By detention and drone: Palestine Action shuts down Elbit

Palestine Action, as ever, has been very busy in the past month. Before, during and after Israel’s “preemptive” bombardment of the Gaza strip on August 6, 2022, which killed 49 Palestinians, including 17 children, we’ve been keeping up relentless resistance against Israel’s arm trade in the UK.

As the bombardment was going on, four activists occupied the roof of The Good Packing Company, a client of Elbit “who packages, transports, and exports Israeli weapons, battle-tested on the Palestinian people.” We also concentrated our work on the UAV Engines Ltd site in Shenstone, with three actions over the past month, including two blockades of the entrance.

On August 27, “Palestine Actionists have set up a ground camp and scaled the adjacent trees, erecting unreachable hammocks” overlooking the factory from an opposite field. This is a new tactic “made possible by a growth in membership and support,” but the “permanent presence of activists on site will mean Israel’s largest arms company is struck at from all angles — including the usual direct action.”

On Saturday September 10, the rapper and journalist Lowkey joined us for a guerrilla concert right outside the Shenstone factory gates, where he “was met by more than 150 people who were there to stand in opposition to Elbit.”

Why have we done all this? To stop Israeli arms trade producing in the UK, and to end British complicity in settler-colonial apartheid. This is a longstanding relationship that trades in both tactics, and technology

These tactics include not only the latest iteration of the long-running drive to erase Palestinians from their homeland — the inheritance Israel has received from other colonial invasions waged by other European nations, and particularly by its forebear, the British Empire. A prime example of this is administrative detention. The Kenyan Kikuyu novelist and playwright Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, whilst reflecting on his own time as a political prisoner under the neocolonial Kenyan state in his book Wrestling with the Devil: A Prison Memoir, observed that “Detention without trial had always been central to the colonial culture of fear,” and that in establishing it as part of the legal system, “the legal groundwork for the fascist tradition of crimes of thought and intention” was laid. This policy was codified in 1897 by Sir Arthur Hardinge, who was “the philosopher of control by sword and the bullet.” 

It can be said, then, in this day and age, that Israel controls by detention and drone. 

Both these things, amongst others, were a colonial inheritance passed along from the senior power, Britain, to its junior. 

Detentions were first used in Palestine by the British authorities in Mandatory Palestine, as part of the Defence (Emergency) Regulations. These regulations, created as martial law for a colonial power, were then incorporated into Israel’s domestic legislation. It is a direct through-line of colonialism that continues to be used as a weapon of domination on Palestinians, who must often fight “the battle of empty stomachs” in a confrontation of wills against their oppressor in order to preserve the few rights they have, and to fight to regain their freedom. 

Drones are another inheritance, one that signifies the links in trade and military aid between Israel and the UK, links that persist to this day. Elbit Systems is Israel’s largest privately owned arms company, and as is stated on our campaign page, “it provides the Israeli military with around 85% of its killer drones.” These drones are used to attack Gaza, and the West Bank too, with impunity, such as the use of several Elbit-made models in “Operation Protective Edge” — the 2014 assault on Gaza that killed 2,202 Palestinians. In 2021, they worked with the IOF to create “a swarm of AI-guided drones operated as a single unit, requiring only one operator behind a screen, rather than multiple single units of drones controlled by separate operators.” 

It is not a large leap in logic to believe these drones have also been used in wrecking death and devastation on Gaza last week. And they will continue to be used so long as Britain remains complicit in its funding of Elbit through military contracts,and allowing it to make parts for drones within its borders. As Palestine Action co-founder Huda Ammori states in a declassified UK article, the company was founded in 1966, “born out of a necessity to maintain Israel’s domination over historic Palestine, which required technology to surveil and attack the indigenous Palestinian population.”

Since then it has expanded its reach across the globe, with six subsidiaries working out of 8 sites in Britain, and with  80% of its products going to foreign exports. Alongside that, Elbit maintains lucrative contracts with the RAF through a joint venture with KBR, Affinity Flying Services. It is for this reason that the British government has brought in a new law that just so happens to target Palestine Actionists. It cannot be overstated how Elbit is yet another of Israel’s many colonial connections, continuing complicity across the global north in a settler colonial state’s programme of ethnic cleansing. For Elbit and Israel, Palestine is the laboratory where the means and technologies of control and mass death can be perfected. 

As Ammori has written: “Today, their business model relies on developing their experimental weapons on the captive population of Gaza, packaging them as ‘battle-tested’ before shipping them off to Israel and other repressive regimes.”

The situation might lead one to ask: what can we do? What do we do when Israel has the funding and the backing of western imperialism? This is something noted in the Foreign Languages Press book, Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine as not to be “regarded as an addition of mere words to our definition of the enemy,” but as a concrete political force: “Imperialism means more arms, more support, and more money for Israel.” 

Another question arises: what can we do as westerners in the Imperial metropole, well within the reaches of its state power? As our co-founder Ammori recognised, “We were up against a Goliath.” 

The answer comes from the Palestinians: resist. 

For a simple but cutting observation of similar attempts to repress Kenyan people comes from Ngũgĩ in his memoir: this attempt to perpetuate a colonial culture of fear reveals it is not the oppressed who are afraid, it is the oppressors. For whilst the David/Goliath imagery might pervade representations of Palestine since the First Intifada, it is important to remember the Intifada caught Israel on the backfoot and pushed them back. It is important to emphasise that in the story of David and Goliath, David won. And right now, the Palestinians provide us with examples of resistance that will accomplish this. 

Recently, Khalil Awawdeh won his battle of wills with Israeli Prison Service to end his detention, part of a struggle to end administrative detention for all Palestinian political prisoners (highlighted by the hashtag #FreeThemAll). We can also look to martyrs like Ibrahim al-Nabulsi, who right up untill the end, defied the Zionist state and dared to reignite the spirit of resistance in his homeland, through armed struggle. The question remains: what can we do? Even with the answer, what does resistance look like here?

Right now, Palestine Action is engaged in a campaign to stop the Israeli arms trade in the UK, by taking direct action at the sites of Elbit Systems, their subsidiaries and their landlords.

This hasn’t been easy.

The British state seeks to repress us, and anyone else fighting for a better world. One of our main campaigns, Elbit Is Guilty, aims to raise support and attention for “The Elbit Eight,” who will go to trial on October 10 to defend themselves against spurious, politically charged accusations, which “includes charges of burglary, criminal damage and blackmail.” As recent as Saturday September 10, the police raided the action camp at Shenstone and made unlawful arrests of 14 activists. 

But the actions we’ve taken have had profound results. Out of the original 10 sites, 2 of them have been shut down and vacated. On Tuesday, August 16, Elbit’s Shenstone landlords Fisher German abandoned their Birmingham office. 

Despite the arrests, the Palestine Action camp persists, laying siege to the arms makers across the road. Direct Action gets the goods, and it is only a matter of time before we achieve another success. But in order to do this, we need your support. 

By joining us, you can take part in disrupting the flow of arms into Palestine, and help end British complicity in apartheid. This is a key form of solidarity with Palestinians, and now more than ever we need people to join and support us. It is a simple, but powerful choice. 

Ibrahim Nabulsi’s mother was quoted as saying that “they are mistaken if they think they killed Ibrahim. Everyone is Ibrahim.”

If we believe this to be true, it should not be taken to mean that we are in the same position as Palestinians, but that through Ibrahim’s example, everyone has the power to resist, to strike at one of the many heads of imperialism. You have that power, too. 

Join us, and help Shut Elbit Down.