In December 2023, former State Department official, Josh Paul told CNN anchor, Christiane Amanpour that during his tenure in the foreign service, he learned of the rape of a 13-year old boy by Israeli officers while in captivity. In response to U.S. inquiries, the Israeli Government designated the Defense for Children International, the Palestinian organization that documented the abuse, a terrorist organization.

Since then, multiple Palestinian testimonies have emerged, enough to fill the pages of reports by the UN Human Rights Office (OHCHR), the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, as well as B’tselem, an Israeli human rights organization. Among the most harrowing incidents was a leaked video of five Israeli officers gang raping a Palestinian detainee in Sde Teiman prison. An Israeli court not only acquitted the officers, but Israeli society celebrated them as heroes and protested their trial in infamous “right-to-rape” rallies. Still, when American journalist Nicholas Kristof published his opinion essay bemoaning impunity for the systematic sexual abuse of Palestinians in Israeli captivity in The New York Times, he insisted that there was “no evidence that Israeli leaders order rapes.” (The Israeli government threatened to sue the paper of record for blood libel nonetheless.)

While Kristof, the UN, and human rights organizations are right to scrutinize the lack of concern and accountability for the sexual abuse of Palestinians, they have rarely asked how sexualized violence has functioned within Israel’s wider system of conquest, occupation and domination.

On June 30, 2026, the Palestinian Feminist Collective released a report that helps rectify that elision with meticulous research and painstaking documentation.  A Predatory State: Israeli Systemic Sexualized and Gendered Violence against Palestinians lays out a decades-long pattern of Israeli sexual aggression against Palestinian children, women, and men.  Harrowing as the 200-page report is, it is necessary reading for anyone concerned with human rights and gender justice. The report’s historic sweep, from the early days of the Zionist militia attacks on terrorized Palestinians, to the present day sexual torture of Palestinian prisoners inside Israeli prisons, should lay to rest any attempt to rationalize the current horrors as a response to the alleged rapes by Hamas militants of Israeli citizens or worse, an issue of a few rogue soldiers. Instead, the PFC report makes clear that such violence advances the genocide of the Palestinian people.

The report revisits a 1949 case, revealed in Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion’s own diary, in which he describes how a platoon of Israeli soldiers kidnapped a young Bedouin girl, “in her mid-teens.” When their commanding officer gave them the choice between using her as kitchen staff or a sex slave, the Israeli officers opted for the latter. They cut her hair and washed it with kerosene, then gang raped her so violently that on the next morning the officer in charge, Second Lieutenant Moshe, “saw fit to remove her from the world.”

Gendered violence is an inherent tool of settler colonialism and is not unique to Israel. Here in the United States, another settler colonial state, the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) movement has highlighted the impunity surrounding the sexual assault of indigenous women on reservations where overlapping US and native criminal jurisdictions have made indigenous women particularly vulnerable to sexual assault. That it remains a significantly under-resourced and unaddressed crisis is not an accident.

Similarly, Zionist ideology, as a nation-making enterprise, necessitates the dispossession of Palestinian land and, ultimately, Palestinian elimination through juridical negation — denying their right to self determination, forced removal, containment, and/or destruction.  Sexual violence is central to that effort as it both advances ethnic cleansing ambitions and shatters the social cohesion of those Palestinians who remain.

Israeli historian Benny Morris, who bemoans the fact that the 1948 Nakba did not go far enough in ethnically cleansing Palestine, noted many reported instances of rape dating to the founding of the Zionist state. He observed that “because neither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events, we have to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reported, which I found, are not the whole story. They are just the tip of the iceberg.” The sexual violence, like other forms of violence enacted throughout and since the Nakba, aimed  to terrorize Palestinians and compel them to leave their towns and villages in search of safety.  Official records show that the highest-ranking Israeli officials were fully aware of these abuses. The PFC report traces this history from before the establishment of Israel, into the present and intensified genocide in Gaza, to illustrate how Israel has always relied on sexual violence to advance its colonial plans. In it, we learn about the rape of civilians during the 1948 Nakba, the sexual torture of innocent prisoners in administrative detention during and in the aftermath of the 1967 War, and the rape of grassroots organizers during the Intifada, all the way to 2023–that is, before the October 7, 2023. The report also provides an analysis of the unfounded mass rape accusations against Hamas militants to demonstrate how such narratives work to further racialize Palestinian society as uncivilized and unworthy of life. 

From being used as a method to expel Palestinians from their land in 1948 to the use of gendered sexualized violence to torture Palestinian detainees and prisoners in the wake of the 1967 War, and beyond, the report shows that while sexualized violence has changed frequency and form, it has remained a feature of settler-colonial displacement and oppression.

The United States cannot treat this as someone else’s crime. US officials have been told about these abuses. US weapons and diplomatic support continue to shield the system in which they occur. Accountability must go beyond a handful of soldiers to reach and tear down the legal, military and political structures that command and then protect these crimes.

There used to be no alternative to long queues for the most popular attractions at theme parks. Now, almost anywhere people have to wait, it's possible to skip to the front – for a price.

- 2026/08 / article

The restoration of a matriarch

July 7th saw one period of uncertainty in French politics end and another begin. Despite an appeals court upholding Marine Le Pen’s fraud conviction, the leader of the far-right National Rally (Rassemblement National, RN) will run for president next year. The election result remains wide open, but she is polling strongly and the possibility of a Le Pen-ist France is once again plausible. Should she win, the rest of Europe would have to contend with a highly abrasive and confrontational leadership in Paris, determined to unwind significant parts of the country’s integration with the rest of the EU.

Bracing for impact

European policymakers must prepare for that turbulent eventuality. In particular, they should:

• Avoid clinging to precedents when thinking about an RN-led France. A President Le Pen would be neither “a Viktor Orban” nor “a Giorgia Meloni”, but a distinct phenomenon rooted in French political traditions and circumstances.
• Seek to understand the party and its instincts. Le Pen is a familiar figure, but her party has never held national power before and has evolved over time. Knowing how it ticks will be essential.
• Manage expectations about the pliability of a Le Pen presidency. Unlike Bardella, she primarily thinks not in terms of alliances with the broader political right (at home or in Europe) but of the RN as a monolithic national movement, beyond left and right, dedicated to French autonomy. Working with others will come less easily to her.
• Prepare to deploy the arts of European and international politics. As France is one of the keystone states of the EU, its turn away from the project could be highly disruptive. Handling a Le Pen presidency will demand a clear sense of where cooperation could be possible (elements of European defence, perhaps) and where events might necessitate coalitions-of-the-willing circumventing Paris.

Courting public opinion

France’s appeals court on July 7^th confirmed Le Pen’s conviction for embezzling European public funds. It reduced her “ineligibility” sentence, opening the possibility of her running as a candidate in the presidential election, but required her to serve a year of house arrest wearing an electronic tag. Le Pen has always said she would not run in those circumstances, but has announced that she will appeal to the Court of Cassation, France’s highest court, suspending the penalty until it delivers its verdict at some point in the new year. Until then, she is tag-free and able to take back the reins from her young protégé, Jordan Bardella. The possibility that his more cautious approach might temper the party’s populist radicalism now seems remote.

Now entering her fourth presidential campaign, Le Pen is an experienced candidate well-known to the French electorate. Having taken over the party (then called the National Front) from her father in 2011, she has sought to detoxify its image. Le Pen presents herself as both an empathetic leader and an unapologetic nationalist who champions “national priority” for French citizens over foreigners. She is polling far ahead of challengers in the first round and appears highly competitive in the second. Current polls put her slightly ahead of her strongest (centrist) challengers in the second round of voting, though French presidential elections can see significant volatility.

Source

This week, Mark Leonard welcomes Célia Belin, head of ECFR’s Paris office and senior policy fellow, and Jeremy Cliffe, ECFR’s editorial director and senior policy fellow, to discuss Marine Le Pen’s decision to run in France’s 2027 presidential election.

After a Paris appeal court ruling rescinded her ban from holding public office, Le Pen has reasserted leadership of the far-right National Rally (RN) and sidelined Jordan Bardella, who was widely expected to lead the party into the 2027 election. Her announcement has led to rivals across the centre and the left recalibrating their strategies in an already volatile political landscape.

Together, Mark, Célia and Jeremy explore how Le Pen’s candidacy changes France’s electoral outlook. They discuss whether she is a stronger candidate than Bardella, how French political parties are preparing for an election that RN enters as the favourite, and they draw on ECFR research to examine what an RN presidency could mean in practice.

Would a Le Pen government seek confrontation with Brussels? How might it reshape France’s approach to migration, the EU budget and European integration? Could nationalist governments across Europe really cooperate? And how would a Le Pen presidency impact relations with Ukraine, the US and France’s European allies?

This podcast episode was recorded on July 8th 2026.

Bookshelf

• Marie Antoinette by Stefan Zweig
• Muskism by Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff
• If Bardella wins: Scenarios for a far-right presidency in France by Célia Belin, Jeremy Cliffe, Camille Lons and Constance Victor

Source

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