Vandalism against arms companies is ok. Vandalism against companies complicit in apartheid should be condoned. Vandalism, when wielded with intent of political action and political conscientization (critical consciousness raising) for the sake of protecting human life, dignity and freedom, most definitely should be supported.
The windows, lights, buildings and objects manufactured for the purposes of the destruction of human life do not have feelings or emotions. The Palestinians, who face Elbit drones as the skies rain down upon them, who march for their right to return to be met with elbit weaponry, do. The value of a window on the building of an arms factory can not, by any moral equivocation, be compared to the value of even one single life that is taken by the arms, weapons and technologies produced by that factory. Let alone, the hundreds and thousands of Palestinians who have been oppressed, maimed, disabled, and killed by companies just like Elbit Systems, simply for the sake of corporate profit.
The weapons and drones may be made here in the UK. But they are deployed in the skies of, and dropped on Gaza. On a population that consists mostly of refugees and children. As people living in the UK we carry an enormous amount of privilege – a privilege built on the backs of the wretched of the earth. Those people’s dispossessed, displaced and discarded for the sake of colonial rule, or simply corporate profit.
The UK maintains a long one-hundred year complicity in the colonisation of Palestine, and the oppression, ethnic cleansing, and colonisation of the native Palestinians living there or exiled around the world. Through the colonisation of Palestine and the establishment of the British Mandate, to the support for the creation of the state of Israel built upon the dispossession and displacement of over 750,000 Palestinian inhabitants, to the continuing diplomatic and military support for the military occupation and apartheid regime that Israel holds. Because of this deep and ongoing complicity between the UK and Israel’s apartheid regime, it is up to all of us to organise, to mobilise and to stop it.
If it were your friends, your family being mutilated, being violated, and being killed by an oppressive regime, would you not declare that it is your right to resist their destruction by any means necessary? Would you not declare that it is your right, and the right of those oppressed, repressed and depressed by companies that make a corporate profit on the backs of your subjugation, mutilation and death, to be respected as a human being by any means necessary? Would you hesitate to vandalise arms factories profiting from the destruction of your friends and family? By what standard of morality do we contemplate the windows, lights and air-conditioners, with the lives of human beings that are killed by the weaponry and technologies manufactured by that same factory?
In order to truly stand against racism, requires seeing everyone in the world as equally human. That means to struggle for human beings, as you would for yourself, against the institutions that continue to deny them their humanity. We, as citizens of the UK, must use our privilege to put ourselves on the front line to stop these weapons manufacturers by any means necessary, and if that means breaking a few more windows, and vandalising a few more buildings complicit in Israel’s apartheid regime, then so be it.
Unlike us, the people of Palestine have no choice. Whether they like it or not their lives are lived on the front line against the bombs dropped and weapons manufactured by companies such as Elbit Systems. With our government continuing to enable, facilitate and profit from Israel’s apartheid regime over the Palestinian people for over a century, it is our duty to resist it.
Despite the morally bankrupt claim to the contrary. The actions of activists that put themselves on the frontline to occupy Elbit factories, to vandalise Elbit offices and their associates to tell them they are not welcome here, are heroic. To draw from the struggles of the suffragettes, the civil rights movement, the lgbt+ movement, the environmental movement and the South African anti-apartheid movement, when your society continues to support the immoral, the only moral course of action is to struggle against it.
It is up to us, to take direct action, to end this complicity and to #ShutElbitDown