Every few years, the political weather between Madrid and Rabat turns stormy, and when it does, a familiar explanation is wheeled out: Western Sahara. The conflict gets blamed for closed borders, canceled summits, diplomatic recalls, and the strange, feverish rhythm of Spanish-Moroccan relations. But in an opinion article published on August 18, 2026, in the Spanish online news outlet InfoLibre, Abdallah Al-Arabi, the Polisario Front’s representative in Spain, asked readers to stop and question that script. It is, he argues, a misleading oversimplification. Using Western Sahara as a pretext to explain every quarrel between Spain and Morocco does not clarify anything; it obscures the real, historical roots of the tensions that have always run beneath the surface of bilateral relations. Al-Arabi does not seek to downplay the Western Sahara conflict itself, which remains a living wound for the Sahrawi people, but he insists that the instability between Spain and Morocco did not begin with the desert, nor will it end simply by silencing discussion of it. The deeper contradictions, he suggests, are closer to home, rooted in unresolved questions of territory, sovereignty, and the unequal way the two countries manage their shared geography. By reducing the entire relationship to one single issue, politicians on both sides are able to dodge the harder questions, and the public is left with a neat but false story. What is missing, in Al-Arabi’s view, is an honest acknowledgment of the long history that shaped these two neighbors, and the uncomfortable fact that some of their deepest disputes predate the Western Sahara case or run alongside it without ever being fully faced.
The concern that prevails among Spanish public opinion, Al-Arabi writes, is not primarily about the desert. It is about Morocco’s continued expansionist ambitions toward the Spanish cities of Ceuta and Melilla. These two cities sit on the northern coast of Africa, and they stand as a living reminder that Spain’s borders do not end at the Strait of Gibraltar. For many Spaniards, they are not just administrative outposts; they are symbols of national sovereignty, and any Moroccan rhetoric that touches them immediately stirs deep anxiety. Morocco has, at various moments, questioned their status, placed pressure on their borders, and used migration flows as a means of exerting political leverage. Al-Arabi points out that the management of those borders is not a technical or humanitarian matter alone. It is a matter of control, visibility, and power. When thousands of people try to cross into Ceuta and Melilla, or when border barriers are quietly renegotiated, ordinary Spaniards feel the fragility of their country’s southern edge. That concern, he believes, is widely shared and entirely rational, and yet it often gets buried under official language about partnership and mutual interests. Terms like “shared prosperity” and “economic cooperation” are frequently used in diplomatic communiqués between Madrid and Rabat, but Al-Arabi warns against letting those pleasant words blur the political and legal specificity of Ceuta and Melilla. No amount of commercial investment or optimistic talk about joint development can change the fact that the status of these cities raises questions of sovereignty, territorial equity, and historical justice. To pretend otherwise is to ignore the elephant that has always been sitting in the negotiation room, not because of Western Sahara, but because of the unresolved tension embedded in the geography itself.
Where, then, does Western Sahara fit into this picture? For Al-Arabi, it is not a pretext or a side issue, but it is also not the only story. The dispute over the territorial waters adjacent to Western Sahara, he notes, has already been legally settled through the repeated jurisprudence of the Court of Justice of the European Union. Those rulings have consistently treated the waters off the coast of Western Sahara as an integral part of the Sahrawi territory listed by the United Nations as a Non-Self-Governing Territory. That is not a point of interpretation or a matter of political opinion; it is a legal reality. The European Union, Spain, and any other actor that wishes to engage in the region cannot simply set aside that reality in order to pursue economic deals or strategic partnerships with Morocco. Al-Arabi’s argument is not merely legalistic, though. He is making a deeper point about respect and legitimacy. The Sahrawi people have a right to their land and a right to their resources, and no external power has the authority to behave as if they do not exist. For decades, the Sahrawi population has lived in exile, in refugee camps, in a condition of waiting, while outside powers negotiated over their heads. Their territory has been treated by some as a prize, by others as a bargaining chip, and by many as an inconvenient complication. But the law, Al-Arabi insists, draws a clear line: Western Sahara is not an empty space, not a Moroccan province, not a free zone for foreign investment. It is a territory whose people have not yet exercised their right to self-determination, and until they do, any measure taken south of latitude 27.40° necessarily requires the explicit and legitimate consent of the Sahrawi people, expressed through their sole legitimate representative, the Polisario Front.
There is a moral dimension here that Al-Arabi wants readers to feel, not just understand. If a project is built on your land, if resources are extracted from your waters, if your future is decided in distant capitals, you expect to be asked for permission. The Sahrawi people have never truly been asked. Instead, they have watched as Morocco and the European Union negotiated agreements, as Spain deepened its economic ties with Rabat, and as the words “Western Sahara” floated around diplomatic circles but rarely led to meaningful action on self-determination. In his article, Al-Arabi is careful to direct his message not only at Madrid but also at Brussels and, in a broader sense, at every European power that sees the Sahara as a useful annex to the Moroccan relationship. He argues that neither Spain nor the European Union has the right to act in a way that disregards the sovereignty of the Sahrawi people over their land and resources. This is not a rhetorical flourish. It is a reminder that international law is built on the principle of consent, and consent has never been given. Any project, investment, fishing agreement, or infrastructure plan undertaken south of latitude 27.40° without the approval of the Polisario Front is, in his eyes, an act of disrespect toward the Sahrawi people and a violation of their most basic rights. The practical implications are enormous, because Western Sahara is not a symbolic territory; it has phosphates, rich fishing grounds, and potential for energy development. The question is not whether outsiders are interested in those resources, but whether they are willing to acknowledge that the resources belong to the people of the land, and that no one else can act as their guardian without their approval.
Having identified the problem, Al-Arabi turns his attention to what real stability would require. Genuine peace and a strong, balanced relationship between Spain and Morocco cannot emerge from superficial political analyses or from attempts to conceal fundamental problems. He outlines three essential pillars on which any sustainable understanding must rest. The first is full respect for international law and the resolutions of international legitimacy. That means accepting that Western Sahara is not a disputed appendage of Morocco, but a Non-Self-Governing Territory with a legal status defined by the United Nations. It also means accepting that the rights of the Sahrawi people cannot be negotiated away by third parties. The second pillar is political good faith: a commitment to keeping promises, to honest dialogue, and to resolving disagreements without resorting to pressure, blackmail, or manufactured crises. Al-Arabi is clearly thinking of the way migration has sometimes been weaponized, the way Morocco has used the border as a tool of leverage, and the way diplomatic ruptures have been staged for domestic consumption on both sides. Good faith, he argues, means abandoning those tactics and speaking honestly about disagreements rather than using them as instruments of coercion. The third pillar is explicit recognition of the legitimate interests of both sides without compromising the territorial sovereignty of Western Sahara or allowing strategic differences to be reduced to simplistic narratives. He is not asking for a relationship in which Spain and Morocco never disagree; he is asking for a relationship in which disagreement is handled with maturity, and in which one country’s interests are not pursued at the expense of another people’s right to exist as a nation.
Al-Arabi’s article is ultimately an invitation to abandon the comfortable lie that Western Sahara is merely a fly in the ointment of an otherwise improvable Spanish-Moroccan friendship. It is, in fact, a serious issue in itself, and it is bound up with other serious issues that have haunted the two countries for generations. The old temptation is to blame the desert for everything, and to promise that if only the Western Sahara problem could be made to disappear, all other tensions would melt away. Al-Arabi refuses to accept that logic. He reminds his readers that the cities of Ceuta and Melilla are not abstractions, that border control is not a bureaucratic detail, and that the history of Spanish-Moroccan relations is far too deep and wounding to be reduced to a single conflict. The Sahrawi people, he insists, deserve justice on their own terms, not as a favor done in exchange for diplomatic stability elsewhere. And until that justice is delivered, until the law is respected, until good faith replaces pressure, and until the legitimate voices of the Sahrawi people are heard clearly and without hesitation, any claim of a lasting breakthrough between Spain and Morocco will ring hollow. The relationship, like the conflict itself, will remain fragile, waiting for someone brave enough to speak the whole truth and honest enough to act on it. In the end, his message is not simply about Western Sahara. It is about the difference between a friendship built on convenience and a peace built on conviction.