Some analysts suspect that Morocco’s sudden lapse in enforcement may be in response to deepening ties between Spain and Algeria — the latter alleged to have sponsored Sahrawi separatists in Moroccan-controlled Western Sahara. In 2021, Morocco similarly waved through some 8,000 migrants to punish Madrid for hosting a Sahrawi leader. But a related — more insidious — reason for the latest breach is that Rabat is leveraging an increasingly close relationship with the Trump administration and Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel.

MAGA has branded Spain Public Enemy No. 1 over its government’s strident posture towards the US and Israel during the Iran war. The socialist government of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has refused to allow Washington access to its Rota and Morón military bases, its consistent failure to meet Nato defense-spending targets also fueling MAGA ire. In March, the center-right American Enterprise Institute’s Michael Rubin wrote a policy brief calling on the White House to formally recognize Ceuta and Melilla as occupied Moroccan territory. True to the spirit of Third-World decolonialism, Rubin wrote that Spain was “a colonial power running colonies across the Strait of Gibraltar”.

Within days, neoconservative congressman Mario Díaz-Balart had entoned Fidel Castro, stating that the enclaves were “not in the geographic territory of Spain” and should be “established, negotiated, and discussed between friends and allies”. Similarly, Reuters reported in April that a Pentagon email outlined options against Spain, including Nato suspension; the treaty states explicitly in Article 6 that territories in continental Africa are exempt from collective defense obligations.

For its part, Rabat has since transformed into a vital partner of Washington and Tel Aviv under the Trump-brokered Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and several Arab states, including Morocco, in 2020. Ironically, Rabat proceeded to leverage the development in the service of its own expansionist aims, with the first Trump administration recognizing Rabat’s sovereignty over Western Sahara.

The dispute over Western Sahara traces back to Spain’s 1975 withdrawal from what was then called Spanish Sahara. Under the Madrid Accords, Spain handed administration of the territory to Morocco and Mauritania; Mauritania withdrew from its share in 1979 after heavy losses to Sahrawi guerrillas. A 16-year war followed, pitting Moroccan forces against the so-called Polisario Front. Rabat eventually built an extensive sand wall — fortified with landmines and troops — partitioning the territory. In November 2020, Moroccan troops entered the UN-patrolled buffer zone to disperse Sahrawi protesters, prompting the Polisario to declare an end to the three-decade truce and a return to armed struggle. The two sides have since traded sporadic strikes along the sand wall.

Rabat has since made inroads on virtually every diplomatic front. Following normalization through the Abraham Accords, Morocco signed a security agreement with Israel in 2021, proving vital for the conflict in Western Sahara; in January, the two nations signed an additional joint military work plan. Then, in February, secret talks chaired by the US brought Moroccan, Algerian, Mauritanian, and Polisario delegations together for the first time since 2019.

In true Trumpian fashion, Morocco announced on Monday that it was naming the Dakhla-Tiznit highway, which runs through Western Sahara, after the US President. Ecstatic, Trump exclaimed on Truth Social: “Thank you to Highly Respected Mohammed VI, the King of Morocco — Such a Great Honor! I look forward to traveling the entire length of this Great Highway someday, hopefully soon!”.

All of this comes as a royal headache for Sánchez ahead of a general election in 2027. His record of raising wages and opposing US and Israeli war crimes has boosted his standing both at home and abroad. Yet a slew of corruption scandals, and a lax immigration policy, have seen his party, PSOE, as well as allies in Sumar and Podemos, consistently trail the Right-wingers of Vox and the People’s Party (PP) in polls.

In recent years, the bulk of low-skilled immigration to Spain has overwhelmingly come from Spanish-speaking Latin America. As a result, negative attitudes towards immigration are rather less pronounced in Spain than other European countries. At the same time, though, Spaniards overwhelmingly oppose illegal migration — especially from Arab and Subsaharan African countries.

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In January, Sánchez’s government issued a blanket amnesty for virtually all illegal immigrants living in Spain. The move, while laudable for granting labor rights to millions of workers, provoked an outcry, with roughly 60% of Spaniards expressing disapproval. Barring overwhelming enforcement on new arrivals, the issue with any such move is that it inevitably incentivizes further illegal immigration.

Sánchez now faces a quandary: clamp down in Ceuta and risk alienating affluent progressives in his coalition, or do little and suffer at the hands of the Spanish Right and the broader public. The former, naturally, is the sounder course. There is, moreover, room for the Prime Minister to maneuver geopolitically while outflanking the progressive Sumar and Podemos’ fantasies of an open-border utopia. After all, Sánchez can credibly accuse Morocco of acting at the behest of the US and Israel against a Nato member. At the same time, he could make a case in favor of overwhelming enforcement against illegal immigration precisely because of the March amnesty.

There is some reason to think that Spain’s famously sly Prime Minister could opt for just such a path, particularly as support for Sumar has collapsed from roughly 13% to 6%, and with Podemos in the doldrums too. The Socialist leader has defied the odds at consecutive elections, favoring high-stakes gambits against his Right-wing adversaries. Nonetheless, the PSOE and its allies have consistently failed to win more voters than the PP and Vox, instead relying on minor, regional parties to govern.

As both Denmark’s and Slovakia’s Social Democrats have shown, the key to Leftist success rests largely on a tough but humane immigration policy. In the wake of the surge in Ceuta, a member of PSOE’s youth wing made a surprisingly sensible plea. “The truth is, I hope this crisis pushes the PSOE to look at the immigration policies of its Northern European sister parties and realize it’s time to move away from what I see as an open-borders approach influenced by the more radical left,” they wrote. “That means protecting those who genuinely need asylum, maintaining secure borders, and avoiding mass regularizations.”

These fanatics were the night-time ogres of my childhood, the threat that never stopped growing, one that came closer and closer, became more and more visible. During the Nineties, on Moroccan campuses, the Islamists took power. The battle of ideas was being lost. On the news, we got used to that now-familiar word: “attack”. In Paris, Luxor, Algiers. In my family, we didn’t underestimate them. We knew that the more educated among them were ready to do anything to defend their vision of the world. My parents implored me to be prudent — me, who didn’t know how to shut my mouth and who played at being the rebel adolescent. No one asked me to stand my ground, to defy them. On the contrary: I was told that you had to fear them — bend the knee, keep a low profile, shut up. How do you answer parents who love you and warn you: “Don’t take risks, don’t provoke them, stay safe from their violence”?

I was 15, I was living in Rabat, and I learned to keep quiet and accept. You accepted that you had to hide when eating during Ramadan, to be afraid that somebody might smell food on you. You accepted that you had to roll up empty wine bottles in opaque bags and drive a few miles to throw them in the dustbin. You accepted that you had to listen in silence to the furious speech of a professor of religion who claimed that Jews and Christians could never go to Paradise, and you wept inside for all those you loved who weren’t Muslims, and so were exiled from Paradise. You accepted being insulted by a customs officer in Casablanca because in your suitcase, in the middle of the New Year holidays, there were things he’d identified as Christmas presents. You accepted being treated as a slut and a sinner on the beach where you’d played as a child, because now your body was an offence to God.

You accepted, and you lived both in fear and in shame. The shame of our cowardice, of the denials that fed and grew on it. The shame of not being able better to defend the Islam of my grandfather, who is in Paradise with his Christian wife. “A thousand little stings of self-reproach that add up not to remorse but to a vague unease.”* That’s what you felt. You felt ugly and small. For reassurance, you said to yourself that it’s we who have right on our side, that we know the frontiers of Good and Evil, of reason and barbarism, and it doesn’t really matter if you don’t dare defend them at the top of your voice. We have to save our skin. Our limp, feeble, losers’ skin — but our skin all the same.

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There was one moment when I didn’t feel afraid. One moment when I felt brave. It was enough for me to close my office door, open up my computer — it was enough for me to start to write, and the fear vanished. That was why I became a writer. To purge my nightmares, to calm my terrors. When I write, I feel capable of anything. I’m no longer a polite little girl, a virtuous woman. I’m not trying to please or to seduce. I’m not afraid of provoking anger or scandal. For me fiction is the terrain of total freedom, the place where you can give expression to ambiguity, fuzziness, uncertainty, where you can contradict yourself and voice bad thoughts.

Tomorrow, at my work table, will I feel as free as before? Tomorrow, taking the stage for a discussion, will I be thinking of Salman and will I fear being attacked myself? Today, a lot of Muslim writers are afraid, and censoring themselves. I don’t judge them; I understand them, and I too think of my family and children. But fear and shame have to switch sides. We have to speak more loudly, become more persuasive, become the voices of Enlightenment, the voices of liberty and dignity. As writers, it’s the only way to be: stifle fear as soon as it appears; have faith in the intelligence of readers; be insolent and irreverent. Write, write, write. Do not submit; do not get down on your knees.

*From Edmond Rostand’s “Cyrano de Bergerac” (Translator’s Note).
Translated by Boyd Tonkin. The original French can be read here.

The country’s Westernised middle classes, centred on Kabul, and ethnic and religious minorities like the Shia Hazara, who played a central role in the 2015 migrant crisis, are unlikely to try their chances under Taliban rule, as long as the door to Europe remains open. Already, Afghans make up 42% of the refugees and migrants living in squalid conditions on Greece’s eastern island camps, perhaps an even larger proportion than they did in 2015 when the large presence of Afghan Hazaras was dramatically underreported in the West, distracted by the Syria crisis, despite Afghans constituting a major portion of the migratory flow, including 2/3rds of Sweden’s 2015 arrivals.

But in any case, the Europe of 2021 is not the Europe of 2015, and Europe’s leaders have no appetite for a return of the political turmoil that followed Merkel’s experiment with open borders. Distracted by Brexit and imported American culture wars, Britain’s remaining pro-EU contingent have neglected to follow the developing consensus on the continent, where the hard line on migration for which Viktor Orbán was lambasted by liberal commentators back in 2015 has now entered the political mainstream. 

When asked whether Germany had a duty to open the country’s doors to Afghan migration, even Merkel herself recently responded that “we cannot solve all of these problems by taking everyone in”. Instead she encouraged, rather unrealistically, a dialogue with the Taliban so “that people can live as peacefully as possible in the country”. In neighbouring Austria, Chancellor Kurz’s centre-right/Green coalition has responded to the surge in arrivals on its eastern borders with the deployment of the army and angry protests that European migration policy has “failed”, with the country’s Interior Minister Karl Nehammer complaining that “we have one of the biggest Afghan communities in the whole of Europe,” and that “it cannot be the case that Austria and Germany are solving the Afghanistan problem for the EU.”

The Austrian government has decisively swung towards the Central European approach of hardened borders and expedited returns to countries of origin, with Kurz stressing that he would not halt deportations to Afghanistan, as Sweden and Finland already have, a reflection of a public mood darkened by recent high-profile crimes carried out by Afghan asylum seekers. Like centre-left Denmark, which is accelerating both its return of refugees to Syria and the search, apparently along with the UK, of third-party countries in Africa willing to host refugees and migrants on its behalf, the new mood in Austria is not the result of the populist Right coming to power, but instead of centrist parties adopting solutions that were in 2015 considered the sole preserve of the radical Right.

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As in Spain, where the next government is likely to be a coalition between the centre-right PP and the radical right Vox, in Italy a coalition government between the centre-Right and the far-Right looms in the wings. Indeed, Salvini’s Lega is now so outflanked on its Right by the rising power of Georgia Meloni’s post-fascist Brothers of Italy party, the most popular political party in the country, that it can be considered centre-Right itself, so far has the country’s Overton Window shifted. In France, where Macron has angrily rejected an imported American racial culture war in favour of the country’s homegrown culture war over Islam and the possibility of civil war, the soi-disant liberal saviour from the perceived populist menace has moved so far to the Right that the roughly even chances of a Le Pen victory in the forthcoming presidential election seem almost irrelevant in defining the country’s political trajectory. 

Perhaps it is Greece that highlights best not just the shifting mood in Europe’s external border states, but the shifting mood in Brussels itself. When Erdogan opened Turkey’s land borders with Greece in spring last year, bussing migrants to the border fences in a confrontation that came uncomfortably close to war, Greece’s militarised response unexpectedly won applause rather than censure from the EU hierarchy, as well as the swift dispatch of both Frontex border guards and funds to build an impassable border wall, now being beefed up with EU surveillance zeppelins and drones. Rather than a rerun of the 2015 migrant crisis, when Europe functioned as a ready source of monetary tribute to an embattled Erdogan, last year’s Evros crisis functioned as a dry run for the coming Afghan wave.

After all, when Belarus’s autocrat Lukashenko began funnelling migrants to the Lithuanian border a few weeks ago, Frontex immediately responded with the deployment of border guards, and support for Lithuania’s planned new 550-km border wall — with Estonia even donating 100km of barbed wire to its struggling ally. Once again, the exact same fortification project Orbán was condemned for in 2015 was hurriedly paid for by the EU in 2020, and presented as a heartening symbol of EU solidarity by 2021. From the Baltic to the Aegean, walls are going up across the eastern marches of the European continent, which will soon define the bloc against the huddling masses straining to get in. Even in Turkey, where the secular opposition CHP party has accelerated its demands to return the country’s three million Syrian refugees within two years and made alarmed noises about the increasing flow of Afghan migrants across the Iranian border, the ruling AKP party is constructing concrete border walls to stem the flow from Afghanistan, just as it has constructed a concrete wall all along its borders with Syria, and deploys lethal force against Syrians trying to sneak through.

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Turkey has become, indeed, the archetype of Europe’s new border guard states, the model for what will no doubt become a ring of authoritarian states bordering the continent’s southern and eastern fringes, whose rulers will be lavishly bribed to keep migrants and refugees from landing on European shores, a relationship somewhere between clients and blackmailers. Like Erdogan, who quickly learned to deploy migrants as a weapon against Europe whenever he was under pressure, Lukashenko has learned the value of Europe’s desire to keep migrants away while not actively being seen to dirty its own hands with the rough business of border management. 

The Moroccan government was equally quick to learn this lesson, recently waving through thousands of migrants to Spain’s North African foothold of Ceuta after the Spanish government granted asylum to a Western Saharan leader, and receiving a handsome bribe to take them back again. Meanwhile, Europe’s only interest in Libya is which faction can most effectively police migrants, just as its only interest in Tunisia’s ongoing coup will be the maintenance of this summer’s border policing deal. Despite the difficulties raised by American financial sanctions, the EU even appears to be eyeing up Iran as one of the potential host nations for the coming Afghan exodus, a dynamic which, if it takes effect, will surely dramatically affect all other aspects of its difficult diplomatic dance with the country. 

So while handing responsibility for keeping migrants out of Europe to regional states may be domestically easier for EU leaders, particularly those from Northwestern and Nordic countries with Green-tinged parties ideologically committed to pro-migration policies, it also offers neighbouring nations handy weapons to deploy against the bloc for their own geopolitical purposes. The great difficulty for European politics is how to balance these opposing tendencies: it is difficult to think, given the steady rightward drift of European politics, that an Open Borders attitude will win out against the simpler solution of a hands-on European effort to prevent migrants entering the EU. 

The expansion of the EU’s Frontex border agency into a 10,000 strong armed rapid deployment force indicates the direction of travel. Indeed, we are already seeing early manifestations of this approach, both in the pushbacks of migrants in the Aegean by the Greek coastguard with Frontex support, and in the growing legal restrictions on the activity of Western European NGO boats blamed for accelerating the migrant flow. Both were placed with the quiet acquiescence of Brussels, despite the protests of Northern European Green parties.

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All this is, of course, a dry run for the almost certainly militarised and exclusionary border policing efforts that will grapple with the vast population movements from Africa and South Asia that will attend the coming decades of climate change. Already, Bangladeshis are the largest single national group making the dangerous crossing from North Africa, and it is not difficult to see a desertifying Sahel or collapsing Lebanon adding new sudden crises for European leaders torn between their desire to maintain allegiance to postwar liberal ideals on asylum and the increasing desire of their voting publics to reject them. The avowedly open, cosmopolitan Europe of the 1990s and 2000s is already dead, and even the lame duck Merkel and her ailing CDU party have abandoned the Wir schaffen das attitude of 2015 in the face of the coming wave. 

The British debate over the Nationality and Borders Bill, insular and self-regarding as all British political debate somehow manages to be, therefore ignores this rapidly shifting European context. In some ways, this must be a relief to a Conservative government that has shown itself incapable of satisfying its core voter base’s demands to stem the flow of irregular migration across the Channel: without any action by the UK itself, the EU will find itself drawn towards a Fortress Europe approach that will, eventually, choke the flow arriving on Kent’s shingle beaches. 

Just as France’s Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin demands a Frontex deployment with aerial surveillance assets along the Channel coast, Priti Patel’s border woes will be solved by European leaders without meaningful British input other than funding analogous to the tribute the EU hands in desperation to Erdogan. The walls are going up across Europe: we will not see them coming down again in our lifetimes.

Good news is flowing from the region: the Jewish state, also at the behest of Trump has established ties with Bahrain, the UAE and Sudan. Of course, the most recent news did not please everyone. Some frowned upon the fact that the US released the information before Morocco or Israel; others criticised the power imbalance between Morocco and Israel on one hand, and Palestine and Western Sahara on the other. The latter has been waging a war of independence against Morocco for several decades, led by a socialist separatist group with Islamist ties.

Hamas, naturally, is outraged and denounced the Moroccan treachery; while in its customary partiality against the Moroccan monarchy, the French media — both mainstream, such as Le Monde, and more independent sites such as Mediapart — quickly attacked both Trump and King Mohammed VI of Morocco for an agreement in which both Palestinian and Sahraoui self-determination was jeopardised.

This grumbling contrasts with the elation and relief felt by many Jewish families around the world as the first candle of the Menorah was lit, and by many Muslims in Morocco who can recall what things were like before the 1960s. Having grown up in Morocco, and with a father who remembers those happier times of coexistence, I was moved to tears by the sight of Israelis dancing in the street to traditional Moroccan song, waving flags of both countries and pictures of the King Mohammed.

Almost a million people in the Jewish state are of Moroccan descent, from families who were exiled six decades ago, a mere blip in time compared to the thousands of years they’d spent in the Maghreb. For them, as well as Jewish North African communities in France and increasingly in London, the deal is a hugely welcome Hanukkah gift during a difficult year.

The first Jews in Morocco were Berber, converted via commercial bonds as early as the 2nd Century BC. One of the most ancient synagogues is in Zagora; a funerary stone in the Roman ruins of Volubilis mentions Caecilianos, a member of the Jewish community, and some Jewish cemeteries have been in use for two millennia.

This original Jewish population was joined in the seventh Century AD by refugees from Spain escaping the persecution of the Christian Visigoth kings. By that stage the Maghreb had fallen to Arab invaders and provided a springboard for the conquest of Spain in 711, which would subsequently prove a more welcoming home to Jews for centuries. Yet Islamic rulers in Morocco had fits of intolerance, too: in 1033, Muslim chief Tamim Ibn Izri massacred 6,000 Jews in Fez and forced the surviving women and children into slavery.

The arrival of Spanish Jews after the Reconquista coincided with more peaceful relations, with this part of north Africa ruled by a succession of dynasties. Jews were dhimmis — forced to pay the jizya in order to be under the Sultan’s protection — but this status by no means excluded them from Moroccan commercial and political life. Paradoxically, because Jews worked in professions Muslims recoiled from for religious reasons, they found themselves in charge of essential diplomatic and commercial duties, at such a high level that they were called tejjar as-Soltan, the Sultan’s merchants.

Moroccan Jews were not just moneylenders, but also extremely skillful craftsmen and artists. Their contribution to music, architecture and literature was enormous and their relations with Muslim neighbours were often more than friendly. Depending on the area, Jews in Morocco received their religious education in Berber or in Moroccan Arabic — a language quite different from classical or literary Arabic — and wrote in Yehudia, a variant of Hebrew transliterated in the Arabic alphabet.

The unconditional respect of Hebraic customary law was inscribed in the Moroccan Constitution in the 1920s by which point, after centuries of rule by various Berber dynasties, the country was effectively under the control of France under a protectorate.

Yet things would deteriorate, and sharply, following independence and the establishment of Israel, and over two hundred thousand would flee, leaving behind them deserted mountain villages and empty shops and townhouses, so much so that only 3,000 Jews are now still living in Morocco.

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The initial anxieties of the Moroccan Jewish community had much more to do with the rampant hostility against Jews in Europe than with Morocco, although Nazi Germany’s attempts to spread its ideology had little success in this part of the world. Morocco’s king Mohammed V — grandfather of the present monarch — protected the country’s Jews during the Second World War, and when the Vichy-allied government attempted to impose ghettos in the country, Mohammed replied: “I entirely disapprove the new laws … and repeat what I have already said in the past, that the Jews are under my protection and that I reject any distinction that should be made among my people.” Morocco’s Jews survived, and in recent years there has been talk of making Mohammed V a Righteous of the Nations.

Following the war, the first Jews to leave the country did so in order to follow the dream of an independent Israel, but conditions at home were to drive many more away in the following decades.

In the aftermath of Moroccan independence in 1956, the leading party Al Istiqlal (“The Independence”) — still a major force in the country — emphasised national identity by making Islam the official religion of the state, and Arabic its primary official language. Not Moroccan Arabic, mind you, but literary or standard Arabic, which is to Moroccan Arabic what Latin is to French and is barely understood, let alone spoken, by most Moroccans.

It led to de facto estrangement of Berber, French and Spanish-speaking Jewish Moroccans. If this was still of little or no consequence to the inhabitants of once-heavily Jewish small towns such as Erfoud in the Sahara, it definitely felt painful to Jewish inhabitants of Casablanca or Rabat, who were in charge of important commercial or administrative duties.

Then, in 1961, Egyptian president Gamal Abd-El-Nasser’s visit to Morocco triggered the first wave of open hostility against Jews. As the Arab League tried to define itself in opposition to both western capitalism and Russian communism, Jews were stigmatised as non-Arabs, and erroneously perceived as too western to be Moroccan.

By this stage many Jews were trying to escape Morocco illegally, but as the tensions increased, it was getting harder to get official travel documents. Even phone calls and postal service was gradually restricted, not so much through legal enforcement as boycotts by Moroccan socialist organisations. Cornered by the Arab-promoting Istiqlal on the Right, and by the USFP (Socialist Union of the Popular Forces, founded in 1959) on the Left, the Jews quickly found themselves deprived of any strong political ally.

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For many people it was a clear example of double-think. Muslim Moroccans would call for a boycott of Israel but at the same time maintain close connections with their Jewish neighbours as individuals. A militia, the Misgeret, was established to provide self-defence for Moroccan Jews, but it soon turned its activities towards helping them to secretly escape the country through the Mossad-backed Operation Yachin.

Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and King Hassan II — Mohammed VI’s father — would eventually negotiate a formalisation of this departure, Morocco asking for financial compensation given the loss in financial and human capital. Entire villages were encouraged to depart at once, torn from centuries of shared memories with little to no preparation. Within just three months in the summer of 1967 half of the remaining Jews left Morocco, and it was by no means a happy story. Once in Israel, Moroccan Jews had to take on new jobs, settling in towns that seemed to have sprouted up overnight in the desert, in tiny two-bedroom flats that looked nothing like what they had been promised. For many, the dream of the Promised Land turned to disappointment as they discovered something they never expected — European Ashkenazi racism against the Sephardic newcomers. A song sarcastically recalled “They asked me where I come from, I said I am from Morocco, they said ‘Leave’; they asked me where I come from, I said I am from Romania, they said ‘Welcome’.”

Today, one million Israelis are Moroccan by descent, including 12 current government ministers. Israeli Jews from Morocco are, on many levels, more Moroccan than the majority of Moroccans, who have since undergone 30 years of Arabisation and increasingly Islamisation that belies their Berber and multicultural identity. But it is through Morocco’s religious diversity that the kingdom can, with luck, fight religious fundamentalism imported from the Arabian Gulf.

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Last year, in spite of the travel difficulties, 100,000 Jews visited Morocco, of whom 30,000 came from Israel. They came to visit shrines, pray in synagogues and recite the Torah near their ancestors’ graves; they came back to the land of their forefathers, and to keep alive something that might otherwise disappear. Moroccan Judaism has a lot to teach to religious scholars and Biblical specialists; but it also has a lot to teach about a lost civilisation of poetry recited to the tunes of the ‘oud, of Andalusian arts and crafts forgotten in years of wandering, of memories of shared jokes and shared tales. Moroccan culture and history would not be the same without its Jewish elements — including the philosopher Maïmonides, singers Sami Al Maghribi and Zohra el Fassia, or politician André Azoulay, current adviser to the king.

Although most still oppose ties with Israel, Moroccans on the whole appreciate the historical place of Jews in their society. When the position of Hebraic law was submitted to public vote in 2011, Moroccans chose to keep all the articles that ensure Jewish freedom of private and public religious practice, despite strong pressure from radical Islamists within the kingdom and abroad.

My father still remembers fondly how Muslim kids used to spend Jewish feasts with their Jewish friends, and hosting them in return during Muslim festivals. I’m moved whenever I hear the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra play traditional Moroccan music — tunes celebrating beauty, love, wine and merrymaking, that are truly, authentically Moroccan, but which Moroccan youth have forgotten, and that fundamentalist Muslims frown upon.

And when I hear Sephardi grandmothers talking in Moroccan Arabic with that distinctive Jewish accent, either in Paris’s Sentier or on Brent Street in north-west London, I feel a kinship that is hard to put into words but that can move me to tears. And so in these troubled times, when anti-Semitism takes a new face, it warms my heart to see my native country welcoming back its most genuinely Moroccan citizens.