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<a class="gmail-domain gmail-reader-domain" href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/08/18/palestine-action-smashing-elbit-systems/">counterpunch.org</a>
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<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">Palestine Action: Smashing Elbit Systems</h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits">David Rovics - August 18, 2022<br></div>
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<div id="gmail-attachment_252757" class="gmail-wp-caption"><p><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-252757" src="https://www.counterpunch.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Hermes_450_Hermes_900_in_formation-680x481.jpg" alt="" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="458" height="324"></p><p id="gmail-caption-attachment-252757" class="gmail-wp-caption-text"><font size="1">Photograph Source: Nehemia Gershuni-Aylho <a href="http://www.ngphoto.biz">www.ngphoto.biz</a> – <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/">CC BY-SA 3.0</a></font></p></div>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>The Oldham factory, and one of the London factories, were forced to close.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>For those involved or those who have managed to break through the
media blackout and hear about these actions, it is an electrifying
moment.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
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<em>David Rovics is a songwriter, podcaster, and part of </em><em>Portland Emergency Eviction Response</em><em>. Go to </em><a href="http://artistsforrentcontrol.org/"><em>artistsforrentcontrol.org</em></a><em> to sign up to receive text notifications, so you can be part of this effort. Another Portland is possible.</em>
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