[News] Palestine Action: Smashing Elbit Systems

[Anti-Imperialist News]

counterpunch.org
<https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/08/18/palestine-action-smashing-elbit-systems/>
Palestine Action: Smashing Elbit Systems
David Rovics - August 18, 2022
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Photograph Source: Nehemia Gershuni-Aylho www.ngphoto.biz – CC BY-SA 3.0
<https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/>

Normally I tour the UK doing gigs around the country at least once or twice
a year, but this was far less the case for the first two years of Covid-19,
when I was mostly stuck at home in Oregon.  Despite these unusual
circumstances, I still found it very unnerving that it took me two years to
encounter the most exciting civil disobedience movement that I’ve heard
about in a very long time, which has been successfully shutting down arms
factories in England, and causing serious operational problems at others.

I could spend the next several thousand words unpacking why it is that two
years elapsed between the founding of the Palestine Action network and me
hearing about its existence.  There is much to be said about the echo
chambers created by social media algorithms.  And much more to be said
about the priorities of those who run the BBC, the Guardian, and other news
sources I consume daily, which haven’t seen fit to mention any of these
obviously significant developments, unless it was on a rare day when I
wasn’t paying attention to the news.

Aside from the priorities of the press and tech billionaires to keep us in
the dark, the government of the UK has gone to great lengths to keep the
frequently-swinging sledgehammers wielded by people smashing equipment
under the banner of Palestine Action as quiet as possible.  There will be
court proceedings coming up in October involving a number of people and
actions, but for the past two years, mostly the state has just been
dropping charges.

The significance of what’s been going on is impossible to miss when you
follow the details of what has been happening with these cases.

I learned about it first from the horse’s mouth, as it were.  Last month at
a concert I was playing in the city of Crewe, near Manchester, England.
Several young folks appeared wearing very spiffy matching black t-shirts,
with the words Palestine Action written in red and white.  As I listened to
stories that evening, I was as excited by the news as I was shocked,
despite my cynicism about the media, by the lack of coverage of it.

Just to cut to the most salient aspects of the situation here:  these folks
used climbing gear, ropes and such to scale an Elbit Systems factory, that
produces drones and other deadly weapons for the Israeli military, and they
broke in through the roof.  They then spent three days and nights rampaging
around in there with sledgehammers, smashing equipment.

Three days and nights.  For three days and nights, the police did not
intervene.  Perhaps because while they were smashing equipment in the arms
factory, thousands of local people were occupying the streets and blocking
the entrance to the place, often in the form of whole families with their
family cars.  Mostly people from Asian backgrounds, along with lots of
others.

It was, it seems, the militancy and obvious goodness of the smashing of
military equipment that was going on in there that was so inspiring to so
many local people, which had them pouring out in such numbers, and staying
in the streets.

Eventually the police moved in and took the trespassers and their
sledgehammers into custody.  They were held for fifteen hours and released,
with no charges pressed.  A few days later, one of the folks got a call
from the police, asking if he would like to go to the station and retrieve
the climbing gear, which they had used to scale the building and break into
it.

The Oldham factory, and one of the London factories, were forced to close.

Damage was extensive, but perhaps far more worrying for the arms
corporation was the knowledge of their vulnerability, under British law,
when faced with this kind of opposition.

The British prosecutors starting dropping charges in case after case
because when one of the cases did go to trial, the sledgehammer-wielding
activists were acquitted.

There are many flaws in the British legal system — for some really
problematic ones, look at how illegally they are detaining Wikileaks
founder, Julian Assange.  But when it comes to incidents like the smashing
of equipment at the arms factories, what has been a challenge for the
prosecutors has been the doctrine of proportionality, in these instances.
I’m no legal expert, but what this is about is when what the activists are
reacting to are Elbit Systems’ involvement in Israeli war crimes against
Palestinians, then doing a million dollars of damage to equipment at the
factory is insignificant, proportionally speaking.

There is also precedent in England (as well as in Ireland and New Zealand)
of activists doing extensive damage to combat aircraft (or in the case of
New Zealand, a CIA spy base) and being found not guilty, on the basis that
they were actually enforcing the laws of their countries by doing what they
were doing, since in each case their country’s government was breaking
their own and international laws by doing what they were doing — in the
UK’s case, by selling combat aircraft to Indonesia while they were bombing
civilians in East Timor.

The British government is obviously capable of breaking its own laws, or
changing them.  It is obviously capable, as demonstrated by fairly recent
history, of declaring groups of their own citizens to be subject to things
like indefinite detention without charges.  But to the extent that it is
subject to its own laws and international covenants, there are legal
quandaries involved with manufacturing and exporting deadly weapons to a
country that is daily in blatant violation of international law, and using
these weapons systems to commit war crimes in territories that are
internationally recognized as illegally occupied — including by the UK,
officially.

This sort of thing generally doesn’t get in the way of Plowshares activists
engaging in identical sorts of sledgehammer-related actions in the United
States from receiving long prison sentences on a regular basis, although
the US is also a signatory to many of these international laws.  But thus
far when it comes to these sorts of acts of civil disobedience, in the UK
and some other countries, international law has had a bit more sway.

For those involved or those who have managed to break through the media
blackout and hear about these actions, it is an electrifying moment.

Around the UK as with so much of the rest of the world, much of the public
is very critical of Israeli apartheid, and the ongoing slaughter of
Palestinians by the Israeli military.  Meanwhile, the governments of
countries like the UK, the US, and so many others make the Israeli war
crimes possible, with their military aid, trade, and political cover.

And too often, solidarity networks descend into bickering and division.
Then they are attacked from so many different sides if they gain any
traction, as can be seen so clearly in the recent history of the British
Labor Party, which was briefly led by Jeremy Corbyn, who is a genuine
critic of Israel and supporter of the Palestinian people, and was and is
therefore ceaselessly denounced with fake allegations of antisemitism and
terrorist sympathies.

What has become very clear in recent months across the UK is that it is not
only the militant few, willing to get arrested for smashing military
equipment, who are tired with more talk, and want to take real effective
action now, to try to stop war crimes which are daily being committed by
Israel in the West Bank and Gaza.  Because unless I missed other
significant developments, we have not seen thousands of people pouring into
the streets in a suburb of Manchester in solidarity with Palestinians in a
long time.

The logic of endless compromise that seems to be the main thing produced by
what we might call the Progressive Industrial Complex is depressing, as
well as ineffective.  The actions taken by Palestine Action have been a
tremendous source of inspiration for the people of Oldham and many other
cities, as demonstrated by their presence on the streets, among other
things.  I’m just one of many very biased observers here who hopes this
direct action will continue until victory.

*David Rovics is a songwriter, podcaster, and part of **Portland Emergency
Eviction Response**.  Go to **artistsforrentcontrol.org*
<http://artistsforrentcontrol.org/>* to sign up to receive text
notifications, so you can be part of this effort.  Another Portland is
possible.*
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