From Gibraltar to the Pyrenees, Al-Andalus Will Be Free

There is something almost poetic about Pedro Sánchez’s Spain. A government that presents itself as the guardian of modernity has revived one of Europe’s oldest political reflexes: framing Jews as a problem while presenting hostility toward Israel as moral virtue.

Since Sánchez adopted policies widely seen as increasingly anti-Israel—and at times indifferent to antisemitism—his government has wrapped its positions in the language of humanitarianism, diplomacy, and moral clarity. Critics argue that this rhetoric masks a deeper ideological posture reminiscent, in tone if not in form, of older European traditions of exclusion.

At the same time, Spain has reshaped its immigration policy, positioning itself as a major destination for mass migration. One might recall Angela Merkel’s “Wir schaffen das” and see in Sánchez’s “Lo lograremos” a similar confidence that large-scale demographic and social change can be managed without significant strain.

Germany tested this assumption first; Spain now appears willing to repeat it, as though geography and history will yield different outcomes in Iberia.

History, however, is not so easily set aside.

In the early eighth century, during the Muslim expansion into the Iberian Peninsula, most of the region came under Moorish control. Between roughly 711 and 732, Muslim rule extended from the Strait of Gibraltar to the Pyrenees, encompassing the vast majority of what is now Spain and Portugal.

Muslim forces even crossed into southern Gaul, establishing a presence in Narbonne and advancing as far as Poitiers. Only a narrow northern strip, particularly Asturias, remained outside their control.

What followed was the Reconquista: a long series of campaigns by Christian kingdoms to reclaim the peninsula. It began around 718 and concluded in 1492 with the fall of Granada.

Eight centuries of shifting frontiers.

During that time, Al-Andalus was never static. Cities changed hands repeatedly, kingdoms rose and fell, and entire generations lived within a landscape of prolonged contestation. Compared to that historical scale, modern political planning often appears fleeting.

Of course, the analogy has limits. Contemporary migration is not conquest, and migrants are not armies. The comparison concerns political authority, state capacity, and sovereignty—not ethnicity or religion.

In the eighth century, territory was taken by force. In the twenty-first, sovereignty can be eroded gradually through legislation, unmanaged migration, demographic change, and political cultures that treat border control as morally suspect and concerns about integration as illegitimate.

No invasion is required when states voluntarily relinquish control and then frame the process as virtue.

Sánchez’s approach, critics argue, is further marked by a pronounced hostility toward Israel. Spain frequently criticises Israeli security policy while maintaining a far more permissive stance toward its own borders, and denounces Israeli self-defence while treating European border enforcement as politically suspect.

In an ironic reversal, one could imagine future scenes in which humanitarian flotillas set sail toward Iberia, or activists on Spanish beaches waving foreign flags while awaiting rescue missions from abroad. The satire underscores a perceived inversion of roles between Europe and the crises it often comments upon.

The original Reconquista was both military and religious in character. Any modern “reconquista,” however, must be neither. Europe’s history is already saturated with conflict, displacement, and persecution.

A democratic reconquest would instead mean restoring effective border control, reaffirming national sovereignty, ensuring meaningful integration, applying laws consistently, and protecting Jewish communities without hesitation or political calculation. It would rest on the principle that a civilisation has the right—and the responsibility—to preserve itself.

The historical Reconquista endured for centuries because successive generations maintained political will over time.

Whether such continuity of purpose exists today is an open question.

Future historians may therefore ask whether the defining slogan of the Sánchez era was something like:

“From Gibraltar to the Pyrenees, Al-Andalus will be free.”