalem, the two Temples and the return from Babylonian exile, Amihai Mazar, Archaeology of the Land of the Bible, 10,000-586 B.C.E. (New York, 1990), chapters 9 and 11, and Lester L. Grabbe, A History of the Jews and Judaism in the Second Temple Period, volume 1 (London, 2004), chapters 2 and 3. https://content.ecf.org.il/files/M00300%20-%20PeelCommissionFullReport.pdf
35. Knesset records of Arab representation and of the composition of the government formed in June 2021, in which the United Arab List (Ra'am) was a coalition partner; and the published composition of the Supreme Court of Israel, recording the appointments of Justices Salim Joubran, George Karra and Khaled Kabub.
36. Simon Perry, Robert Apel, Graeme R. Newman and Ronald V. Clarke, “The Situational Prevention of Terrorism: An Evaluation of the Israeli West Bank Barrier,” Journal of Quantitative Criminology 33, no. 4 (2017), 727-751, doi 10.1007/s10940-016-9309-6.
37. HCJ 2056/04, Beit Sourik Village Council v. Government of Israel, judgment of 30 June 2004, ordering alteration of the barrier route.
38. HCJ 7957/04, Mara'abe v. Prime Minister of Israel, judgment of 15 September 2005, ordering reconsideration of the route in the Alfei Menashe area.
39. Tribunal Supremo, Sala de lo Contencioso-Administrativo, Sección Quinta, sentencia 814/2026 de 29 de junio de 2026, recurso de casación 3795/2025, ECLI:ES:TS:2026:2965, ROJ STS 2965/2026; publicly reported on 8 July 2026. The Court dismissed the appeal of the State Attorney against the judgment of the Tribunal Superior de Justicia de Andalucía and held that the summary rejection procedure under the tenth additional provision of the Aliens Act may not be applied to persons intercepted at sea attempting to reach Ceuta or Melilla, the ordinary removal procedure of article 58.3 of Organic Act 4/2000 applying instead. For the characterization of the case as the first of five pending, and for the account of the claimant’s treatment, see the statements of the litigating organizations reported at https://noticiasobreras.es/2026/07/el-supremo-limita-las-devoluciones-en-caliente-en-ceuta-y-melilla-y-obliga-a-garantizar-procedimientos-legales/ and https://fernandezrozas.com/2026/07/12/el-tribunal-supremo-confirma-que-la-ley-no-permite-las-devoluciones-en-caliente-de-los-migrantes-que-pretenden-entrar-a-nado-en-ceuta-y-melilla-8-julio-2026/
40. Consejo General del Poder Judicial, on the Supreme Court's confirmation that the return of minors from Ceuta to Morocco in August 2021 was unlawful for failure to follow the procedure laid down in the Aliens Act. https://www.poderjudicial.es/cgpj/es/Poder-Judicial/Tribunal-Supremo/Noticias-Judiciales/El-Tribunal-Supremo-confirma-que-la-devolucion-de-menores-desde-Ceuta-a-Marruecos-en-agosto-de-2021-fue-ilegal-al-no-seguir-el-procedimiento-previsto-en-la-Ley-de-Extranjeria