By Sarah Wilkinson
Elbit is Israel’s biggest publicly-traded weapons company. Simply put, it manufactures repression and death from Palestine to Kashmir and all the way round to the American-Mexican border. In fact, wherever there is carnage, expendable civilian fatalities and the erasing of entire families in one cluster blast, the dots most likely always lead back to Elbit.
Elbit’s Hermes 900 drone, for instance, was first experimentally-deployed during Israel’s attack on Gaza in the summer of 2014. It was, without question, this hideous piece of machinery that facilitated the heinous slaughter of over 2,200 Palestinian civilians and 551 children in just 51 days — 51 days of absolute carnage.
It’s believed, that roughly 164 of those children were blown apart by drones actually built in the UK, and sadly, this is probably an underestimated statistic. Allowing Israel to “build” on British soil is one of this country’s most shameful acts of collusion and complicity, and it’s nothing to build a values-based “friendship” on, although Dominic Raab would have us believe otherwise.
If anyone is questioning why Palestine Action is targeting this company so arduously, then the above information is probably all you need to know. Of course, there’s lots more, from caliber bulletry to SmartEye ballistic glasses, surveillance and spy equipment, enhanced-vision-system cameras (for killing sprees on a foggy day), unmanned aircraft, autonomous military jeeps, boats, helicopters, suicide drones and well, to be honest, the devil’s list just goes on until you run out of breath. So, lets just keep it simple: it’s electronic warfare, tested on living people, and sold to regimes with zero respect for human rights. Elbit is quite frankly, E for Evil.
A map published on Elbit’s own website reveals that it now has 10 production sites, or offices, in Britain, including a factory in Shenstone, near Lichfield, which manufactures the engines for its killer drones. And, our very own British armed forces are important customers, purchasing £46-million worth of so-called military equipment from these merchants of death in under two years.
Elbit doesn’t particularly hide its capabilities from the public — it actually markets its weaponry as battle-tested, or field-proven; so what does battle-tested even mean? It means how accurately can its weaponry kill a single Palestinian child, or worse, how many unarmed civilians can it kill in one strike to make the art of slaughter as cost-efficient as possible. One shot, two kills; one strike, 100 kills; and so it goes.
And there we have it: Elbit, busily designing its incremental genocide on London’s streets in Holborn, creating its killing munitions in the sleepy village of Shenstone, putting together its “smart” lethal technology in Oldham’s historic Ferranti factory, while the British people, and even some of the work force, unknowingly applaud its contribution to the economy.
E is for Evil — evil contributes to nothing; it serves its own interests; Elbit’s sole purpose is to kill, and kill it does. Period.
#ShutElbitDown