Epping is a leafy and prosperous town on the edge of London. It seems more of a village than a town and is separated from the city by the eponymous large forest. It is, to a certain extent, a victim of “white flight”, although the black population has grown significantly in recent years. It is more divided by class than anything else. It is the stereotypical haunt of former Eastenders who have made money. As with most of rural Essex, it’s a place where the Conservatives normally rule. But it is also home to some active fascists.
It has become a focal point of the far-right and neo-Nazi groups in recent weeks as a result of an alleged sexual assault on a local woman by an asylum seeker who was a resident of the local refugee hostel, the Bell Hotel. It is called a hotel, but asylum seekers in the UK are normally housed in run-down and dilapidated hotels that no tourist would ever want to visit.
The media and right-wing politicians will portray this as a cushy setup. Yet, refugees are housed in the most miserable conditions. They suffer from a lack of privacy; men, women and children are often housed together in cramped accommodation; they are prevented from working, which leads to intense boredom and frustration; and refugees do not have access to cooking facilities.
The policy of housing refugees in hostels began with the last Conservative government. It is an unplanned response to the increasing number of refugees arriving in the UK by boat. But housing refugees in hotels also benefits the invariably Conservative voting owners of such properties. As of 30 July, 25,436 migrants had crossed the Channel in small boats in 2025. The figure is about 49% higher than at the same point in 2024. In 2024 as a whole, nearly 37,000 people were detected making the crossing, 25% more than in 2023. The highest yearly total was recorded in 2022, when 45,755 people arrived. One consequence of Brexit. Britain’s withdrawal from the EU’s Dublin Regulation outsourced its responsibility for refugees to neighbouring countries like France.
All this has contributed to a very toxic debate around migration and refugees, with the important distinction often being blurred by the mass media. “Stopping the boats” has become an obsession with the right-wing tabloids, which dominate Britain’s political discourse.
Unsurprisingly, refugee hostels have become the focus of the far-right in recent years. As in most Western countries, violence and sexual violence in particular are often racialised, even though the non-white population are proportionately less likely to commit sexual offences against white women.
It was on 29 July last year that a mass stabbing targeting young girls occurred at a dance studio in Southport (a town some 30km north of Liverpool). Seventeen-year-old Axel Rudakubana killed three young girls and injured ten others at a Taylor Swift–themed dance workshop attended by 26 children.
Immediately, far-right groups, assisted by Elon Musk’s X platform, spread false rumours that the killer was a muslim refugee. Neither was true, but this helped to whip up a pogromist atmosphere which resulted in attempts to burn down refugee hostels and unleashed some of the worst racial violence Britain has witnessed in over sixty years. The response of the anti-racist movement, led by Stand Up to Racism, was large-scale mobilisations which left the racists and far-right isolated in August last year.
A word also needs to be said about the role of the extreme right party, Reform UK. It is now the leading party according to opinion polls. After the Stockport killing, Nigel Farage, its leader, falsely claimed that the police were hiding information about the killer, implying that the killer was a muslim refugee. And in the case of Epping he encouraged the protests and spread false claims that the anti-racist protestors attacked the police when the truth was that all the violence came from the neo-Nazi presence in Epping.
The toxic mix of fourteen years of austerity and the biggest fall in living standards since the Napoleonic Wars has created a political tinderbox. Now we have a deeply unpopular Labour government that swept to power last July after fourteen years of Conservative misrule. It has done nothing to address the economic malaise. Under Chancellor Rachel Reeves, it is unleashing a new wave of austerity and the relentless scapegoating of refugees. Worse still, Prime Minister Keir Starmer is echoing the language of the far-right with his “island of strangers“ speech a few months ago.
The UK has witnessed a significant mobilisation in solidarity with Palestine over recent years. But mobilising against the far right is proving to be much harder. Last July, two successive mobilisations against the far-right came under attack as the anti-racist were outnumbered. It was the shock of last week and evidence that Reform UK were openly collaborating with the neo-Nazis of Britain First and other far-right groups, which created the impetus for the much greater mobilisation of last Sunday. With the school holiday, August is traditionally a month of unrest in the UK.
Despite the victory on Sunday, 20th July, the fight against fascism is by no means over. The anti-racist anti fascist movement will have a summer of mobilisation ahead of it. But this success will make it easier to organise opposition at similar flashpoints up and down the UK.
Israel uses rape as a weapon of war
Jakob Reimann attempts to comprehensively document sexualised torture by Israeli forces after October 7, 2023
Content warning: this article contains graphic descriptions of cases of extreme sexualised torture, which can be highly disturbing for many people.
After the onset of Israel’s war against the civilian population in Gaza in October 2023, reports of severe torture and mistreatment of Palestinian prisoners and hostages by Israeli soldiers have increased. These include a plethora of allegations of often extreme sexualised violence that is “systematically” used as a method of torture (UN, B’Tselem). These reports shed a shocking light on the conditions in Israeli detention centres, with the infamous Sde Teiman Prison—”Israel’s Guantanamo”—taking centre stage.
The guards moved Amer Abu Halil and several fellow prisoners to another wing. As always, they had to leave their cells with their hands tied behind their backs and in a bent-over position. In the kitchen, the guards took off their clothes and threw them on top of each other: “a pile of 10 naked prisoners”. There they were beaten with clubs and spat on. One guard began ramming carrots into the men’s anuses and raping them. After the ordeal, dogs were let loose on the prisoners. Dogs also repeatedly urinated on the prisoners’ mattresses in the completely overcrowded cells.
Abu Halil has a broken vertebra in his back and can only walk with the help of a walking stick after an attack in prison. His medical report also notes dilated veins in his testicles. Guards hit the prisoners’ genitals with metal detectors. The 30-year-old tells of another day when guards beat up a group of naked inmates, repeatedly kicking them in the testicles. Over a period of 25 minutes. Abu Halil also describes the anal rape of another inmate, which he witnessed, with “an iron baton as thin as a cigarette”.
Amer Abu Halil gave testimony toHaaretz andLe Monde about the ordeal he suffered in Israeli captivity after 7 October.
“Welcome to hell”
A UN commission report published in March made serious accusations against the Israeli state: since 7 October 2023, Israel had “systematically used sexual, reproductive and other forms of gender-based violence … intended to retaliate and punish them [the Palestinians] for the attacks [of 7 October]”. The commission speaks of “a pattern of sexual violence” to “humiliate and degrade Palestinians in detention”, including men, women and children. Sexualized assaults are used as a means of oppressing and controlling the Palestinian population. The experts see these crimes as possible evidence of genocide, as they are “calculated to bring about the physical destruction of Palestinians as a group”. According to Navi Pillay, Chair of the Commission, “There is no escape from the conclusion that Israel has employed sexual and gender-based violence against Palestinians to terrorise them and perpetuate a system of oppression that undermines their right to self-determination.” Israel categorically rejects all accusations with the familiar strategies, because according to the Israeli Foreign Ministry, the UN is an “anti-Semitic organisation” anyway.
This latest UN report is preceded by others that accuse the IDF of the systematic use of sexualised violence as a method of torture. Back in August 2024, the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem published the report “Welcome to Hell” on the “Israeli prison system as a network of torture camps”. Based on interviews with 55 Palestinian prisoners and hostages, the NGO documents the most serious abuse and torture, including “repeated use of sexual violence, in varying degrees of severity” and “gang sexual violence”. The testimonies “uncover a systemic, institutional policy focused on the continual abuse and torture of all Palestinian prisoners”.
Here too, the Israeli authorities categorically denied everything: “We are not aware of the claims you described and as far as we know, no such events have occurred under IPS responsibility,” Reuters quoted a spokesperson for the Israel Prison Service (IPS) as saying. All prisoners are treated in accordance with the law and all their basic rights are fully respected by professionally trained guards, the spokesperson continued, adding that prisoners also had the right to file complaints that would be fully examined and investigated.
Since the beginning of the war, 75 Palestinians have died in Israeli prisons, according to two Palestinian prisoners’ rights groups cited by Anadolu. The Palestinian Prisoners’ Commission attributes the deaths mostly to starvation and torture. However, there are also multiple allegations of prisoners being “likely raped to death,” including a case raised by UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese involving the well-known orthopaedic surgeon Adnan Al-Bursh.
Clubs, metal rods, fire extinguishers, tools, assault rifles, dogs
There are numerous reports according to which, in addition to the carrots and metal batons mentioned at the beginning, Israeli soldiers in torture prisons like the Sde Teiman camp sodomised Palestinian prisoners and hostages with a wide variety of objects.
Israeli +972 Magazine interviewed lawyer Khaled Mahajneh, who testified about a visit to a client in Sde Teiman—the journalist Muhammad Arab, who was abducted by the IDF in March 2024 while reporting on the siege of Al-Shifa Hospital for Al Araby TV. Arab was unrecognisable after 100 days in custody, according to his lawyer; he was covered in dirt and pigeon droppings. The hostages’ hands were cuffed behind their backs around the clock with metal handcuffs, which were removed once a week for a minute-long shower. Arab testified how Israeli guards raped six prisoners with a stick in front of the other prisoners after they had violated the guards’ orders. According to a statement from the Palestinian Prisoners’ Commission, journalist Arab also testified that one detainee “had a fire extinguisher hose inserted into his rectum, and the extinguisher was discharged inside him”. Other methods of sexual abuse are “difficult to describe”.
Paramedic Walid Khalili told Human Rights Watch (HRW) about sexualised torture in the al-Naqab camp, in addition to other extreme forms of physical and psychological torture he had been subjected to in Sde Teiman, and the executions he had witnessed. There, a man who was visibly “bleeding from his bottom” was placed next to Khalili by Israeli soldiers. The man confided in Khalili and told him that “three soldiers took turns raping him with an M16 [assault rifle]“. Out of shame, the man did not tell anyone else about his ordeal, but he apparently placed a special trust in Khalili as a medic. “He was terrified. His mental health was awful, he started talking to himself,” Khalili told HRW.
Palestinian Ibrahim Salem was abducted by Israeli forces from the intensive care unit of Kamal Adwan Hospital in North Gaza in December 2023 and taken to Sde Teiman. He was released after almost eight months without charge. Published by CNN, the photo of the 36-year-old went around the world—it was one of the first ever to be leaked from the torture prison (the cover picture of this article [see here]). Salem told Middle East Eye about months of humiliation, sadistic soldiers and constant torture, including various forms of sexualised torture: “He [a soldier] electrocuted me in sensitive spots and hit me in these spots.” Various objects were rammed into his rectum. When the thick iron baton “is inserted inside you, it feels like your brain is exploding“, he describes the torture to the British Channel 4 News.
He reports the “rampant” rape of Palestinian hostages; the shame among the men was particularly great when they were raped by “female soldiers, who were sometimes in their teens”. One prisoner was bent over a table and handcuffed. The female soldier behind him “would insert her fingers and other objects into his rectum.” If he flinched, the soldier in front of him would hit him on the skull. “Most of the prisoners will come out with rectum injuries,” Salem testified to Middle East Eye. The human rights NGO Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor also reported, based on witness testimonies about “placing sharp objects in the victim’s buttocks“.
Several witnesses told B’Tselem about “blows to the genitals and other body parts of naked prisoners”, according to the aforementioned report. “Metal tools and batons” were used “to cause genital pain”. A former Palestinian hostage told the British Channel 4: “When the female soldier grabbed me by the balls and penis, she injured me with her nails, digging them into my penis. I started screaming and biting the wire like a dog.” According to a statement by the Palestinian Prisoners’ Commission, journalist Muhammad Arab told his lawyer that “another detainee was completely stripped and electrocuted, his genitals were yanked“. Shortly after the war began, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported on the testimonies of several witnesses from Megiddo Prison in northern Israel. Among many other abuses, guards there had been “hitting their testicles, and humiliating prisoners”. “They tell people to spread their legs and then kick them between the legs,” Haaretz quotes 41-year-old Israeli prisoner Ahmed Khalifa.
In June last year, the New York Timesuncovered extremely disturbing events at Sde Teiman. In November 2023, 39-year-old senior nurse Younis al-Hamlawi was abducted by Israeli forces outside al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City and taken to the torture prison. Al-Hamlawi was repeatedly tortured during interrogation with electric shocks that caused uncontrolled urination, followed by an inability to urinate at all for several days. He described an incident in which an officer ordered two soldiers to lift him up and press his rectum onto a metal bar attached to the floor. He experienced “unbearable pain” and bled from his anus. A 41-year-old Palestinian described variations of this ordeal to the UN. He too was rammed with his anus on a metal rod attached to the ground, but it was extremely hot: “it felt like fire – I have burns [in the anus]“. Another Palestinian abductee was reportedly killed by soldiers ramming an electric metal rod into his anus. “He got so sick; we saw worms coming out of his body and then he died.”
A Palestinian prisoner told the Israeli +972 Magazine that he had personally witnessed cases of Israeli soldiers sexually assaulting prisoners with dogs. Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor quotes Fadi Saif al-Din Bakr, a lawyer who was detained for 45 days, as saying that police dogs were used to rape Palestinians in Israeli captivity. “This was among the most awful things that I witnessed,” says Bakr, “this was just one more [incident] added to the heap of torments. I was hoping to die so that this would not happen to me.” 45-year-old Palestinian Adham Mansour from Jabalia also “revealed shocking details about the conditions and suffering of prisoners in Israeli jails”, according to the Israeli-Arab magazine Arab 48: “There are prisoners who were raped by dogs.”
Let me tell you about the worst thing I experienced at Sde Teiman prison. They called the names of three people, and I was one of them. We came out into a cement courtyard, dedicated to one form of torture. They removed our blindfolds. We were crouching on our knees. They came and took one of the other men. They beat him. After they beat him, they forced him to the ground on his belly. They tied his hands and tied his feet. There were about eight or nine soldiers. They stripped him of his underpants. A captain came and sprayed something on his backside. There was a dog there. They unleashed the dog on him. The dog raped the young man. It raped him, literally speaking. Rape.
A video circles the globe
In the summer of 2024, a case from the Sde Teiman torture prison caused an international outrage. As video footage of the alleged crimes was leaked, this one case could not be swept under the carpet as usual. The Israeli Channel 12 published footage from a surveillance camera showing several soldiers in Sde Teiman taking one of around 30 prisoners lying on the ground to one side. He is then apparently raped while other soldiers try to conceal the violence from the cameras with their shields. As a result of the ordeal, the prisoner suffered “a ruptured bowel, a severe injury to his anus, lung damage and broken ribs“, according to information obtained by Haaretz. The Palestinian was taken to the hospital for treatment.
The video circled the globe. On 29 July 2024, masked officers from the Israeli military police entered Sde Teiman and arrested nine reservists who were allegedly involved in the crime, Haaretz reported. Right-wing and fascist politicians and activists then called for protests and blockades. Dozens of demonstrators—including Knesset members of the ruling coalition such as Zvi Sukkot (Religious Zionist Party) and Nissim Vaturi (Likud)—broke through the fence and stormed the base. Masked men chanted: “We will not abandon our friends, certainly not for terrorists.” Soldiers barricaded themselves inside the detention centre. When the military police arrived to arrest the suspects, violent clashes broke out and some soldiers inside used pepper spray against their colleagues.
After their arrest, the suspects were taken to the Motta Gur military base in Beit Lid for interrogation, and there too right-wing extremist demonstrators gathered, some 1,200 in number, chanting “Release the warriors“. At the protest, Revital Gotliv of Netanyahu’s Likud party took on the role of mob inciter. Several people broke into the base, some in IDF uniform, some armed. They first broke into the military court and laid siege to the base’s prison. The police dispersed the mob, but no one was arrested. The following day, a special session was held in the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee, in which the manner of the initial arrests was sharply criticised and assurances were given that this would not happen again. “Our soldiers are not criminals and this contemptible pursuit of our soldiers is unacceptable to me,” said committee chairman Yuli Edelstein (Likud).
Three of the detainees were released shortly afterwards, Times of Israel reported. Five others were at first placed under house arrest. Prof Yoel Donchin, a doctor in Sde Teiman who had examined the Palestinian prisoner, was shocked by the man’s condition: he “couldn’t believe an Israeli prison guard could do such a thing”, according to Haaretz. “If the state and Knesset members think there’s no limit to how much you can abuse prisoners, they should kill them themselves, like the Nazis did, or close the hospitals,” Donchin continued. According to a medical report published by Channel 14, the pro-government surgeon Alon Pikarsky came to the strange conclusion that the “foreign body” was not inserted “by any external party”, but that the man had raped himself.
On 19 February, the military prosecutor’s office filed charges against the five military police soldiers, Times of Israel reported: a team commander, a security guard, an interpreter and two other members of “Force 100”, two of them officers. The three soldiers who covered the others with their shields and the two who secured the area were not charged. The indictment reads: “For 15 minutes, the accused kicked the detainee, stomped on him, stood on his body, hit him and pushed him all over his body, including with clubs, dragged his body along the ground, and used a taser gun on him, including on his head.” Then, the blindfold came off the detainee, and one of the soldiers “stabbed the detainee in his buttock with a sharp object”. The man had screamed in pain during the attack. The soldiers took the prisoner back to the others after the torture. It was not until an hour later that he was taken to the hospital because of the heavy bleeding from his anus. While the military prosecutors accused the soldiers, among others, of “aggravated sodomy” (equivalent to rape) in court on 22 August last year, this accusation is not included in the indictment. “IDF troops and commanders act in accordance with the law and IDF values,” reads a military statement on the indictment.
During a hearing on the case in early July, the head of the military court at Beit Lid, Judge Meir Vigiser, repeatedly urged both sides to strike a plea deal for the five accused in order to avoid a full trial, Haaretz reported. The prosecution has expressed willingness to consider mediation.
From perpetrator to national hero
In addition to the protests protecting the alleged perpetrators, the publication of the Sde Teiman video also triggered a wave of solidarity on the political right. In September 2024, a video was released showing the extreme right-wing Rabbi Meir Mazuz blessing one of the suspected soldiers, saying he was “completely innocent”, following whichthere was a heated exchange of words in the Knesset. When asked by Ahmad Tibi, chairman of the Arab Ta’al party and a trained doctor, “To insert a stick into the rectum … Is it legitimate?”, MP Hanoch Milwidsky (Likud) shouted at Tibi: “Yes! If he is a Nukhba [Hamas special forces unit], everything is legitimate to do to him! Everything! Everything!”
Some ministers also backed the suspected soldiers in reaction to the arrests. Justice Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Yariv Levin (Likud) said he was “shocked to see harsh pictures of soldiers being arrested”, and that it was “impossible to accept this”. The extreme right-wing Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir (Religious Zionist Party), described the arrest of the soldiers as “nothing less than shameful. […] Soldiers need to have our full support.” Ben-Gvir also stated that: “Gang rape is permissible for the security of the state.” Economics Minister Nir Barkat (Likud) also made his position clear: “I support our fighters and call on the defense minister to immediately put a stop to the despicable show trial against them.” Transport Minister Miriam Regev (Likud) warned that the arrests of Israeli soldiers in the war were “a dangerous step”, and urged the military judges to “focus on protecting our soldiers, not appeasing our enemies”. MP Limor Son Har-Melech (Otzma Yehudit) went further, accusing the military’s attorney general, who had ordered the arrests, of being a “criminal“.
One of the alleged perpetrators was invited to Israel’s Channel 14 shortly after the chaotic scenes outside the Sde Teiman to defend his “Force 100”, wearing a balaclava to disguise himself. He was cheered and said that the IDF was “a very healthy army“. To applause, he portrayed himself and his unit as the real victims. A few days later, the man revealed his identity in an online video: Meir Ben-Shitrit. This was followed by further interviews and appearances, now unmasked, including on the satirical show “Fathi and Shai”, where he was celebrated as a national hero. Ben-Shitrit defamed Guy Peleg, the Channel 12 journalist who originally published the surveillance camera footage from Sde Teiman, saying that he had “split the nation”. In the scene shown in the video, the soldiers acted according to standard procedure, he claimed. They did not rape the man, but only searched him and “kept a very, very high level of morality”. The shields held up were merely intended to prevent other inmates from seeing how such a search was carried out—because: “They peek.”
לוחם כוח מאה מאיר בן שיטרית שנחקר בחשד לאונס נוחבה, לא פחות, מגיע הערב לפתוח הכל על פרשת שדה תימן.. שתפובואו pic.twitter.com/DNbSFayOZ2
Hosts and soldiers are mutually exalting each other in their glorification and fantasies of violence. The whole nation should “kiss our hands”, says the Sde Teiman soldier, as they are doing “holy work“. He continues: “We could have just cocked our weapons and killed them all on the floor, from the nature of things, because you want to kill that person with a machete.” The soldier lamented that the state had betrayed him, which was “very offensive”. The media had also treated him unfairly. The people in Israel were different: “A lot of love and warmth” he received from people in the streets after coming out; “many hugs, a lot of love, we get many gifts, I got a holiday package”. A link to fundraising for the “Force 100” is shown. The show ends with a handshake: “Meir Ben-Shitrit, a hero! A hero of Force 100! Success to you!”
One of the main suspects in the only investigation into a large number of serious allegations of sexualised torture against Palestinians is celebrated as a hero on Israeli television.
Women and girls as targets
The case made public by the video leak was the first and only time after 7 October 2023 that Israeli soldiers were prosecuted for sexual crimes allegedly committed in Israeli detention facilities (as reported), although extreme allegations of sexualised torture were widely made. Sde Teiman was quickly nicknamed “Israel’s Guantanamo”—which, from what we know, is a clear understatement. Guy Shalev, director of Physicians for Human Rights Israel, toldCNNthat he was aware of at least ten cases of Palestinians being sexually abused in this prison alone. The number of unreported cases is probably much higher. When asked why soldiers were arrested in this particular case, Shalev replied:
This got out. This person was hospitalised in a civilian hospital where doctors and nurses, and other staff members could see what happened to the person while he was incarcerated in Sde Teiman. So, the information leaked out. And I don’t think the military or other apparatuses in Israel were able to keep it silent anymore.
And yet officials refer positively to this arrest to show that the system is supposedly working: A military spokesperson stated that the Israeli military “rejects allegations of systemic abuse, including sexual abuse, in its detention facilities” and abides by Israeli and international law. The military pointed to the arrest of the soldiers suspected in Sde Teiman as proof of the functioning of the Israeli rule of law.
In addition to the categorical denial of all allegations of sexualised torture, the Israeli government is also actively taking action against the prosecution of alleged perpetrators. Most prominent is the Israeli blockade of a UN investigation into sexualised violence by Hamas during the 7 October 2023 attack of January 2025. As this would also require an examination of allegations of sexualised violence by Israeli soldiers against Palestinians, and for Pramila Patten—the UN Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict—to be granted access to Israeli detention facilities, Israel refused this investigation.
In addition, the Israeli state creates conditions of comprehensive impunity for itself internally. For example, at the end of November 2024, Israel’s Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara decided not to initiate criminal investigations against high-ranking officials who had publicly called for extreme violence against people in Gaza or made inflammatory statements—i.e. those relevant to the genocide proceedings at the International Criminal Court—explicitly mentioning, among other things, the remark by the Minister of Cultural Heritage, Amihai Eliyahu (Otzma Yehudit), who brought up the dropping of an atomic bomb on Gaza. In the same month, the Knesset’s Ministerial Committee for Legislation advanced a bill that would extend legal immunity of Knesset members and would de facto “put MKs above the law“, the Committee’s legal adviser Arbel Esterhan warned. The bill has since passed through further parliamentary hurdles.
In January this year, Israeli State Attorney Amit Isman dropped the investigation into five soldiers suspected of raping and killing a handcuffed Palestinian after 7 October 2023—despite video footage, the victim’s body being found in a suspect’s vehicle, and confessions. One reportedly shows how one of the five soldiers stabbed the Palestinian in the face with a knife, killing him. Another confessed that he had tortured the man in a sexualised manner. The five alleged murderers are free men.
Sexualised violence is deeply rooted in the everyday practice of the Israeli armed forces. In addition to the comprehensive dehumanisation of Palestinians, this is based on the knowledge of absolute impunity, protection by the courts and encouragement from politicians. The systematic nature of the mounting accusations leads to the conclusion that Israel is using rape as a weapon of war against the civilian population in Palestine.
This article was originally published in German on etos.media and translated by Jakob Reimann.
Jakob is an independent journalist focused on international politics—primarily in the WANA region—and serves as the foreign affairs editor of the online magazine etos.media.
Tariffs! At The Disco
Interpreting the latest tariff agreement between the European Union and United States
In the latest round of tariff mud-wrestling, Donald Trump ate the EU’s lunch – no TACOs for von der Leyen. Reactions to the agreement announced on Sunday have been widely interpreted as a capitulation by the EU to the brazen bullying tactics of Donald Trump. The French PM Francois Bayrou called it a dark day for Europe. Economics commentator Christian Odendahl of The Economist took a more realist position on Bluesky, amplifying a range of voices that stress both the silver linings and the institutional weakness of the EU that led to the capitulation in the first place. Martin Sandbu of the Financial Times sounded utterly aghast at the way the EU feebly yielded even though he believes the EU had real leverage in negotiations with Trump. Perhaps the most pertinent statement, and one that frames this article on the deal, came from Nicolai von Ondarza, a think-tank wonk at SWP and Chatham House:
“I think European leaders – both national and in the EU – are underestimating what it will do to their publics to be humiliated by Trump.
Like the NATO summit and Rutte’s ‘Daddy’ strategy, maybe the outcome could have been worse. But losing pride and being humiliated is also a price that is paid.”
Asking the right questions about the trade deal is as important as formulating coherent answers to the ones we pose. We can choose to focus on the economic ramifications of the deal and spend our limited energy amplifying the negative impacts. However, in my view, this is a fool’s errand for two reasons.
First, this trade deal, like any other deal with a capricious organism like Trump, is not bound to last. It is a framework agreement, with details to be ironed out over an indefinite period. Estimating its long-term impacts is therefore impossible.
Second, retail politics is a dead end for the radical left — not because of a shortage of popular offers to the public, but rather due to a lack of any credibility to deliver them. An alternative approach, which I favour, is to forget the economics altogether and to focus on narrativising the EU’s capitulation itself. von Ondarza and Sandbu have their finger on the pulse when they choose to emphasise the political and moral ramifications of the deal more than any discussion of the numbers.
The bigger picture
Donald Trump has tried to impose tariffs in various forms on trade partners all over the world. What began with the pure festival of chaos that was theLiberation Day tariffs (a mere four months ago in April) has ended with a massive political victory for him, with a slew of favourable bilateral trade agreements with Japan, the UK, and now the EU. Favourable, not in an economic sense, but in a political one. Many people believed that the stock and the bond market chaos unleashed by Trump’s yo-yo trade policy would discipline him into returning to a status quo ante. No less than Adam Tooze warned of an epic crisis on the horizon. And yet, today, the stock markets are back to growing across the board. Capital is in an ebullient mood. Does this mean that there is no stopping the Trump juggernaut?
If Donald Trump is winning, it is not because of his own genius. He telegraphed his strategy plainly: bully people into submission, retreat momentarily when markets panicked, and ram the resolve of US trade partners again when markets calmed. Ironically, the TACO trade incensed him enough to keep trying, while simultaneously creating a unique opportunity for market movers to make an easy buck on the oscillations he was engendering with his tariff pronouncements. Like malleable dogs, Trump trained the capitalist class to stay calm when he barked, thereby removing a key obstacle to his objectives.
In turn, he moderated his ambitions on the final level of tariffs, settling on a bargaining position around 30 percent with the EU, which eventually accommodated itself to 15 percent as the headline figure (exceptions and carve-outs notwithstanding). Disunited, fearful of economic pain and political instability, lacking both resolve and intelligence, each major US ally bent the knee to his caprice. It needn’t have ended this way.
We radical leftists must take a moment to sit with the momentous change ushered in by this World Wrestling Entertainment hall-of-famer. Within seven months, free trade as a hegemonic concept undergirding world economics has collapsed. The sacred cow of frictionless movement of goods and services between major trading powers has had its entrails splattered over the floor of every stock exchange. But that is not the most significant blow Trump has struck. In fact, this one may end up doing more harm to the US than to Europe. Tariffs are a blunt tax on US consumers and will suppress economic demand, even if exporters try to soften the impact by reducing prices. Trump has effectively demoted allies and turned them into vassals in a true sense. He has forced them to stitch their fates to the whims of the US with their own skins.
The list of humiliations
Among the humiliations Trump has forced on the EU is a commitment to purchase $750 billion worth of energy imports from the US over the course of this presidential term, as well as a pledge to invest $600 billion. For context, the EU imported €76 billion worth of US energy last year out of a total bill around €375 billion. There aren’t enough pies in the sky to feed so many fantasies. This fantasy, should it even come partially to fruition, would make the EU an order of magnitude more dependent on fossil fuels from the US than it ever was on Russia. This comes hot on the heels of NATO countries being forced to commit to a 5% GDP defence spending target – a more than twofold increase of current levels. Combined with a completely supine foreign policy vis à vis Gaza and China, and a persistently unaligned strategy vis à vis Ukraine (something highly pertinent to European interests), the EU seems resigned to accepting whatever Trump wants.
The rationale for these humiliations seems to be couched in 4D chess-style arguments: that Europe has retained regulatory autonomy on areas such as big-tech and AI; that the German car industry has been shielded; that the pharmaceutical sector has been spared (though on pharma and semiconductors they have merely kicked the can down the road). These are the self-soothing lullabies of economistic wonks. Trump won because he played politics while the EU, Japan, and the UK played competitive Microsoft Excel. They caved to the extortioners’ demands, hoping that it would put an end to the extortion. Have they forgotten there are still 41 months left of the Trump presidency?
Ramifications and strategies for the left
The EU has comprehensively demonstrated how weak it is, not as an economic bloc, but rather as a political one. A unitary executive led by a mad pretend-king appears far more effective at achieving its objectives than a supposedly democratic bloc of European nations united by high-minded liberal enlightenment ideas. Professional commentary suggests that it was the internal discord among member states that led to a complete loss of appetite for a fight with daddy. But the deeper malaise is this: the Commission is designed as an A-tier retirement home for one-time political heavyweights ready to be put out to pasture, unsuited for the demands of world-historical political contestation. Perry Anderson’s withering criticisms — of its bloated, impenetrable rule book (over 90,000 pages long and accessible only to organised corporate lobbyists), and its structural inflexibility replete with perverse incentives against reform — are being grimly vindicated by this capitulation.
There are grim resonances between the EU’s political inefficacy and the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, which repeatedly succumbed to internal divisions in its battles with Russia and Sweden, eventually leading to three partitions of Poland. Germany is protective of its manufacturing industry and is effectively wedded to US patronage, as are several Eastern European countries. It is unsurprising such a diffuse set of interested parties could not forge alliances either within the EU or externally (for example with China or the Global South) to counter the Trump threat.
The biggest losers are most likely the affluent countries of Western Europe, now paying the price for decades of political inaction. Having treated the Eastern bloc of the EU as poor cousins who should be happy to be invited to their weddings, these countries helped foster a reactionary backlash that has hollowed out the EU from within. At the same time, this dynamic has deepened Europe’s dependence on the US, particularly in relation to the threat posed by Russia. The failure of Western Europe to engage in common development through Eurobonds; the austerity imposed on successive sovereign governments at the whims of Germany, Austria, and the Benelux nations; the visionless leadership of the European Commission; and the total unaccountability of the parliament in Brussels have all contributed to the EU becoming a rudderless behemoth, adrift in stormy seas.
For the radical left, this crisis of confidence within the EU presents a chance to promote solidarity of European nations against an onslaught from a vindictive bully. Common foes are the basis of fruitful alliances, and therefore, the left must argue for ecologically-driven economic development as a guard against permanent dependence on a decadent order led by the US. What is essential is to build an economically invested constituency for this vision across the bloc, a project that will require sacrifice by wealthier European nations to develop nations on the periphery.
This will entail helicoptering money into poorer countries to develop solar panel plants, wind turbines, electric buses and bikes, and trains and trams—all funded through commonly securitised debt at the European level, alongside increased taxation on European wealth. It will also mean arguing for uncomfortable ideas, such as the creation of a common European military apparatus that reduces costs and improves Europe’s defensive capabilities, thereby lessening its reliance on the US. But it also opens an opportunity to argue for expanded immigration as a way to address sectoral labour crises across the bloc. Who will build the houses, man the new factories, care for the young, the old, and the sick—if not migrants, whose arrival will help usher in a meaningful form of European sovereignty in an increasingly cut-throat geo-economic reality?
None of these ideas is an easy sell. Many of them are deeply uncomfortable terrain for the radical left, and the timescales for them to become a new consensus stretch across decades. But that, ultimately, is what thinking big is all about.
The overarching lesson that the left must draw from this moment is the importance of political consolidation, and the costs that come with it. As Perry Anderson argued in Lineages of the Absolutist State, the example of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth showed how the aristocracies of Russia and Prussia aligned themselves behind empowered monarchs in response to the threat of an ascendant Sweden. Today, the EU finds itself pulled between an autocratic, ascendant China and a once-hegemonic US on a self-indulgent bender, firing its guns in all directions and now wont to terrorising its allies as much as its foes.
No single European country can act as a bulwark, for better or worse, against this reality. We can either treat European nationalism as just another species of nationalism’s evils, or we can attempt to imagine it as a form of limited internationalism – a bitter kind of intellectual self-contortion. The left, as constrained as it is, requires innovative strategies that can forge a new set of received wisdoms, rather than recycling the stale, if noble, tactic of arguing for straightforwardly good things in the absence of a common narrative. Donald Trump’s bullying may finally present a ready-made opportunity, one that favours social democrats more than radical leftists, but only if we let it.
In August 1977, the National Front (NF) in Britain was feeling confident. Two months earlier, the street fighting fascist party had stood 91 candidates in the Greater London Council election, gaining 119,000 votes and pushing the Liberals into third place. NF membership had climbed to 14,000, and was accompanied by a surge in racist attacks. In 1976, in a by-election in Deptford, two fascist parties shared 44.5% of the vote.
On 30th May, 21 young Black people were arrested in nearby Lewisham for loitering and “conspiracy to steal”. This was part of a campaign known by the police as PNH (“Police Nigger Hunt”). Police claimed that these 21 individuals were responsible for “Ninety percent of the street crime in south London.” The NF responded by calling a “Muggers Out” march for the 13th of August. NF national organiser Martin Webster told the press: “We believe that the multi-racial society is wrong, is evil, and we want to destroy it”.
Two main demonstrations were organised against the NF march. One was led by the All Lewisham Campaign Against Racism and Fascism (ALCARAF)—a broad front including the Labour Party, Communist Party, and bishops. The ALCARAF demonstration took place in a different part of town at a different time. A second demonstration, organised by socialists and local youth, aimed to confront the fascists and prevent them from marching. It attracted between 5,000 and 10,000 people.
The police response to the counter-demonstration was brutal. Riot shields, already commonplace in the North of Ireland, were used for the first time on the British mainland. Between 4,000 and 5,000 police were deployed, subjecting demonstrators to repeated baton charges. Mounted police on 2,500 horses charged into the crowd. Yet demonstrators managed to break through police lines, physically confront the fascists, and cut their march in half. The fascists did not pass.
In the wake of Lewisham, the Anti Nazi League (ANL) was formed, combining a mass popular campaign with a strategy of confronting fascists directly on the streets. At the 1979 general election, the NF received a miserable 0.6% of the votes. Peter Hain recalls Webster later complaining: “Prior to 1977, the NF were unstoppable and I was well on the way to becoming Prime Minister. Then suddenly the Anti-Nazi League was everywhere and knocking the sheer hell out of them”. This victory began at Lewisham.
Trump’s no-peace deal in the DRC
Why is there so much suffering in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and why doesn’t it seem to end?
The war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) gained a new, imperialist turn on June 26th as a peace agreement with neighbouring Rwanda was signed, mediated by Qatar and the US. Yet, this won’t bring peace and prosperity to the region, but will rather further serve capitalist interests at the expense of the people of the DRC.
The conflict in the DRC has its roots in colonialism and imperialism, but also strikingly in the Rwandan genocide in 1994, when ethnic Hutu soldiers and extremists murdered about 800,000 members of the country’s ethnic Tutsi minority and moderate Hutu, as well as raped an estimated 250,000 women. In the aftermath, the new Rwandan Tutsi-led army then sought revenge on the DRC, where millions had fled to. Since then, according to different sources, the war on the mineral-rich eastern regions of the DRC has taken between 6 and 10 million lives, almost half of them children under age five. Rape has been used as a war tactic, villages and livelihoods have been destroyed, and millions have been displaced.
Since 2023, Rwanda-backed March 23 Movement (M23) paramilitary troops—once part of the DRC army—have been terrorising the country’s eastern Kivu region, with over 7,000 killed in fighting. The war escalated at the beginning of this year when M23 took over the region’s largest city of Goma. The Rwandan government has repeatedly denied its linkage to M23, but evidence from the UN tells another story.
Imperialism in central Africa
Rwandan President Paul Kagame is celebrated by many for the country’s economic growth, although poverty remains widespread outside the capital. At the same time, he is widely criticized as a ruthless dictator, having served as a de facto head of state for 30 years with the mission to establish “a home for the Tutsi population”. Kagame, a former Tutsi refugee in Uganda, initially led the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a militia founded by exiled Tutsis in Uganda in the 1980s, which fought the Rwandan Civil War and eventually ended the genocide. Yet, the international community, led by the US, failed to make the true genocide perpetrators accountable, many of whom were able to escape to the DRC and hide among the approximately 2 million—mostly unarmed—civilian Hutu refugees. Hence, with the already dodgy record of the RPF due to human rights violations, Kagame started to wage massacres against these refugees over the border. In 1996, with the support of the US, and UN leaders looking the other way, Rwandan and Ugandan armies acted with impunity and organized a full-scale invasion of the DRC’s eastern regions.This is known as the First Congo War.
According to the documentaryCrisis in the Congo: Uncovering the Truth by Friends of the Congo, the US government, as well as the international community, knew very well about the atrocities being committed, but only stayed silent. Thanks to its location in the central African Great Lakes region, along with its proximity to the Horn of Africa, Rwanda is surrounded by the DRC minerals and West-Sudanese oil, making it an important geopolitical ally for the US. As stated in the documentary, the whole US economy and its military funding are, indeed, based on the raw minerals from central Africa. Similar to German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s observation that Israel is doing the “dirty work for us” in Iran, Howard French from The New York Times explains in Crisis in the Congo the US strategy:
“Why are Uganda and Rwanda important to the US military? Precisely because we can have them do in Africa that which we don’t wish to do ourselves. We can have their soldiers die if need be, we can have them to deploy to places if need be. And so having proxies, having allies, and having clients who are willing to do your bidding becomes very important.”
Moreover, the EU is among Rwanda’s largest supporters, most recently as a part of the “Global Gateway” project for minerals for the “green transformation” and to counter China’s growing influence in Africa. Yet, a diplomatic crisis has arisen since an investigation by Global Witness has revealed Rwanda’s decades-long involvement in “conflict minerals” from the DRC. Evidently, Rwanda has been trading for instance white coltan with the EU—a raw material used in various electronics, but which does not occur in large amounts on Rwanda’s own soil. Further, in 2024, the DRC filed criminal charges against Apple in France and Belgiumfor the use of conflict minerals in their supply chains. This now poses a reputational risk for the European Commission, and Belgium has been pushing for sanctions against Rwanda. In response, Rwanda cut diplomatic ties with Belgium. The issues have been predictable: while the EU as well as Rwanda have praised “sustainable and responsible production”, the DRC’s sole control organ for the mineral supply chain, the International Tin Supply Chain Initiative (ITSC), has shown evident gaps, with some members involved in laundering conflict minerals, child labour, trafficking, and smuggling in the DRC.
However, the most important political and economic partners of Rwanda remain the US and the UK, and estimates state that diplomacy with Belgium will soon be restored out of pragmatism. With its powerful allies in the Global North and the rhetoric of defending “national security” and protection of the Tutsi minority in the DRC, Rwanda has developed into an important power in Africa —“a poster child of neoliberalism”—sending out the EU and the US paid troops to Central African Republic or even until the coast of Mozambique, where large gas reserves are located. As Mwambari stated: “This classic story is palatable to the Western world, in which the concept of genocide and resilience have a special place in the media narrative, especially in the United States, with its unique relationship with Israel (2021, p. 611–628).”
Congo’s bitter past and the present
The DRC, on the other hand, has been a colonial, imperial playground, and the people have been displaced, abused, kidnapped, raped, enslaved, mutilated and murdered since the Berlin Congo Conference of 1884–-1885, during which Congo was handed out to King Leopold II of Belgium. Indeed, the fast industrialization in Europe had created a new demand for raw materials found on African soil, and so the “scramble for Africa” began. Under the humanitarian narrative of bringing “civilization” and security to the region, King Leopold II and his administrators established the king’s own plantation for ivory and rubber for the newly invented vehicles.Between 1885 and 1908, 10–15 million Congolese were killed in this world’s only private colony. The Belgian government eventually took over, yet the structures of forced labour, apartheid and kidnapping of “mixed-race” children by the settler colonial regime continued.
Further, as the DRC serves as the warehouse of vast reserves of crucial minerals—gold, copper, coltan (70% of the world’s reserves), and uranium—imperial interests continue to hold their grip. However, after the official colonial rule, in 1960 the people of the DRC saw a brief light of true liberation—but for only three months. The film Lumumba by Raoul Peck documents the life of the revolutionary pan-Africanist, socialist Patrice Lumumba, depicting his path to becoming a celebrated, freely elected prime minister in June 1960. As shown in the film, Lumumba was feared and hated by the white settlers and threatened imperialist interests. The US, together with Belgium and the UK, reacted with a coup and assassination of Lumumba by the CIA in 1961, subsequently placing Joseph Mobutu in power for the next 30 years—“to save Congo from communism”. With the help of his “Western” allies, Mobutu would become one of Africa’s most notorious and cruel dictators. He plundered the country’s resources instead of investing in health care, education or infrastructure for the people, and accumulated an estimated 4 billion US dollars in his Swiss bank accounts.
As the Cold War ended and the record of immense human rights violations committed by Mobutu became somewhat embarrassing to the US, the West required a new, strong accessory in the region. It seemed they’d hit the jackpot with a former ally of Lumumba’s and opposition leader of Mobutu, Laurent-Désiré Kabila, who seized power with Rwanda’s help in the First Congo War in 1997. However, Kabila soon started to pose nationalist demands, and so the imperialist eyes turned to the country’s eastern neighbour, which was struggling with the aftermath of the genocide and wanted to continue retaliatory actions towards the ethnic Hutu in the DRC.
Throughout the decades, many attempts have been made for peace and security. However, although UN “peacekeeping” missions under various names have been on the ground since 1999, they have been struggling with credibility. UN peacekeepers have been accused of standing by as M23 took over Goma in 2012, not addressing the army’s human rights violations, chaotic and greedy leadership, or simply being useless. What is more, the United Nations Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUC), one of the former missions, concentrated on fighting only rebel groups opposing Rwandan or Ugandan interests. After several protests, the latest United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the DR Congo (MONUSCO) was banned by the DRC in 2024 for not being able to bring peace.
Old wine in a new bottle
Yet now, the DRC’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Thérèse Kayikwamba Wagner and her Rwandan counterpart, Olivier Nduhungirehe, have signed a peace agreement at Marco Rubio’s office in Washington, with the US calling this a “historic turning point”. The peace deal aims at the “neutralization” of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) militias and other groups. The FDLR was established by the ethnic Hutus after the Rwandan genocide and has been accused of immense atrocities like the murder of civilians and the use of child soldiers. However, the deal does not mention the role of Rwanda’s forces, which have also been suspected of participating in the conflict and are present in the DRC, violating the country’s territorial sovereignty. Further, M23 calls its mission the protection of the Tutsi community in the DRC against discrimination by the government and, hence, is supported by Rwanda. The deal with M23 is being negotiated separately with Qatar during the first week of August. Interestingly, Qatar is now investing heavily in the Kigali airport as well as the national RwandAir, as Qatar plans to establish its first cargo hub abroad.
Kambale Musavuli from the Center for Research on the Congosays many are questioning the deal with the US, which has not been transparent and includes giving up rights to minerals., and only then could the US “be engaged constructively” in the peace stability. Indeed, there has been an increasing interest by US companies in investing in crucial minerals in the DRC for new technology, such as electric cars, nuclear plants or weaponry, especially now since Chinese companies are gaining more and more influence in Africa. Yet, the miners in Katanga Province have already put out a statement against the agreement, and some MPs have questioned why this was not first discussed in the country’s parliament or the senate. Moreover, it has been strongly emphasized that DRC cannot lose control of their own minerals—by Lumumba and still today. Even the former president of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, previously offered a similar deal: minerals in exchange for peace attempts.
Moreover, the new “peace deal” does not address justice and accountability for the millions of deaths, displaced people or the severe atrocities such as rape as a war tactic, killings or torture—still taking place in M23-controlled areas. What the deal does include is US military training to “secure peace”. Yet, as history has shown us, armies are seldom there to protect people, but rather to secure the capital and easy access to resources. Musavuli draws a parallel to history by stating Trump is now creating false narratives of Congolese people being killed by machetes and, hence, needing to be saved—by the US: “At least for him, being the new King Leopold, he’s telling us what he got from DR Congo. […] The US has literally shown to the world that for them to have supremacy, they will do everything in their power to have control over Congo.”
Robberies, shootings, extortion, and rapes have been carried out by over 120 different groups pursuing different business or political interests—in collaboration with organized crime by multinational corporations, and even with the army itself, which sells weapons to whoever can pay. Musavuli goes further, stating the army is, in fact, the source of these groups and the perpetrators are “coming in and out of the military”, acting with impunity, contributing to a never-ending cycle of peace negotiations. Hence, none of the peace agreements have worked so far. What is more, the whole political structure of the country has been marked by predation, impunity, patronage, and a longstanding lack of legitimacy for decades—or even centuries.
In summary, the new imperialist deal is everything but justice and peace for the people of the DRC. But, the Congolese are calling for justice, and it is evident that this can only come from below, from the liberated people in control of their own resources instead of by creating new neocolonial exploitation structures with foreign military forces. According to Musavuli, Lumumba remains an aspiration; resistance is there, and people do keep fighting for their rights and the liberation of the DRC, like the fierce youth of Goma who protected the city against the M23 troops for 2–3 days. Musavuli quotes Lumumba: “Congolese are not alone but […] every liberated people everywhere around the world have always been found on the side of the Congolese people and because of that we are sure that people around the world will join us as we are fighting to transform the African continent”.
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