A new campaign has launched to shut down weapons companies in the US that are arming Israel’s genocide of Palestine.
On Thursday, October 12th, organizers with Palestine Action US took direct action against Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer, Elbit Systems, at its “Innovation Center” in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Activists blockaded Elbit’s main entrance so their employees could not enter, and drenched the building with red paint and graffiti, exposing Elbit for profiteering from Israeli war crimes against Palestinians. “Elbit Systems will not conduct business as usual in our city, while their weapons are mass murdering the Palestinian people right now,” activists cried as they were locked down to Elbit’s front doors. “War criminals work at 130 Bishop Allen Drive!”
Elbit’s Cambridge office was targeted twice more after Thursday’s blockade. That evening, the building was defaced with graffiti reading “ELBIT PROFITS FROM GENOCIDE” and “WAR CRIMINALS WORK HERE.” Then, on Sunday, key card scanners at both entrances were smashed to bits, preventing employees from entering the building, and the building was drenched with red paint and graffiti was left reading “GAZA RESISTS” and “ELBIT ARMS GENOCIDE.”
What Israel is doing to Palestine is nothing short of a genocide, and Elbit has blood on their hands. Elbit supplies 85% of Israel’s military drone fleet, along with bullets, tear gas, land-based equipment, and internationally banned weapons. In Gaza alone, Israel has used Elbit weapons to murder over 3,500 Palestinian men, women, and children, and injured over 12,000 since October 7, with thousands still missing under the rubble, in retaliation for the Al-Aqsa Flood resistance operation. Yesterday, Israel committed an utterly horrific war crime, air striking the Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City and massacring at least 500 Palestinians, with thousands still missing under the rubble — doctors, patients, and families who had fled to the hospital for shelter, only to be bombed again. A child is being murdered every 15 minutes in Palestine. These bombing attacks not only serve to ethnically cleanse Gaza but will be used by Elbit to market their arms to repressive regimes around the world—from Kashmir to Azerbaijan to the US-Mexico Border. By striking Elbit we disrupt a crucial link in the military apparatus of Western imperialism.
Palestine Action US urges the people of the world to internalize these numbers with the gravity they merit, to recognize the profound terror and grief Palestinians have been experiencing for generations, and to direct action where we live to put a stop to this 75-year-long naked genocide still unfolding before our eyes. As long as we allow Elbit to operate in our communities, every one of us has blood on our hands.
Solidarity with Palestine mandates that we expose Elbit Systems and all weapons developers as manufacturers of genocide.
Solidarity with Palestine mandates that we take direct action until Elbit can no longer “innovate” its instruments of surveillance, oppression, and terror from within our communities.
Solidarity with Palestine mandates that we disrupt the US war machine in all of its forms, because Elbit’s weapons are murdering oppressed and colonized people across the globe after they are “battle-tested” on Palestinians.
We are making Palestine Action a transatlantic movement.
Sustained direct action can make business inoperable for Elbit. It already has in the UK, where Palestine Action permanently closed an Elbit factory and their London HQ after relentless direct action and a number of arrests. After last week’s actions, Elbit removed the address of its Cambridge, MA facility from its website.
They are scared of the community’s power to resist their war profiteering.
Since the lockdown on Thursday, and subsequent disruptions in the US and the UK, Elbit’s share prices have fallen, while every other weapons manufacturer’s profits skyrocket. Elbit operates not only in Massachusetts, but in New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Texas, Florida, Alabama, and South Carolina. Imagine what nationwide coordinated direct action against Elbit will yield.
The time to act is now. We will shut down Elbit Systems and every weapons company arming Israel’s genocide of Palestine. To stay in touch, follow us @pal_actionus and contact us at PalestineActionUS@protonmail.com.
One of the welcome consequences of Palestine Action’s courageous work is that it is probably the only action that brings home to prosperous, middle-class workers, respected in their own communities, that the daily work that pays their mortgages is, in fact, utterly filthy and stained with the blood of mutilated and dead children, women and men. These workers, when they stop to think about it, are likely to be fully aware of their complicity in horrific crimes against humanity, but they use cognitive dissonance to persuade themselves that their need to ‘feed their families’ and ‘put bread on the table’ outweighs the moral demand to not kill foreign, nameless, unseen children. No doubt the well-paid German workers at IG Farben, manufacturer of the Zyklon B used to gas Jewish people in WWII, deluded themselves likewise.