On the 74th annual Nakba Day, Palestine Action targeted and shut down Elbit Systems’s flagship premises in Bristol, commemorating Nakba Day. If the fact of life for Palestinians under Israeli apartheid is that of ongoing dispossession and death, then our resistance too must be ongoing. We won’t stop till the Nakba does.
There is one angle of the Ukrainian crisis that may turn out to boost Israel’s legitimacy and bolster its international impunity – weapons.
Palestine Action raided Elbit System’s subsidiary, UAV Engines Ltd, in Shenstone, Staffordshire on Monday morning in an action that drew parallels with Israeli demolitions of Palestinian homes in Sheikh Jarrah.
After 18 months of sustained direct action taken at the Elbit Ferranti site, the Israeli arms maker has sold a subsidiary which produced military technologies for Israel’s fleet of combat drones.
The “Elbit Three”, a group of British activists who defaced the site of an Israeli arms company, have been acquitted.
Protestors with Palestine Action are occupying Elbit System’s London HQ, and preventing operations at the site. In the past year, Palestine Action has disrupted Elbit for 105 days of 365, across their 10 UK sites plus those of a drone parts supplier. The action taken today, as with all actions by Palestine Action, has been taken in order to end the supply of UK made arms, drones, munitions and military technology to Israel.
Activists in the United Kingdom have been occupying a drone factory in Leicester for the last six days. The Elbit Systems factory produces weapons that have been used by Israel to attack Gaza. “We’re taking direct action because the UK is complicit in the colonization and ongoing occupation of Palestine,” an activist with the group Palestine Action explained.
Eight activists from Extinction Rebellion North and Palestine Action were arrested yesterday after causing £20,000 worth of damage after shutting down an Israeli arms factory in Oldham, UK. The activists stormed the factory in the early hours of Monday morning, February 1, with six blockading three entrances and another two climbing onto the roof.