Ceuta crisis fuels Israel conspiracy theories

Hours after tens of thousands of people from Morocco stormed into Spain’s Ceuta enclave on Thursday, Spanish actor Javier Bardem shared a theory on who was behind this mass breach of his native country’s borders.

The theory reposted by Bardem—a vocal champion of the Palestinian cause who’s publicly accused Israel of committing genocide—blamed Israel, implying it somehow orchestrated the invasion 3,200 miles away from its territory to punish Spain’s government for its anti-Israel policies.

U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee called Bardem’s repost a “laughable new blood libel by another dim-witted actor,” and described Bardem as “‘Dumb & Dumber’ rolled into one person,” referring to the 1994 comedy film starring Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels.

Yet the posts and reposts of conspiracy theories about Ceuta by anti-Israel individuals spread like wildfire, often accompanied by antisemitic rhetoric, demonstrating the demand for this type of content.

On Thursday, at least 50,000 people, mostly young men, broke through the fence that surrounds Ceuta as others landed on its shores, overwhelming security forces and flooding the enclave. At least 72 people died because of crowd crushes, clashes and drowning, authorities said, adding that most of those who crossed had been returned to Morocco, whose territory surrounds Ceuta. Spain and Morocco have exchanged accusations for decades over Spanish-held territories in northern Africa.

One post shared by Bardem on Instagram, where he has 1.5 million followers, was a monologue by Indian comedian Sundeep Bhardwaj saying: “If you’re wondering what does the United States or Israel have to do with this: As usual, everything. Spain is the only country that has publicly declined to help the United States and Israel commit their genocide in Palestine. So, in the last year, Israel has been openly threatening Spain.”

Another reshared post by Bardem read: “We don’t know who engineered this crisis, but we know who benefits from a weakened, destabilized Spain: Israel, and the Western far right eager to turn migration into a weapon against Muslims.”

The conspiracies didn’t end with Bardem. Spanish Transportation Minister Oscar Puente retweeted a comment on the Ceuta invasion by Israel’s Ambassador to the U.N., Danny Danon, writing of Danon’s comments: “Well, things are starting to get pretty clear.” Danon had written that “maybe before it continues lecturing us, it’s time [Spain] explained to the world why it still maintains colonial enclaves in Africa.”

The U.S.-based Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM) found that 119 influencer accounts were responsible for 173 posts that peddled a “global antisemitic conspiracy,” as CAM called it, in connection with the Ceuta crisis. The posts generated 57.5 million views with an estimated reach of 103.1 million viewers, 1.9 million likes, and 368,400 shares in two days.

Every society “has its share of conspiracy theorists,” Rafael Medoff, an author and director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies in Washington, D.C., told JNS. “The danger is when insane theories start moving from the margins to the mainstream—and when those theories are aimed at inciting hatred against a minority group.”

Bardem’s “incendiary rhetoric is helping to fuel the flames of anti-Jewish hatred worldwide, at a time when such hatred is already exploding into violence in country after country,” Medoff added. He said it was “the height of irresponsibility for Javier Bardem to use his stature as one of Spain’s most prominent and admired actors to spread hatred of Israel.”

The Ceuta crisis is a major political problem for Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s left-wing government, which Bardem has endorsed. Critics say it exposes a broader laxness on law and order as well as immigration—one of the hottest issues on the political agenda in Spain and throughout Europe.

The breach closely followed the approval by the Sánchez government of a mass regularization decree granting legal residency and work permits to hundreds of thousands of undocumented migrants. Sánchez’s critics argued the regularization incentivized immigrants to break in.

Some of the government’s advocates pointed outward, to Morocco, Israel and the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump. Trump has clashed with Sánchez over the Spanish prime minister’s opposition to the joint U.S.-Israeli military operation in Iran, and his attempts to complicate the use of U.S. air bases in Spain in that operation.

Transportation Minister Puente wrote on X, “Some in Washington, Tel Aviv, and Rabat, and also a few who grow in their shadow in Madrid, wanted images of our security forces and armed forces machine-gunning children on the beaches.”

There is no public evidence connecting Israel or the U.S. to what happened in Ceuta, but some of those seeking to make the connection cited a 2019 tweet by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s son, Yair, who wrote: “Dear Arabs and Muslims. Want to free occupied Arab Islamic lands? Here’s a good start!” referring to a map showing several Spanish enclaves in Africa.

One post shared by Bardem and others read, “Yair Netanyahu publicly called on ‘Arabs and Muslims’ to ‘liberate’ Ceuta and Melilla.” Yair Netanyahu commented on this on Friday, saying he posted the tweet in 2019 to expose Spain’s “hypocrisy” in criticizing Israel’s presence in Judea and Samaria. “I see that antisemitic conspiracy theorists are using this tweet from 2019 as ‘proof’ for their absurd blood libels against Jews and Israel,” Netanyahu wrote on Friday.

Spain is one of several European Union member countries that have intervened in South Africa’s 2023 lawsuit accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza, widely understood as an endorsement of the disputed suit. Sánchez last year called Israel a “genocidal state.” Jerusalem has accused Madrid of fomenting the surge in antisemitic hatred.

On social media, some have connected the Ceuta conspiracy theories involving Israel to the painful Jewish history in Spain, where Jews had been persecuted for centuries after the Inquisition that began in 1492.

Angel Mas, the founder of the pro-Israel Action and Communication in the Middle East (ACOM), a Madrid-based non-profit, disputed a narrative in which the Ceuta crisis triggered Spanish antisemitism.

“Modern Spain is not an antisemitic society. Medieval history is not an accurate guide to contemporary Spain, just as it would not be for England, France, Germany or Switzerland,” Mas, a vocal critic of the Sánchez government, told JNS.

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