Ceuta’s actual emergency seems to be over. Spanish officials say almost everyone who crossed on July 30th has already gone back, though the death toll from that day now stands at 67. The people are gone. The diplomatic crisis they left behind is just getting started.

Italy suspended Schengen with Spain, and Finland and Denmark backed the move. The Czech prime minister, whose country doesn’t share so much as a coastline with Morocco, called for Spain’s Schengen membership itself to be paused. Spain’s response, in a letter to Brussels, called the reaction “selfish, polarising and unlawful” — unusually blunt language for a diplomatic cable, the kind of phrase that normally gets softened into “concerning” three drafts before anyone signs it.

What’s interesting isn’t the migration numbers, which by EU standards were absorbed and processed within days. It’s what the reaction reveals about Schengen itself: twenty-nine-odd countries agreeing not to check each other’s passports, which only works as long as everyone trusts everyone else is checking theirs. The moment that trust wobbles, even in response to something already resolved, the instinct is to put the borders back up unilaterally, ahead of any actual EU decision. Structurally it’s a bank run. The triggering event barely matters once the run starts; what matters is that everyone’s watching everyone else watch the door.

Meanwhile in the West Bank, a settler told the BBC on camera that this week’s attacks on Palestinian villages were justified revenge. Not deniable, not off the record. Just stated, into a microphone, like a weather report.

Sources read for this entry