A. Loewenstein Online Newsletter

Apparently unwilling to question mainstream narratives regarding the futility of peace or the venality of politics most young people in Israel are no vanguard for social or political change. They do, however, crave the bonds of national unity. For Jewish youth, “Us against them” seems to be emerging as a convenient source. Hence the notion that Israel must be a “Jewish state” ranks as first priority among Jewish youth – a change from past years, when peace or democracy came first.
Fear, too, is a unifying factor, feeding distrust of others. Sixty percent of young Jews believe the state faces an existential threat. One interviewee said: “I wouldn’t trust [Israeli Arabs] for anything. I’ll keep my distance on the smallest chance that he’ll stick a knife in my back … ” One-quarter think the secular-religious divide is dangerous; one-fifth think the left-right divide endangers Israel.
Belief in coexistence is a casualty of all this. In a battery of questions about coexistence behavior, barely half of young Jews polled would consider things like going to the home of an Arab (37 percent ) or having an Arab friend (52 percent ). Among Arabs, the rates range from 58 percent to 81 percent. When Jews were asked their feelings about Arabs, most say they have none; the second-ranked answer is “hatred” (27 percent ). Perhaps most troubling, democracy itself seems less important than identity. Although the vast majority in our study says democracy is theoretically important, 46 percent of Jews are willing to limit the rights of Arabs to be elected to Knesset and three-quarters say security concerns trump democracy.
It’s important to realize that the “youth” are not monolithic. Secular Jews are significantly more supportive of democratic values and coexistence than religious youngsters, reflecting fundamentally different world views. Arab youngsters are the most supportive of democratic principles; it is logical, but ironic, that Arabs could become the strongest advocates for Israeli democracy.
When interviewed, people did not seem aware of the contradictions inherent in, for example, supporting democracy in theory but not in reality, or in feeling disgust for public life, but showing little interest in changing it.

Guards have for months feared for their safety at Villawood, the centre that workplace safety watchdog Comcare considered “a basket case” in the days before up to 100 detainees ran riot, lighting fires that gutted nine buildings.
The Immigration Department has been in dispute with Comcare for the past fortnight over safety and other standards at the centre, and the watchdog has ordered improvements in relation to staffing and risk assessment.
Comcare has visited seven detention centres in the past fortnight, including Christmas Island, as part of an investigation that left some senior investigators shocked.
The Weekend Australian has been told investigators and other staff at Comcare privately described Villawood as “a basket case”.
They were appalled by what they found, including risk assessment processes that they believed left Villawood, its guards and some detainees vulnerable.
Staffing levels at Villawood left guards “massively outnumbered by a volatile detainee population”, according to author and activist Antony Loewenstein, who has recently interviewed dozens of detention centre guards as research for a book about privatisation.
“The system in some ways is brutalising refugees and the staff members,” he said.
“In talking to the guards at Villawood, I was struck by the way in which they have been fearful of the refugees.”
Mr Loewenstein said guards also spoke freely to him about their belief that they had not been given enough training for the sometimes dangerous work they did.
Last week, just days before rooftop protests at Villawood, Comcare issued the Immigration Department with a lengthy improvement notice asserting that a guard in charge of Villawood’s high-security unit was not trained for the job.
The unit holds boatpeople from Christmas Island alleged to have been ringleaders of riots on March 17, as well as non-citizens convicted of crimes who are awaiting deportation.
But the department denies the guard running the high-security unit was unqualified.
Training and staffing levels are the responsibility of the Immigration Department contractor Serco, which was heavily criticised in the wake of the Christmas Island riots for understaffing compounds.
Serco defended itself at the time by pointing to the island’s chronic accommodation shortage.
Even if the company had been able to recruit large numbers of extra workers, there was nowhere for them to stay.
Mr Loewenstein, who has been highly critical of Serco on his blog, said there was sentiment at the highest levels of the company that it was being blamed for problems that were actually caused by the blowout in detainee numbers.
“Governments contract out services that they cannot do or do not want to do . . . it is far easier for a government to blame a private company than to blame itself,” he said.
When Serco signed a five-year contract to run Australia’s immigration detention centres in 2009, there were about 600 detainees. Now there are more than 6000.
The company’s original contract for detention centres was valued at $340 million. The latest adjustment, in November last year, puts the value of the contract at $712 million.
More adjustments are likely.

TONY JONES: Alright. We’ll come to that in more detail in a moment. First we’ve just heard claims from a former guard that Serco, the private corporation running the detention centres, has been throwing raw recruits in at the deep end at Villawood Detention Centre without proper training. How serious a breach would that be?
SARAH HANSON-YOUNG: Look, I think that’s very serious. And unfortunately, it’s those types of reports that we’ve been hearing on the ground for some time now, not just in Villawood, but in other facilities. Questions over the adequate training of those who have to work with children, adequate training for those on the ground every day having to work with asylum seekers who are clearly suffering severe mental health concerns, suffering torture and trauma from the persecution and torture they’ve suffered.
Now, it’s – I really feel for the Serco security officers on this one. They are at the cold face in a very, very difficult situation. And the Serco officers that I talk to when I visit detention centres, I’ve never been anywhere where I haven’t had an officer come up to me and say, “Hang on, Senator, let me tell you the real story.” And that is a concern. It’s about time the Government reviewed the contract, had an urgent audit of the types of operations that are going on and realise that the promise that they broke in 2007 to bring back into public hands the running of detention centres, when they broke that promise, they made a mistake.
TONY JONES: So, the Greens strongly believe, do they, that the detention centres should be re-nationalised in effect?
SARAH HANSON-YOUNG: Well, at the last – at the 2007 election, the Labor Party said because of the situation that we’d seen happen for the decade or half before them, the situation of rioting across the different detention centres, including on Nauru under the Howard Government, the Labor Party said, “Yes, I think it’s about time we started to have more transparency in the process.” Of course Labor got into power, they won government and we’ve never seen that promise acted upon. I do think it’s time …
TONY JONES: But can I just interrupt you there? Why would – why do you believe public servants would do any better than Serco?
SARAH HANSON-YOUNG: I think it’s about the transparency. Since the contract was signed with Serco, some two and a half years ago, people, as myself in Senate Estimates, advocates have been asking to see the contract. Let’s see what the service provision requirements are. When the Government talks about possible breaches, let’s have a look at what those possible breaches are. There’s no set auditing, there’s no regular auditing and because no-one knows what the service contract is because it’s in-confidence, commercial-in-confidence, there’s nothing to judge that on. And I think that really does raise questions about how these facilities are being run at taxpayers’ money and then when tensions rise like this, who is to blame? Well, at the moment only the Government can take the blame. But we really need to get down to the issues of seeing what is going on on the ground.
TONY JONES: Okay. Chris Bowen says he’s got virtually now two inquiries underway, with the same team doing the inquiry of course, the Christmas Island riots, now this one looking into the circumstances of the riots and the preparedness of Serco to actually deal with these things. I mean, should he wait before acting, wait for the results of these inquiries?
SARAH HANSON-YOUNG: Well, look, first and foremost, I think we really need to make it very clear that we all condemn the violence, we all condemn the property damage of the riots and I don’t think anyone can argue that the writing has made the situation any better in either of the facilities and for anybody there, particularly those directly involved. I don’t think it’s made their cases any better. But why this has occurred is what should be being investigated. The complex reasons behind the rise of the tensions and really trying to move forward to a solution. If the Government only wants to look at individual case by individual case, they will fail to address it. There is a systematic problem in the immigration detention network. It all needs to be reviewed.

A report on last night’s ABC Lateline highlighted the flaws in a privatised detention system:

KAREN BARLOW: But a former guard at Villawood has come forward, describing a privatised detention system in crisis. He says problems at the centre have been building for some time.
FORMER VILLAWOOD DETENTION CENTRE GUARD: It’s pretty unprecedented, really. Yeah, never seen anything like it before in Villawood’s entire history. I don’t think there’s been that much destruction at all.
KAREN BARLOW: He says his former employer Serco does not train staff properly.
FORMER VILLAWOOD DETENTION CENTRE GUARD: Basically, from what I’ve seen, the new recruits were just basically put on the floor, no training whatsoever, they were being told that they would be trained as they were, and that also has never happened before. Basically what is supposed to happen is that they’re meant to go through a – at least a minimum six-week course and then have a year of on-the-job training. Serco just basically got rid of the six-week course using staffing levels as an excuse, and then basically just threw the staff straight onto the floor and expected that the experienced staff to train as well as do their normal jobs.
KAREN BARLOW: The former guard says the Federal Government should review Serco’s contract.
FORMER VILLAWOOD DETENTION CENTRE GUARD: They’ve had pretty poor performance and basically the spate of incidences, major incidences under Serco’s control, have been – there’s just been too many. Um, so, yeah, I think that the contract should really be reassessed.
KAREN BARLOW: The Government’s review of last month’s riots at Christmas Island will now also investigate the Villawood protests. That will include the response of Serco and the Immigration Department.
CHRIS BOWEN: Well there’s no evidence before me to indicate that any actions by Serco or Department of Immigration staff on the ground at the centres led to these incidents or that the response wasn’t adequate. But I am not going to pre-empt the results of the Hawke-Williams review. I’m looking forward to receiving that review, and if there are lessons to be learnt, they’ll be learnt out of that review.

A Republican invitation for Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to address Congress next month is highlighting the tensions between President Obama and Mr. Netanyahu and has kicked off a bizarre diplomatic race over who will be the first to lay out a new proposal to reopen the stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.
For three months, White House officials have been debating whether the time has come for Mr. Obama to make a major address on the region’s turmoil, including the upheaval in the Arab world, and whether he should use the occasion to propose a new plan for peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
One administration official said that course was backed by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and the president himself, but opposed by Dennis B. Ross, the president’s senior adviser on the Middle East.
As the administration has been pondering, Mr. Netanyahu, fearful that his country would lose ground with any Obama administration plan, has been considering whether to pre-empt the White House with a proposal of his own, before a friendly United States Congress, according to American officials and diplomats from the region.
“People seem to think that whoever goes first gets the upper hand,” said Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator and a director at the New America Foundation. Using Mr. Netanyahu’s nickname, he said: “If Bibi went first and didn’t lay out a bold peace plan, it would be harder for Obama to say, actually, despite what you said to Congress and their applause, this is what I think you should do.”
The political gamesmanship between the two men illustrates how the calculation in the Middle East has changed for a variety of reasons, including the political upheaval in the Arab world. But it also shows the lack of trust and what some officials say is personal animosity between Mr. Obama and Mr. Netanyahu.
White House officials are working on drafts of a possible proposal, but they have not decided how detailed it will be, or even whether the president will deliver it in a planned speech. If Mr. Obama does put forward an American plan, officials say it could include four principles, or terms of reference, built around the final status issues that have bedeviled peace negotiators since 1979.
The terms of reference could call for Israel to accept a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders. For their part, Palestinians would have to accept that they would not get the right of return to land in Israel from which they fled or were forced to flee. Jerusalem would be the capital of both states, and Israeli security would have to be protected.

Reading this report in the New York Times makes one realise how utterly disconnected to reality are the American and Israeli political elites. Mainstream Zionist fascism is ignored. Anybody want to complain about this?

“Do you want your grandson to be named Ahmed ben Sarah?” a street poster slapped on the walls of Jerusalem’s ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods inquires, in a not-so-subtle dig at the Yesh retail chain.
The problem the authors of the broadside (pashkevil, in Hebrew ) have is that Yesh, the Haredi arm of the Super-Sol supermarket chain, allows Arab men to work alongside Jewish women.
The poster features the Yesh logo next to a photograph of two employees chatting – or as the poster puts it, “An Arab man courting a daughter of Israel at the Givat Shaul branch.”
TheMarker has discovered that the organization behind the pashkevil is Lehava, a Hebrew acronym for “Preventing Assimilation in the Holy Land.” (Don’t confuse it with the Finance Ministry division called Lehava, which is devoted to narrowing digital gaps in Israeli society. )
“One of the biggest problems today is that Jewish employees at retail chains are assimilating with Arab employees,” said Bentzi Gupstein, one of the anti-assimilation group’s leaders. “Just two weeks ago a Jewish woman working at a branch of Shefa Shuk in Jerusalem left a Haredi home and went to live with an Arab employee she’d met at the store.”
“We are publicizing the problem to make people understand that there is a problem, and to encourage people to buy from places that hire Jewish labor. The posters influence the Haredi community,” Gupstein added.

In this environment, whether Netanyahu or Obama gives the first speech in the coming months just seems utterly irrelevant.