Palestine Action is nearly four months old, and since its launch, it has been determined to shut Israel’s UK chain of arms factories down. Collectively, it has targeted Elbit Systems and its landlords LaSalle over 40 times, from individual actions to coordinated protests to bigger rooftop occupations.
In this short space of time, Israel has used Elbit weaponry to bomb Gaza over 14 times. The Palestinian death and injury toll has risen for every week that Elbit has been allowed to continue manufacturing, and the toll will continue to grow.
Elbit is a company designing equipment to cost-efficiently terminate life. Its sole purpose is to end people’s existence and preserve soldiers’ safety and guilt with autonomous load-carrying military vehicles of every kind: from water, land to sky — killing without a conscience.
Israel insists, celebrates in fact, that its revolutionary unpiloted drone warfare is a new ‘humanitarian’ form of attack. Such a claim is a preposterous insult to the thousands of Palestinian civilians already dead: and further more, it makes no attempt to acknowledge the tens of 1000s injured, disabled, traumatised and grieving families who have survived Israel’s vicious ‘revolutionary humanitarian’ assaults.
Our movement’s success is still a work in progress and although we have cost Elbit in damages, clean-ups, reputation and factory closures, we have not yet reached the tip of the iceberg. We have barely left the shoreline.
Elbit Systems of America and its subsidiaries have operational facilities in Fort Worth, Texas, San Antonio, Texas, Merrimack, New Hampshire, Talladega, Alabama, Roanoke, Virginia and Boca Raton and Florida. They also have smaller subsidiaries and investee companies in Israel, Europe, Latin America and Asia-Pacific. In the UK, they have 10 production sites, from Kent, Tamworth, Oldham, Lichfield, North Wales to Bristol and across to London — that’s more offices than the British Arts Council: sad, don’t you think? Frankly, we are up against a global Goliath, armed with just perseverance and paint. It’s a vulnerable, lonely battle in “a wide field of war cruelties” — 99 red balloons in the path of an indiscriminate nuclear blast.
Elbit’s survival, however, belongs to us. We either ignore it exists, or ignite a global battle against it. We walk passed the locked door, or we kick it down. We give it air to breath, or we asphyxiate it. We can choose. And despite our thousands of followers and our growing membership, we must all choose at the same time, because an army must charge simultaneously if it is to barrage the enemy effectively. Synchronise your watches. The war against war begins soon. And we need everyone.
#ShutElbitDown