As we start the new year under a third national UK lockdown, many of us are just trying to keep ourselves safe from the British Government’s cock-handed response to the pandemic. As the vaccine is slowly rolled out across some parts of the UK, Israel’s “fantastic” distribution has simply exposed its active Apartheid regime, by denying Palestinians the opportunity to be ‘saved’.
Despite the pandemic causing Palestine, what has been described as, a ‘lockdown within a lockdown’ (hash-tagged #Covid_19MeetsOccupation), the Israeli army unrelentingly bombed 300 locations in Gaza during the course of 2020. While the world locked down to combat an international pandemic, Israel continued to bomb people out of house and home; and it largely went unnoticed, or it was, more to the point, obstinately dismissed.
Elbit Systems factories, such as UAV Engines in Shenstone, have continued to be operational: supplying drones, ammunition, military equipment and murderous hardware. Israel’s desire to keep developing, testing and annihilating Palestinians [or selling its weaponry to India to murderously oppress the Kashmiris] can only be explained by presuming the apartheid state has declared itself covid-exempt in the UK. Funny that! It’s not covid-exempt in Israel.
In short, we have a moral duty to speak out for the people of Palestine and protect them as fellow human beings. The UK’s complicity with Israel’s apartheid regime has hardly lessened or been tempered down in the face of an ever-mutating and mushrooming pandemic; if anything, it’s allyship has become even more fused, with a new £123 million deal to co-build a British Naval submarine school. Really? Perhaps this was agreed on a Zoom call; we’ll never know.
If those employed by Elbit Systems are considered “essential workers” — and let’s face it, profiting off the backs of the murder of innocents during lockdown is “indispensable”, then it’s also essential activists continue to confront this industry of death. Elbit is not an indiscriminate virus; it’s working on a pandemic of systematic ethnic cleansing and brutal oppression — both result in much the same devastation, but, one is avoidable.
We continue to call for those who are truly committed to international solidarity, to continue our struggle against the UK’s complicity in Israel’s Apartheid regime, and our fight to #ShutElbitDown — there is no vaccine for Elbit, but with people power, pressure, persistence and perseverance, we can win this one.