[News] After Years of Campaigning Against an Israeli Weapons Factory, It Was Direct Action That Shut It Down

[Anti-Imperialist News]

progressive.international
<https://progressive.international/wire/2024-01-16-after-years-of-campaigning-against-an-israeli-weapons-factory-it-was-direct-action-that-shut-it-down/en>
After Years of Campaigning Against an Israeli Weapons Factory, It Was
Direct Action That Shut It Down
January 16, 2024
------------------------------

Delving into the relentless efforts of Palestine Action in targeting Elbit
Systems, the Israeli arms company, which ultimately led to a significant
win— £6m less in the sale of Elbit's UK subsidiary, this article unravels
the strategic evolution of activism from community mobilisation to
disruptive civil disobedience.

In August 2014, Adie Mormech got a Facebook message he will never forget.
It was from Wafaa, one of his former students in Gaza. “Adie do u remember
Huda that was in your class in Afaq she was my friend”. Of course he
remembered Huda: her humour; her quirkiness; how she’d come to class early
to tell him stories; the gifts she gave him when he left; her excitement
about her upcoming wedding. Huda, Wafaa wrote, was dead.

Mormech, an activist with Manchester Palestine Action and a committee
member of Oldham Peace and Justice, taught Huda and Wafaa while
volunteering in the Nuseirat refugee camp in Gaza between 2010 and 2011,
and stayed in touch with them both. Wafaa told Mormech that Huda’s house
had been hit by an Israeli missile and that she, along with her two
children, husband and mother-in-law, were killed. In Mormech’s memory,
Wafaa’s message said, “We’re all in pieces here.” In fact, she was far more
grimly literal: “They became small pieces [sic] adie”.

It’s near-certain that the bomb that obliterated Huda and her family was
manufactured by Elbit Systems. The Israeli arms company, the largest of its
kind, supplies the state
<https://corporatewatch.org/elbit-systems-company-profile-2/> with around
85% of its land-based equipment, including the armed Hermes drones known to
be used
<https://theintercept.com/2018/08/11/israel-palestine-drone-strike-operation-protective-edge/>
against Palestinian children. The company has played a critical role in
facilitating Israel’s decades-long military occupation of the West Bank and
its blockade of the Gaza Strip, and has consequently placed it firmly in
the crosshairs of the pro-Palestine movement, which yesterday achieved a
major win against the company.

On Monday, Elbit announced the sale
<https://www.ttelectronics.com/news-events/news/tt-electronics-acquires-ferranti-power-and-control/>
of one of its five UK subsidiaries, Ferranti Power and Control, to TT
Electronics for £9m. That’s £6m less than what Huda Ammori, co-founder of
Palestine Action, estimates her group has cost the company. Since August
2020, Palestine Action has targeted Ferranti’s factory in Oldham, Greater
Manchester with increasingly disruptive direct action, from paint stunts to
rooftop occupations to machinery destruction. The group’s colourful
protests have made national news
<https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-58305265> and even attracted
the ire <https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/285887> of Israeli
ministers.

Despite repression from local police – who have made 36 arrests since the
first action, thwarting two in the process – Palestine Action not only
persisted but escalated. So frequent have local protests become – weekly,
since May 2021 – that Elbit made a rapid response agreement with the
police. Officers were stationed outside the factory throughout Israel’s
bombing of Gaza in May 2021; the following month, Palestine Action infiltrated
the building <https://www.palestineaction.org/activists-oldham/> once
again, this time doing £500,000 worth of damage and forcing the factory to
close for a number of weeks. The assault was relentless – and it paid off.

Yet while Palestine Action has been the engine of the Oldham campaign, it
has not acted alone. “Targeting the Oldham factory, for us, was the logical
thing to do,” says Ammori, who was brought up in nearby Bolton. One reason
for this was there was already “support on the ground” when Palestine
Action arrived.

Laying the groundwork.

Elbit bought Ferranti Technologies, along with the Oldham factory it
occupied, for £15m in 2007. It would be another nine years before the
acquisition attracted any serious or sustained attention from local
activists. Manchester Palestine Action (unrelated to Palestine Action)
formed in 2014, around the time of Operation Protective Edge; Mormech
joined not long afterwards. The group first protested outside the Oldham
factory in 2016.

>From this protest grew a slow but steady campaign, including meetings with
councillors and MPs, stalls, petitions and freedom of information requests.
Both Mormech and Ammori cite the local Asian population – many of whom were
already sympathetic to the Palestinian cause – as helping the campaign to
gain a foothold in the area. The group’s efforts were passionate but
polite: the most trouble they caused was to blockade the factory entrance
and spray “Free Palestine” on its steps in July 2017. The action made the local
news
<https://www.oldham-chronicle.co.uk/news-features/8/news-headlines/104365/calls-to-end-arms-exports-to-israel>
.

Though the campaign may have instigated a “sea of change”
<https://www.mancunianmatters.co.uk/news/07062018-sea-of-change-on-streets-of-manchester-as-people-wake-up-to-palestinian-plight/>
in Greater Manchester, Mormech understands why it failed to inspire more
broadly. “I think a lot of people have seen the sort of ritual of … very
contained demonstrations … speeches and talks, and a lot of people didn’t
feel like that was for them, partly because … they want to actually get in
the way of this now. They’re not seeing change quick enough.”

Palestinians take action.

Palestine Action was borne of this frustration at the lethargic pace of
much of the pro-Palestinian movement. The daughter of a Palestinian father
and Iraqi mother, Ammori feels Israeli apartheid as personal injury: her
great-grandfather was shot and killed by a British soldier shortly after
the Balfour Declaration was issued; her great-grandmother was pregnant with
her grandfather at the time. Politics was in her milk; by the time she got
to university, she was a confident activist.

Ammori founded Manchester University’s boycott, divestment and sanctions
(BDS) campaign, which recently forced the administration
<https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20200805-manchester-university-divests-from-companies-complicit-in-the-israeli-occupation/>
to divest £10m from Caterpillar. In 2018 and fresh out of uni, she became
campaigns officer for the Palestine Solidarity Campaign. There, she would
lobby MPs and receive the same tired responses: either they would profess
sympathy untethered from any actual political will, or they would give a
standard response about the need to “recognise Palestine” within a
two-state solution.

Ammori quickly became disillusioned with the institutional approach:
“Although there were significant victories along the way,” she says, “it
just didn’t feel as if it matched the severity of what was happening to the
Palestinian people.” She felt the need for action acutely: “When the
situation is so urgent, there has to be more done.”

There was still one last hope of change. In 2019, the Labour party committed
to an arms embargo
<https://labour.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Real-Change-Labour-Manifesto-2019.pdf>
in its election manifesto and seemed like it might actually win the power
to implement it. When Corbyn lost, any remaining glimmers of faith Ammori
had in making change from within the system were snuffed out – but
something else was ignited.

In July 2020, Ammori and a group of other activists founded Palestine
Action. As the name suggests, their aim was to pressure state and corporate
actors from without. The group decided to focus their strategy on a single
company – Elbit – to maximise their efficacy, and to operate primarily via
acts of civil disobedience – the sort of tactics Ammori credits Extinction
Rebellion with having “normalised”. Palestine Action was not, however, the
first to train such tactics on Elbit.

#StopElbit bears fruit.

Maren Mantovani sits on the international secretariat of the BDS National
Committee. Speaking to Novara Media from Portugal, she points out that
Elbit was among the first targets of the BDS movement after its founding in
2005. Since 2007 – and with increasing intensity since 2011, when BDS called
for an international military embargo
<https://bdsmovement.net/news/impose-immediate-comprehensive-military-embargo-israel>
on Israel – activists around the world have disrupted Elbit’s operations in
multiple ways, and with remarkable success.

Now in its sixteenth year, the campaign has seen gradual but consistent
victories <https://stopthewall.org/divest-elbit/stopelbit-timeline/>:
examples Mantovani gives include the Norwegian state pension fund’s 2009
divestment from Elbit <https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB125197496278482849>
and the Brazilian government’s cancellation in 2014 of a major contract
<https://bdsmovement.net/news/elbit-systems-loses-key-brazil-deal-over-palestine-protests>
with the company (though the Bolsonaro government has just signed another
<https://www.flightglobal.com/military-uavs/elbit-secures-additional-hermes-900-order-from-brazil/147026.article>).
In a grim coincidence, while his former student’s family was being bombed
with Elbit weapons in Gaza, Mormech was occupying the company’s factory in
Shenstone
<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/21/david-cameron-government-gaza-arms-embargo-israel>
alongside eight other activists.

Palestine Action has since also targeted
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-palestine-uk-shenstone-village-protests>
Shenstone, as well as a number of other Elbit sites, including in Leicester
and Bristol. There are many possible reasons why their campaign in Oldham
has taken off where others have not, but one of them is clearly the years’
worth of thankless, unspectacular outreach and campaigning undertaken by
Mormech and others. The BDS movement, like practically all successful civil
rights movements before it, has relied on a blend of tactics to win. “I
think action and community mobilisation are the perfect duo in terms of
targeting these factories,” says Ammori. “And the community mobilisation
around Oldham has been brilliant.”

Still, Mormech says Palestine Action has given the campaign the push it
needed to get it over the line. He hopes that after Monday’s victory, the
“establishment organisations” that “have always looked down on direct
action … acknowledge this crucial and courageous mobilisation.”

“Believe me,” he says, “I’ve done all the different aspects of this
campaign. They’re all important, but this is what turned the screw, no
question about it. If we ignore that, we’re ignoring how to win.”

*Rivkah Brown is a commissioning editor and reporter at Novara Media.*
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