In May 2021, when Morocco opened the Ceuta border and pushed thousands of people into the Spanish exclave, there were those who knew at once whose fault it was. Not Rabat's, though it was using human beings as a lever against Madrid. Not the European Union's, incapable as it was of answering the blackmail. The fault was Israel's: the Abraham Accords had drawn Morocco closer to Israel, so the hand that opened the border was, at bottom, the hand of Jerusalem.
The claim is absurd, and it is its very absurdity that makes it useful. Israel had no hand whatever in Ceuta. And yet, of all the actors with real agency at that border, it was the only one to whom a hidden causality was ascribed. It is worth noting who said so. Not the crude antisemite, who knows no better, but educated people, people who fancy themselves intelligent, who fervently built the bridge linking a Spanish exclave to Tel Aviv. Intelligence, here, did not guard against the error. It refined it.
That alignments exist between Israel, Morocco and the United States is true; but an alignment is not an order. From a web of interests one does not leap, without proof, to the authorship of a particular act. And the opportunistic remark of some Israeli minister applauding what had happened proves nothing, because to applaud a thing after it occurs makes no one its author. What is missing is a fact linking Jerusalem to Ceuta, and that fact does not exist.
This is nothing new. It is the latest form of a very old structure. First came theological anti-Judaism: the problem was the Jew's faith, and conversion resolved it. Once that door had closed, the nineteenth century brought racial antisemitism: the problem became the blood, and conversion no longer served, because an essence cannot be converted. That version culminated in extermination. After 1945 it became unsayable, and the structure needed a new object in order to be sayable once more. Part of contemporary anti-Zionism is that third form: it allows one to say of the State what can no longer be said of the race or of the religion. The Jewish State comes to occupy the place of the individual Jew, the hidden power, the diffuse guilt for the ills of others. Ceuta is precisely this in its pure state: proof that the object need no longer even exist to be summoned.
A line must nonetheless be drawn, lest one blindness be traded for another. Not all anti-Zionism is this. Genuine political criticism of Israel exists, as legitimate as that made of any state. To say that anti-Zionism is, without more, antisemitism is both false and self-defeating: it lumps together the militant of hatred and the critic of conscience, and it drains the word of the force it needs for the case to which it truly applies. What separates the two is not tone but singling out. When Israel is denied the right to exist that is denied to no other state, when it is asked what is asked of no one else, when the Jew of Lisbon is made answerable for a government in Jerusalem, then the old structure is at work beneath the language of politics. It is Natan Sharansky's 3D test: delegitimisation, demonisation, double standards.
And this is the point on which I will not yield. Israel is the only state required continually to prove its legitimacy to exist.
It is called colonial in a region where the principal colonisation was not European. It is judged an aggressor when, at the decisive moments, the casus belli was forced upon it by the other side, from the siege of 1948 to the closure of the Strait of Tiran in 1967, from Yom Kippur to 7 October. One may argue over who fired first in this or that episode. There is no arguing over who, time and again, made war inevitable. To note this is not to absolve Israel of anything. There are excesses of its army; there are, in its government, extremists whose acts border on the criminal, and to whom nothing binds me. A state that claims for itself the standard of Western democracy has a duty to be measured by it, and fails when it does not meet it. But it is precisely because it claims that standard that Israel is scrutinised as no other is. No one fills the squares of Europe over Sudan, over Burma, or over China and its Muslims, because of those states nothing is demanded. There is no indignation without expectation. And beneath it lies a racism of low expectations that no one cares to see: of Israel it is demanded because Israel is recognised as one of us, and the rest of the world is abandoned in silence.
That is why the question that matters is not about them. It is about us. What Ceuta reveals is nothing about Israel, which was not there. It reveals a mental structure that outlived the religion and outlived the race, and that has found in the Jewish State its sayable form. And whoever needs Israel to explain Ceuta is not talking about Israel. They are talking about themselves.
Jorge Silva Carvalho served as the Director-General of Portugal's external intelligence agency.
