Essaouira Outrage: Moroccan Officials Applaud Public Prayers Supporting Zionist Military Atrocities
✍️ BY: Dr. Hana Saada
Algiers – September 2025 – The images that circulated from Essaouira are not merely a blot on a single ceremony — they are a damning indictment of policy, ethics and governance. What unfolded in that coastal city — the public platform given to a rabbi who openly prayed for, and lauded, the actions of an occupying army currently accused of horrific attacks on civilians in Gaza, while Moroccan officials sat by and applauded — amounts to a political and moral volte-face of grave proportions. It cannot be dismissed as a private religious rite; it was a public spectacle that normalized and celebrated violence, and it did so with the apparent acquiescence of state apparatuses.
This episode compounds a pattern of double standards that has become intolerable. Across recent months Moroccan religious figures and civic actors have been muzzled for expressing solidarity with Palestinian victims; imams have faced sanctions for offering prayers for the dead, and critics within the kingdom risk professional reprisals and legal harassment. Yet, in Essaouira, a foreign cleric allied to the occupying power — whose forces are accused of killing children, damaging hospitals, and provoking mass civilian suffering — was granted a stage. The message could not have been clearer: trauma and mourning are punishable when they dissent from an official line, but platforms and permission are extended to those who validate the very violence that fuels that trauma.
The political implications are stark. When a state’s representative institutions appear to lend credibility to an event that amounts to moral endorsement of an occupying force’s military campaign, the line between normalization and complicity is dangerously thin. The presence of high-level interlocutors — including the head of the liaison office representing the occupying authority — signals more than diplomatic coexistence; it signals political imprimatur. That imprimatur corrodes Morocco’s standing in the Arab and Muslim worlds and undermines its claims to preserve national dignity and regional leadership.
This is not merely a matter of optics. The ethical bankruptcy of legitimizing calls to “support” an army accused of indiscriminate violence is profound. International humanitarian law exists precisely to protect civilians in warzones; public rituals that sanctify assaults that produce mass civilian casualties are, at best, tone-deaf, and at worst, an endorsement of policies that contravene the most basic norms of humanity. Domestic laws on incitement, on use of public spaces, and on the responsibilities of public officials to preserve public order and respect human rights must be invoked. Civil-society actors have already begun to do so: Moroccan human-rights organizations and independent journalists have rightly demanded investigations into how this event was authorized, who financed or organized it, and which officials attended in an official capacity.
Equally important is civic clarity: the Moroccan people — the citizens whose voices are now being silenced — must be distinguished from the acts of those in power. Public opinion in Morocco remains overwhelmingly sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. To punish or silence that sentiment, while granting a megaphone to a representative of the occupying power, is to disenfranchise citizens and to weaponize cultural and religious spaces against public conscience.
The domestic consequences are already visible. Outrage within Morocco and across the region has led to demands for accountability: resignations of local officials who attended, independent judicial inquiries into alleged violations (including whether ports or facilities were used to transfer materiel in violation of international or national law), and parliamentary scrutiny. These demands are legitimate and must be met with transparency. A state that tolerates such a glaring contradiction — between its treatment of dissenting religious expression and its tolerance for celebratory calls to back a brutal occupation — forfeits moral authority and invites civic unrest.
Internationally, the event hands ammunition to those who argue that normalization agreements and diplomatic overtures have a human cost when implemented without safeguards. It revives fundamental questions about the responsibility of states where normalization overlaps with human-rights violations elsewhere: are diplomatic ties being pursued at the expense of justice and basic humanity? When public ceremonies abroad become venues for exhortations in favor of violence, the international community — rights bodies, intergovernmental organizations and foreign partners — must react with clarity. Silence would amount to tacit acceptance.
This is a defining moment. The choices made now will determine whether Morocco will be remembered as a state that bent policy-making to geopolitical expediency, at the cost of basic moral commitments — or as a state that listened to its people, corrected course, and recommitted to international law and human decency.
History will judge harshly those who stood by while platforms were used to bless suffering. The people of the region — and the memory of the victims in Gaza — deserve no less than transparency, accountability and a return to principles. Morocco’s authorities must answer: did they protect the public interest, or did they sell it? The lifespan of legitimacy is short; it withers fastest where conscience is traded for convenience.
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