France Bars Israeli Minister Ben-Gvir Over Activist Violence

The day in French diplomacy turned on Itamar Ben-Gvir. Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot's entry ban on the Israeli national security minister was framed not as a stance on the Global Sumud Flotilla itself -- Barrot said France "disapproved" of the convoy -- but as a defence of French nationals subjected to violence by a foreign public official, and as a public split with the Israeli government over Ben-Gvir's video taunting bound activists at Ashdod. Barrot joined Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani in pressing the European Union for sanctions, a move Czech Foreign Minister Petr Macinka has already vowed to block in a Council that requires unanimity.

The flotilla's afterlife crowded the same diplomatic file. Released activists -- the count of detainees reached more than 430 after the May 18 Israeli interception off Cyprus -- continued to describe what they say was systematic abuse in Israeli custody. The Global Sumud Flotilla said in a Friday statement that at least 15 cases of sexual abuse, including 12 documented sexual assaults on one converted vessel and accounts of rape and forcible penetration by a handgun, had been reported by returning participants. France's specific concern is concrete: of 36 French nationals on the convoy, eight returned to Paris on Friday and two remain in hospital in Turkey with broken ribs or fractured vertebrae, organiser Sabrina Charik told Reuters. UN spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said the United Nations was "very concerned" about the reports; Israel's prison service called the allegations "false and entirely without factual basis."

Algeria opened a second front the same week. Algiers published in its official gazette on May 21 a law criminalising French colonisation between 1830 and 1962 as a state crime, listing 31 imprescriptible offences. Parliament had adopted the text in early March; its appearance in the gazette closes the legislative loop and abandons earlier proposals to seek generalised apologies or reparations in favour of a unilateral national criminalisation. Across the calendar, the bill folds into a year of strained Paris-Algiers relations and will travel back through every future French negotiation with the post-Tebboune leadership.

French border police temporarily suspended the EU's biometric Entry/Exit System checks at the Port of Dover on Saturday after thousands of holiday travellers faced delays of up to two and a half hours; the port confirmed French authorities had invoked Article 9 of the EES regulations to reduce processing time. The same bilateral file produced a public failure of the "one in, one out" small-boats returns scheme: an asylum seeker returned to France under the agreement covertly re-entered the UK and told the Guardian he had been beaten by smugglers after refusing to work with them, alleging at least 18 others had managed similar covert returns. Britain's Office for National Statistics put net migration at 171,000 in 2024, about a fifth of the 891,000 peak of 2022.

Domestic politics did not stand still. Gabriel Attal, Macron's former prime minister, formally entered the 2027 race on May 22 with an explicitly centrist pitch to inherit the president's electorate, opening a campaign Bloomberg flagged as the start of a fractious succession debate inside the macronist bloc. Le Monde reported separately that the Elysee residence was searched on May 20 as part of an investigation into possible corruption around government contracts awarded to Shortcut Events. Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu's 2026 budget -- which boosts military spending -- had already been passed under Article 49.3 in the absence of a parliamentary majority, surviving two no-confidence votes; the political space the Attal declaration is now testing is the space that procedure created.

Vanuatu's Prime Minister Jotham Napat told Parliament that Vanuatu's independence would remain "incomplete" until it secured sovereignty over the uninhabited Matthew and Hunter islands off New Caledonia, the Vanuatu Daily Post reported, with Napat presenting a photomontage of himself alongside President Emmanuel Macron above the two islets. The dispute dates to 1983 and has been aggravated by France's continued administrative presence. Separately the Marine Nationale's Rubis-class nuclear attack submarine Perle left Toulon for Cherbourg to be dismantled in 2026, after 33 years, nearly one million nautical miles and the equivalent of twelve submerged years -- a retirement that leaves France with only the three Suffren-class SNAs and the Amethyste in service until the SNA de Grasse enters in 2027.

Franziska Brantner, co-leader of Germany's Greens, called for an explicit European nuclear deterrence debate built around a British-French umbrella, naming the Trump administration's reliability as the central variable for reducing reliance on Washington. Analysts the same week pressed the EU to offer Ukraine security guarantees under the Lisbon Treaty's mutual defence clause, a proposal Chancellor Friedrich Merz has floated as a step short of accession. Both debates land directly on the Elysee: Paris holds one of two European nuclear arsenals, and Macron took part in Friday's E3-Ukraine video call with Merz, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Volodymyr Zelenskyy on how to revive a stalled peace process.