A Case Study In Effective Leverage Operations: How The Western Sahara Was Won By Morocco: Part II.
In part one of this series, we discussed how Morocco swayed the United States and the first Trump administration into its camp and secured U.S. recognition of Western Sahara.
That was the first crucial domino.
Everything else followed from there on.
Now we have a situation where Morocco has the UN on its side and enjoys full unchallenged control over Western Sahara.
We also discussed how this provides so much benefit and strategic leverage for Morocco.
And why the United States was interested in this part of the African continent being in Morocco’s hands rather than under Algeria’s influence or under the control of the Polisario Front/Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic.
Now, in this cable, we will look at how Morocco pitched itself as a linchpin, a strategic benefactor of other key players involved.
It made it very attractive for other countries to join the bandwagon in recognizing Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara.
As discussed before, this is a fascinating case study in the effective application of real-world leverage in foreign affairs.
What Israel Got: A Partner That Held Through Gaza
Israel entered the story in earnest as Morocco recognized it as a favor to Washington (and as part of the Abraham Accords).
But there were also other concrete benefits directed to Israel.
In November 2021, Benny Gantz flew to Rabat and signed the first defense memorandum of understanding Israel had ever concluded with an Arab state.
This MOU covered intelligence exchange, procurement, and joint exercises.
The arms relationship that followed has made Morocco one of the two largest importers of Israeli weapons in the Arab world, alongside the UAE.
IAI sold Morocco the Barak MX integrated air and missile defense system for $540 million, built around ELTA’s ELM-2084 AESA radars.
Which is the same radar family behind Iron Dome’s fire control.
The system is now deployed and active, covering Rabat and, notably, the Western Sahara itself.
Another Israeli defense contractor, Elbit systems sold ATMOS 155mm self-propelled howitzers (along with EXTRA precision rockets which have a 150km range and a 120kg payload and a highly accurate 10 meter CEP), beating France’s KNDS and its Caesar system in a head-to-head competition.
Twenty Elta radars have been integrated onto Morocco’s upgraded F-5 fighters.
In addition, Morocco operates Heron drones, Harop loitering munitions, Hermes 900 and 450 UAVs, and a counter-drone system from SkyLock.
And Hermes fleet was already used inside Western Sahara, against the Polisario Front.
Then, in July 2024 the relationship reached a new tier: a $1 billion contract for two Ofek 13 reconnaissance satellites, the largest deal between the two countries since normalization.
The detail that matters is who lost that contract.
Morocco’s previous spy satellites were French, built by Airbus and Thales.
And so Rabat replaced them with Israeli ones, reportedly declining even to receive the French armaments directorate’s delegation while relations with Paris were cold.
Crucially, the satellite deal was finalized around the outbreak of the Gaza war, and was not canceled.
And the relationship has moved from sales to production.
BlueBird Aero Systems, an IAI subsidiary, has opened a factory near Casablanca to manufacture SpyX loitering munitions on Moroccan soil, with technology transfer and local engineers trained to assemble and maintain the systems.
And most recently, in January 2026, the two countries upgraded the 2021 memorandum into a formal defense cooperation partnership.
By SIPRI’s accounting, Israel rose to Morocco’s third-largest arms supplier across 2020-24 and has now overtaken France outright.
For Israel’s defense industry, which drew 12% of its total exports from Abraham Accords states in 2024, Morocco became the proof that normalization is a market.
The intelligence dimension matters just as much.
Morocco cut ties with Iran back in 2018, accusing Hezbollah of training Polisario fighters through the Iranian embassy in Algiers.
Which means the Western Sahara file and the Iran file were fused in Rabat’s mind before the Accords even existed.
For Israel, backing Morocco against the Polisario is backing a partner against what both governments describe as an Iranian proxy problem on the Atlantic.
And for Jerusalem, this relationship buys a standing intelligence relationship on Iran’s African networks, plus a customer for Israeli cyber tools, including, by wide reporting, NSO’s Pegasus (that can hack mobile phones and take over total control).
All of this led to a compelling case for Israel to grant a formal recognition for Morocco.
In July 2023, Netanyahu’s office formally recognized Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara in a letter to the King, and announced the intention to open a consulate in Dakhla, making Israel the second major state after the US to convert relations into official recognition.
Morocco then delivered the thing Israel needed most: a normalization with an Arab state that survived the war in Gaza.
Despite facing enormous domestic public anger and some of the largest protests in the Arab world, the government never broke ties with Israel, never suspended the defense contracts, and never canceled the satellite deal signed as the war began.
For Israel, that endurance is the proof of concept the entire Abraham Accords framework rests on.
It is a demonstration that normalization is a state decision that can hold against public opinion in wartime.
Every argument now being made about Saudi normalization, including in these cables, quietly leans on the Moroccan case: that it is possible to push it through while disregarding public opinion on the ground.
MBS is not convinced though (or at the very least, he is using the pretense of that lack of conviction as an excuse to avoid normalization without securing major concessions first.)
(side note: as discussed before, the Morocco - Israel alignment has a current strategic/political application too, because a politically wounded Sánchez, Israel’s harshest critic in the EU, serves Jerusalem’s interests, and so Morocco’s use of a migration pressure valve at Ceuta was doing that work for Israel. Which is precisely why evidence-free Mossad conspiracy theories bloomed around the crisis.)
What Moved Spain: The Migration Pressure Point
Spain was not persuaded through charm or concrete benefits like Israel.
Instead, Spain was coerced, and the precise mechanism of this coercion was the one on full display at Ceuta last month.
And as previously discussed, there is also a background to this story
In April 2021, Madrid quietly admitted Polisario leader Brahim Ghali to a Spanish hospital under a false identity for COVID treatment.
Morocco’s border gendarmes then stepped aside, and roughly 10,000 migrants, many of them minors, crossed into Ceuta in 48 hours.
This forced Spain to deploy the army with armored vehicles on a European beach.
Ten months later, in March 2022, Sánchez wrote to King Mohammed VI endorsing Moroccan autonomy as “the most serious, realistic and credible basis” for resolving Western Sahara.
Spain ended up reversing four decades of Spanish neutrality on its own former colony mere ten months after this display of naked coercion from Morocco.
Migration coercion produced a formal reversal of a European state’s foreign policy, publicly, and everyone in the region took notes.
The depth of Spain’s dependence explains why Madrid opted out against resistance to coercion.
Morocco controls the land approaches to Ceuta and Melilla, the EU’s only land borders in Africa.
It furthermore polices the Atlantic departure zones feeding the Canary Islands route, which set successive records of over 39,000 arrivals in 2023 and nearly 47,000 in 2024 when cooperation frayed elsewhere.
Spanish counterterrorism efforts also run on Moroccan liaison.
This is a dependence burned into institutional memory by the 2004 Madrid train bombings (carried out largely by Moroccan nationals, which killed 193 people).
Trade flows also compound this dependance : Spain is Morocco’s largest trading partner, with bilateral flows above €20 billion, and hundreds of Spanish firms manufacture in Morocco.
The two countries are even co-hosting the 2030 World Cup, together with Portugal.
And this binds a decade of Spanish planning to Moroccan goodwill.
There is also a humiliation on the record that Madrid chose to swallow.
In 2021, Pegasus spyware, the Israeli tool Morocco is widely reported to operate, was found on the phones of Sánchez himself and his defense minister.
Spain confirmed the infections, never publicly attributed them, and eight months later delivered the Western Sahara concession anyway.
The 2022 concession was supposed to buy stability.
But what it actually may have taught Rabat is that the migration pressure valve works famously.
And this is why (as a proximate reason), ten days after Sánchez’s reconciliation trip to Algeria last month, the gendarmes vanished from the breakwater again and 50,000 people crossed at Ceuta.
The lever that won Western Sahara is now being pulled to police Spain’s other relationships.
Leverage that succeeds does not retire.
Which is a good reminder for Spain too.
If that leverage takes the form of coercion, then the situation will only compound.
It’s always better to nip the coercive efforts in the bud before letting it be repeated.
This was the primary error committed by Sánchez.
Back in 2022, he should have used EU measures (or threatened to/pushed for it at least), to punish Morocco instead of caving to this coercion
What Moved France: The Market
France required another type of payoff.
Morocco is the anchor of French commercial presence in Africa: the top destination for French investment on the continent.
It is also a home to operations of nearly every major French firm, and tied to France by a diaspora of around 1.5 million people of Moroccan origin.
When Paris tried to balance between Rabat and Algiers in the early 2020s, Morocco simply cooled the relationship and started redirecting contracts.
The Ofek satellite deal with Israel was the demonstration: a billion-dollar contract that had belonged to Airbus and Thales since 2013 handed to their Israeli competitor, with the French procurement delegation reportedly not even received.
Visas were restricted, ambassadors recalled, and French firms watched Morocco’s infrastructure pipeline, high-speed rail, ports, renewables, drift toward other bidders.
Paris got the message.
In July 2024, Macron wrote to the King declaring that “the present and future of Western Sahara fall within the framework of Moroccan sovereignty.”
The reward was immediate: a state visit that October yielding around €10 billion in agreements.
And this included the French Alstom-supplied high-speed rail extension toward Marrakech ahead of the 2030 World Cup.
There were additional agreements on developing Safran aircraft-engine facilities, energy and green-hydrogen ventures, and port logistics.
(side note: the Pegasus hack file sits in the French ledger too, since the phone reportedly targeted in 2021 belonged to Macron himself, and recognition came three years later regardless.)
Britain followed in June 2025, backing autonomy under Moroccan sovereignty and attaching British firms to Moroccan infrastructure and the World Cup buildout.
Making it the third permanent Security Council member in the column of recognizers.
The EU renewed its trade arrangement in October 2025 with Western Saharan products still inside the preferential regime, adjusted only by a labeling technicality.
With three of the Permanent 5 (P5) UN Security Council members already bought in, the October 2025 resolution (treating Moroccan autonomy over Western Sahara as an established baseline) was close to a formality.
Overall playbook
Morocco priced every major bilateral relationship it has in a single good, recognition of its Western Sahara claim.
It then let each buyer pay in the currency that buyer actually felt the most.
For Trump’s Washington, the primary currency was Israel/Abraham Accords, a normalization trophy at zero American cost.
For Israel, it was a defense market absorbing everything from air defense to satellites to a drone factory, an intelligence partner on Iran’s Atlantic networks, and a model normalization agreement with an Arab state that held throughout the Gaza war.
And this was then paid for with Israel’s own recognition and a promised consulate in Dakhla.
For Madrid, it was the border, periodically opened just long enough to demonstrate what non-cooperation costs.
For Paris, it was contracts, with the Ofek deal as the warning shot and €10 billion as the make-up payment.
For the Sahel region military juntas, it is port access to the Atlantic through Dakhla.
For African states, it was phosphate diplomacy, fertilizer investments and agricultural training that flipped the continent, brought Morocco back into the African Union after 33 years, and converted the SADR’s strongest support bloc into a field of Moroccan consulates.
Underneath these separate transactions ran the constant underlying theme: fifty years of facts on the ground accumulating in Morocco’s favor: Moroccan settlers moved in, border facilities bolstered, new infrastructure and motorway built, etc.
This then created the following reality: by the time each power came to price its recognition, the alternative it was declining to defend had already ceased to exist in any practical and realistic form.
In other words, Morocco not only made recognition of its control over Western Sahara very advantageous for each bilateral party, but it also removed the realistic possibility of any positive outcome materializing from any other alternative to Moroccan autonomy.
It is at once disgraceful, pathetic, and disappointing that Spain, France, and the US caved on Western Sahara. And Spain is virtually apologizing for giving a sick man a hospital bed. (remember the Shah in the US). Trump has no principles, so no surprise. It is also ridiculous that Spain had to give up all its pieces of land in Morocco except Ceuta and Melilla.