Here’s a snapshot of government priorities: one third of staff at a key facility that seeks to prevent the incidence of family and sexual violence are set to lose their jobs.
The Centre for Family Violence and Sexual Violence Prevention, hosted by the Ministry of Justice, has today begun consulting staff on a proposal to cut 26 of 78 roles, a reduction of 33 percent. National Trainers who deliver best-practice prevention in communities, advisors, managers, and administrative staff are all in the firing line.
On its website, the Centre describes itself as “the strategic thinker for the Family Violence and Sexual Violence system,” and portrays its work in these terms:
The Centre supports government agencies to take a collective, community-led and people-centred approach to delivering solutions that prevent and respond to violence, strengthen and heal.
Clearly…very unimportant work, and very disposable people. As the PSA has pointed out :
…”The Centre is helping drive the National Strategy and Action Plan on family and sexual violence launched only in 2021. “It’s hard to understand how a sharply reduced workforce is expected to deliver coordinated national leadership on this issue. How can the plan be effective now when the Centre responsible for it is going to be gutted?”
Trump v Netanyahu
Donald Trump’s readiness to burn off America’s allies now seems to be extending to Israel – or at least to Benjamin Netanyahu, who looks increasingly vulnerable as Israel heads towards elections that must be held by October at the latest. The Trump/Netanyahu bromance seems to be over. The Jewish newspaper Haaretz has just published a useful timeline on the escalating abuse that Trump has been directing at the Israeli PM in recent months.
As columnist Esther Solomon has pointed out, the tensions go back well before Trump’s recent comments that Netanyahu is “fuckin’ crazy.” Never one to forget a grudge, Trump reportedly felt that Netanyahu had been overly speedy in congratulating Joe Biden on his 2020 election victory. (“Fuck him” was Trump’s response at the time.) Supposedly, the sense of resentment had been fuelled by Trump’s belief that if it hadn’t been for Trump’s support (ripping up the Iran nuclear deal, recognising Israel’s illegal annexation of the Golan Heights, shifting the US embassy to Jerusalem etc) Netanyahu would never have been re-elected. Such an ingrate.
Although the US and Israel jointly launched the war with Iran in February, they did not have the same objectives, and these differences have only become more apparent since the Iranian regime did not crumble overnight, as the US had been naively led to believe it would. In effect, two separate (but related) wars have been taking place: Israel in Lebanon against Hezbollah, and the US against Iran.
Israel been cut out of any role in the ceasefire talks between the US and Iran. Pointedly, those ceasefire talks have not addressed several issues of concern to Israel, such as the fate of Iran’s missile programme and/or Teheran’s future support for its regional allies in Lebanon and Yemen.
Instead, Trump has had far more narrow, far more self-centred aims in mind. What Washington and Teheran have been trying to do is to cobble together a temporary fix that would (a) enable the US to stand down the bulk of its force deployment (b) allow the re-opening the Strait of Hormuz and (c) deliver the White House a face-saving “victory” over Iran’s nuclear enrichment programme, even though Trump himself has publicly described the nuclear enrichment issue as being largely just a P.R. exercise.
So far, the sticking point has been that Trump can’t sell the package back at home in terms that look like anything else than what it is: a US backdown and surrender. For its part, Iran has been deliberately linking the ceasefire deal to the cessation of Israeli actions in Lebanon, in order (a) to protect its ally Hezbollah, but also (b) to drive an ever-widening wedge between Israel and the US. (The current spasm of tit-for-tat fighting between Iran and the US has given Israel the breathing room it has been wanting, in order to resume its attacks on Lebanon.
Bidding Goodbye
Will Netanyahu lose his bid for a seventh stint as PM? The mounting White House abuse of the Israeli PM – which have included Trumpian claims that Netanyahu might not even contest the upcoming election – isn’t helping his chances.
In a wave of reports over the last couple of weeks, we have learned that he called Netanyahu “fucking crazy,” that Netanyahu “will do whatever I want him to do”, that “If I tell him to do something, he does it,” and that “I call all the shots. Netanyahu doesn’t call the shots.”
Not surprisingly, the Israeli opposition parties have been treating all of this as a sign of Netanyahu’s inherent weakness, and of his willingness to let Israel be humiliated as an American puppet that has no sovereign voice on matters of its own national security. The main opposition bloc is called Beyachad (“Together”) and is an opportunistic liaison between two former Prime Ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid.
If anything, they have taken an even more extreme on the Lebanon invasion (and on Gaza) than Netanyahu. Some recent polls have been showing support for the former IDF chief Gadi Eisenkot as a potential compromise candidate for PM. In sum, there’s not much sign of Israel changing course from its current “perpetual war” settings, with or without Netanyahu.
Polling has been showing however, that a majority of Israelis – and even a majority of supporters of Netanyahu’s Likud party – have deep misgivings about the wisdom of Netanyahu seeking re-election. Yet the fragmented, highly polarised nature of coalition politics in Israel serves to undermine any reliable predictions about the outcome of an election campaign yet to formally begin.
Weaponising sexual violence
A series of credible reports – from the United Nations, and from several leading human rights groups – have been exposing the systematic use of sexual violence against Palestinian inmates by their Israeli captors, within the Israeli prison system. There are disturbing reports of what this abuse commonly entails.
In May, Israel was added to the UN “blacklist of sexual violence in conflict zones”. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Israeli rights group B’Tselem and the PCHR have described the pervasive culture of sexual violence within Israeli forces, especially among those charged with overseeing Palestinian prisoners.
There have been attempts to defend those accused of such actions, and to justify rape and other forms of sexual abuse as being “legitimate.” The video evidence of one such attack has been decrieed by some Israeli politicians – including Cabinet Ministers – not for the crime, but for the act of releasing the video evidence.
[Finance Minister] Bezalel Smotrich has demanded “an immediate criminal investigation to locate the leakers of the trending video that was intended to harm the reservists and that caused tremendous damage to Israel in the world and to exhaust the full severity of the law against them”. Others, including the hard right and ultranationalist politicians, such as National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, within Israel, have argued that any action – even gang rape – is permissible if it is undertaken for the security of the state.
A comprehensive report on the conditions experienced by Palestinian prisoners within the Israeli prison system – e.g. detention without charge, sexual abuse, denial of medical treatment, with-holding of food etc – has been compiled by the Israeli humanitarian organisation B’ Tselen, and is available here.
Music as escape hatch
Given all of this pervasive grimness, here are a few tracks that bid to take us to a better place. For example : this new track by Hermanos Gutierrez perfectly evokes the Andean mountain-scapes of highland Peru:
The new Board of Canada track “Father and Son” uses found dialogue from an early 1970s documentary encounter between a worried father and his son, a recent convert to a creepy faux Christian cult. The result is compelling on a whole range of levels:
Lastly, here’s the latest dancefloor epic by DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ…a 12 minute track that reportedly contains some 100 samples, and a highlight plucked from her recent four-hour long album Fantasy.