#elbite

[kropotkindersurprise]

August 5, 2024 - Palestine Action used a repurposed prison van to crash through the fences and the gates at the heavily-secured Bristol-based research, development and manufacturing hub for Israel's biggest arms producer, Elbit Systems, where they smashed hundreds of thousands of pounds worh of equipment and merchandise.

In this video you can see activists directly smashing high-tech quadcopters that the Israelis have used over and over to gun down innocent people gathering in hospitals or around humanitarian aid shipments. Israel has slaughtered hundreds of people in this way, a naked, unashamed war crime that kind of disappears among all the other war crimes that Israel commits daily, supported by their unconditional american friends Biden and Harris. [video]

[sayruq]

[probablyasocialecologist]

[cathkaesque]

Relentless direct action has secured another victory in the fight against Israel’s arms trade, as Elbit Systems are forced to sell their ‘Elite KL’ factory in Tamworth.

The company had previously manufactured cooling and power management systems for military vehicles, but was sold on after stating that it faced falling profits and increased security costs resulting from Palestine Action’s efforts. 

After the sale was completed last month, Elite KL’s new owners, listed as Griffin Newco Ltd, confirmed in an email to Palestine Action that they will have nothing to do with the previous owners, Elbit, and have discontinued any arms manufacturing:

“Following the recent acquisition of Elite KL Limited by a UK investment syndicate, the newly appointed board has unanimously agreed to withdraw from all future defence contracts and terminate its association with its former parent company”.

This victory is a direct result of sustained direct action which has sought, throughout Palestine Action’s existence, to make it impossible for Elbit to afford to operate in Britain. Before they sold the enterprise to a private equity syndicate, Elbit had reported that Elite KL operating profits had been slashed by over three-quarters, with Palestine Action responsible: Elbit directly cited the increased expenditure on security they’d been forced to make, and higher supply chain costs they faced.

And these actions did, indeed, cost them. The first action at the site, in November 2020, saw Elite KL’s premises smashed into, the building covered in blood-red paint. Between March and July 2021, the site was put out of action three times by roof-top occupations – drenched red in March 2021, with the factory’s camera systems dismantled, before again being occupied in in May. Another roof-top occupation in July, despite increased security, saw the site forced closed – once again painted blood-red, and with its windows and fixings smashed through.

In February 2022, activists decommissioned the site for weeks – closed off after an occupation that saw over £250,000 of damages caused, the roof tiles removed one-by-one. After this, Elbit erected a security perimeter around the site – but to no avail. One month later, six were arrested after Palestine Action returned to Tamworth – again taking the roof and smashing through, preventing the production of parts for Israel’s military machine.

Elite KL is a ‘specialist thermal management business’. Since the sale, the company focuses on cooling systems for buses and trains, but it had, under Elbit, manufactured these systems for military vehicles. Until December of last year, Elite KL’s website was advertising its military and defence products, and it was known to provide parts for Israel’s deadly Merkava tanks, with export license records demonstrating its provision of ‘ML6a’ components for military ground vehicles to Israel. The company was also known to manufacture crew cooling systems, for the military vests of tank operators.

Elbit Systems itself provides 85% of the drones and land-based military equipment for the Israeli military, along with a wide range of the munitions and armaments currently being used against Gaza’s beseiged population. Its CEO, Bazhalel Machlis, has claimed that the Israeli military has offered the company its thanks for their “crucial” services during the ongoing genocide in Gaza

A Palestine Action spokesperson has stated:

“Each activist who occupied and dismantled Tamworth’s Israeli weapons factory did so in order to bring an end to Israel’s weapons trade, and to end the profiteering from Palestinian repression. Every defeat Elbit faces is a victory for the Palestinian people.

Kicking Elbit out of Tamworth shows once again that direct action is a necessary tactic. It is one which must be utilised and amplified in the face of the Gaza genocide.”

[mirkobloom77]

BREAKING: Palestine Action permanently shut Elbit down in Tamworth!

Sources: Al Jazeera (first three screenshots) and @Pal_action (last screenshot)

[ahaura]

(Dec. 1)

Article: Recruiters Drop Elbit Systems after Palestine Action Campaign

After weeks of action, the sole recruiters for the British operations of Israel’s largest weapons company, Elbit Systems, have confirmed via email to Palestine Action that they ended their association with Elbit on the evening of the 29th November. For two months, activists in the Palestine Action network had disrupted iO Associates at their premises across the country, to impede their ability to recruit roles for Israel’s war machine. 

iO Associates recruited the likes of engineers, software developers, and finance staff for positions across the sites of the British branch of Israel’s largest weapons company, Elbit Systems. Elbit are the largest supplier to the occupation military, providing the vast majorities of its drones, munitions, surveillance gear, and parts for its tanks, jets, and precision missiles. From Britain specifically, they manufacture parts for Israel’s killer drones, along with weapons sights, tank parts, and more, exporting these technologies to Israel in great volume yearly. This is the nature of the business that IO was Associates with, and were IO Associates biggest client.

In response to their facilitation of Elbit’s criminal activities, iO’s offices were stormed and occupied in Manchester on the 1st September, and again on the 7th October. Activists painted iO offices red on October 9th in London, Reading, and Manchester. They were forced to vacate their Manchester offices from the 11th October, after the premises were also stormed by the Youth Front For Palestine, and then finally targeted in Edinburgh twice, on the 11th and 17th October. After being forced to vacate their offices, having their online presence tarnished, and (as confirmed to us by former employees) losing their staff who resigned in opposition to their arms trade partnership, iO Associates have finally cut ties with Israel’s weapons trade. 

This is part of an expansive strategy by Palestine Action, by disrupting the suppliers and facilitators of Elbit’s presence in Britain. It has seen Elbit’s accountants (Edwards), haulage providers (Kuehne + Nagel), landlords (JLL) and many other complicit companies targeted, alongside the hundreds of actions at Elbit sites themselves, continuing to resist the presence of Elbit warmongers in Britain, and constantly reminding those associated with them that they have blood on their hands.

As a result of iO Associates dropping Elbit Systems, the recruiters have been removed as a target of Palestine Action’s campaign. All targets who still facilitate Israel’s weapons trade are listed on elbitsites.uk

[commiepinkofag]

Activists protest against the bombing of Gaza blockade the entrance to the Instro Precision factory in Sandwich, Kent, a subsidiary of Israeli owned Elbit Systems, 26 October 2023 [📷 Guy Smallman]

[decolonize-the-everything]

In response to the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people, Operation Enduring Freedom officially began 7 October 2001 with American and British bombing strikes against al-Qaeda and Taliban forces in Afghanistan. Initially, the Taliban was removed from power and al-Qaeda was seriously crippled, but forces continually dealt with a stubborn Taliban insurgency, infrastructure rebuilding, and corruption among the Afghan National Army, Afghan National Police, and Afghan Border Police.

On 2 May 2011, U.S. Navy SEALS (Sea, Air, Land) launched a raid on Osama Bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, during Operation Neptune Spear, killing the al-Qaeda leader and mastermind of the September 11th terrorist attacks. Operation Enduring Freedom officially ended on 28 December 2014, although coalition forces remained on the ground to assist with training Afghan security forces. The United States Armed Forces completed its withdrawal from Afghanistan on 30 August 2021, marking the end of the 2001-2021 war.

Walz and the mayors of Minneapolis and St. Paul said Saturday morning that the vast majority of those who were arrested Friday night were outside agitators who were not from the Twin Cities region. Walz called those people a group "bent on adapting their tactics to make it as difficult as possible" to maintain order. "Let's be very clear: The situation in Minneapolis is no longer in any way about the murder of George Floyd. It is about attacking civil society, instilling fear and disrupting our great cities," Walz said. He said he had mobilized more than 700 National Guard soldiers on Friday night, and that after television cameras found large gatherings of protesters with no police presence at all, he was authorizing the head of the state's National Guard to fully mobilize on Saturday.

Contrary to activists’ calls to defund the police, the bill provides over $3 million in new funding for these initiatives and extends an existing $6 million in annual training funds until 2024.

[...]Dropped from the bill were DFL provisions that would have turned over prosecutions involving deadly force to the attorney general’s office and restored voting rights to some felons.

[...]Civil rights lawyer, activist and former Minneapolis mayoral candidate Nekima Levy Armstrong called the bill “watered-down legislation” and “a slap in the face, especially to Black residents in the state of Minnesota.” Activists weren’t the only ones disheartened. Andy Skoogman, executive director of the Minnesota Chiefs of Police Association, told the Minneapolis Star Tribune that he wanted to see greater changes to arbitration as well. And Julia Decker, police director for the ACLU of Minnesota, told the Star Tribune that she was disappointed the bill didn’t require an independent prosecutor like the attorney general to handle cases like Floyd’s.

Did you know that the Minnesota State Board of Investments holds around 10,000 shares, worth a whopping $1.2 million, in Israel’s largest weapons company, Elbit Systems — the world’s largest exporter of drones?

Elbit has been involved in all of the major Israeli assaults in Gaza, contracts with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security for, among other things, a virtual surveillance wall at the U.S.-Mexico border, and markets its equipment to governments around the world as “battle-tested” (on the Palestinian civilians). Elbit drones constantly fly over Gaza, providing surveillance targeting for military assaults and Israeli snipers that hit peaceful protestors.

What are the odds that the drones over Minneapolis were Elbit drones, especially given that Metropolitan State University, located in the Minneapolis–St. Paul, metropolitan area, partners with Elbit on a state of the art cybersecurity training facility? A number of Democrats in Congress have written to the Department of Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf expressing “grave concern” over the use of drones over Minneapolis on May 29th to “surveil and intimidate” protestors.

Pro-Palestine protesters have been demanding that the state of Minnesota divest its financial stakes in Israeli companies and bonds, which they say are worth around $119m. Activists have also for years been urging the state to repeal its anti-boycott legislation, which forces state contractors to sign a pledge that they will not engage in a boycott of Israel. The law was first passed in 2017, prior to Walz becoming governor. However, he has made no moves to try to repeal the law. In December, a group of 1,000 Palestinian solidarity activists in Minnesota disrupted Walz's Christmas party, demanding the governor commit to divesting from Israel. “Governor Walz has ignored our calls for the divestment of taxpayer dollars and public pension funds from Israeli apartheid. But he will never stop hearing from us or seeing us until he finally ends Minnesota's complacency in genocide,” Christine Hauschildt of the Minnesota Anti-War Committee said back in December.

"I don't know of a single educator who wants our money invested in weapons companies, and in bombing school buildings in racist wars,” Drake Myers, a member of the Minnesota Anti-War Committee who is also active in the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers, told the panel. Max Vash, who has a Palestinian son, spoke out against the state’s holdings in Elbit Systems, an international defense and aerospace contractor based in Israel. “You have the power and the responsibility to ensure that neither my son, nor any other Palestinian person experiences these horrors,” Vash said. Lucia Wilkes Smith, a longtime member of Mothers Against Military Madness, said the BDS movement — Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions — shouldn’t be written off as antisemitic. Mike McDonald of Veterans for Peace didn’t address Israel directly but said the Board of Investment shouldn’t have money in defense contractors that are arming nations across the planet. He asserted the state has $800 million in holdings in companies that make weapons of warfare. It’s not the first time the investment board has heard from people calling for divestment from Israel. In 2015, activists unsuccessfully pressed the board to sell off its Israeli government bonds. This time around, activists look to build support based on outrage over thousands of Palestinian civilian casualties in Gaza in the war between Israel and the Hamas militant group. That fighting was sparked by a series of coordinated surprise attacks by Hamas on Israel Oct. 7, in which 1,200 Israelis and foreigners were slain and 250 others were taken hostage. Since the war began, the Gaza Health Ministry has reported more than 13,300 Palestinians have been killed, roughly two-thirds of them women and minors. The board members — Walz, Simon, and Blaha — listened and took notes, but didn’t take any action in response to the request.

.....gonna wait to hear more but I'm not super impressed thus far.

I don't give a shit what your domestic policy is when you're actively making money off of a genocide started by the "war on terror" you personally helped start.

[soon-palestine]

the Australian government signed $ 917 million weapons contract with elbit system february this year

[kropotkindersurprise]

July 15, 2024 - Palestine Action activists infiltrated the factory of the company Hydrafeed in Milton Keynes, UK, which supplies machinery to Israeli weapons firm Elbit Systems. They used a rope ladder from the roof of Hydrafeed's factory to break into the building, where dozens of activists smashed machines and equipment, before leaving undetected.

Hydrafeed’s machinery is used to produce arms by Elbit’s Instro Precision factory, which has had over 80 separate licenses to export weapons to Israel since 2016.

Through direct action, the activists have prevented Hydrafeed’s ability to provide Elbit Systems with a “rapid response for breakdowns, repairs, spares and replacement parts,” effectively disrupting the supply of machines used to arm Israel’s war of extermination against Gaza.

A Palestine Action spokesperson said: “Anyone who remains a partner of the Israeli weapons maker has done a serious moral and financial miscalculation as Palestine Action will break every link of Elbit’s supply chain, which involves targeting Elbit’s suppliers and of course, shutting Elbit down. We will not allow any institution to continue facilitating the bloody massacres of the Palestinian people.” [link]

[sayruq]

[probablyasocialecologist]

[nando161mando]

BREAKING: Actionists use a prison van to crash inside the Bristol-based research, development and manufacturing hub for Israel's biggest arms producer.

By dismantling machinery and weapons, they directly intervened in Elbit's genocidal supply chain.

[theinconvenientlifestyle]

middleeasteye

Police in the UK have used powers under the Terrorism Act to detain six pro-Palestine activists involved in a direct action protest against an Israel-owned arms factory.

Last week, members of Palestine Action were arrested after crashing a modified prison van into an Elbit Systems factory in the Filton area of Bristol.

Video footage shared by the group showed activists spraying red paint and using sledgehammers to damage machinery inside the facility.

Under the Terrorism Act, police can detain individuals for up to seven days, with the possibility of extending this period by an additional 14 days without formal charges.

In response to the arrests, dozens of pro-Palestine activists staged a protest outside Hammersmith Police Station on Sunday, where some of the detainees were taken after their arrest.

A spokesperson for Palestine Action described the use of the Terrorism Act as "unprecedented" and condemned the police for attempting to discredit their activists.

Elbit Systems opened its Filton site in Bristol in May 2021 with a £9m ($11.5m) investment. The facility focuses on advanced manufacturing and the development of high-tech military systems, including drones and surveillance technology.

Palestine Action has been targeting Elbit Systems sites across the UK for years due to the company's role as one of Israel's largest arms manufacturers.

Elbit's weapons have been used in conflicts with Palestinians, including in the ongoing war in Gaza, where Israel faces accusations of genocide at the International Court of Justice.

Elbit supplies 85 percent of Israel's military drones and land-based equipment. It also exports drones, aircraft components, military electronics and other military systems to Britain.

[sophia-zofia]

WHY TARGET ELBIT? Every hour, we receive thoughtful, well-aimed suggestions or inquiries about alternate targets for direct action: political offices, Embassies, NGOs, other weapons companies, intersections, etc., all of which have clear ties to the Zionist occupation of Palestine, and the ongoing genocide in Gaza. It is right and just to rebel and act boldly in all places and moments, with all tactics, without a doubt. The more chaos ensues in the halls and courtyards of the normalizers and genocidaires, the better. But focus in targeting, from a strategic perspective, is the most effective route, which is why our campaign is singularly focused on Elbit Systems, Israel’s *largest* weapons producer.

Palestine Action US has been given the privilege of carrying the banner of one of the Western world’s most successful grassroots direct action campaigns. Palestine Action UK, founded over three years ago by a Palestinian-Iraqi woman, has successfully shut down two of Elbit’s UK locations, permanently, and got HSBC to divest from Elbit. Their pressure has escalated over the years into a constant, relentless campaign, to the point where we see disruptions at Elbit in the UK nearly every day. Since October 7th, that pressure has only grown, and also exploded into the US, Canada, Australia, and everywhere Elbit is headquartered. In that time, while other weapons firms’ profits have skyrocketed, Elbit shares have taken a nosedive.

If one wishes to help build a city, one must first build a house, so others might see how it was built. Like other historic campaigns which have isolated the enablers of injustice, we start with Elbit, we shut down their operations, and we strike fear in the hearts of their staff and their investors. Once Elbit Systems of America has been vanquished, we will have a replicable model for targeted direct action, which might be used to target every single conspirator in the occupation of Palestine and the subjugation of the colonized world. Further, we absolutely uphold the necessity of mass demonstrations, marches, and softer forms of direct action. These are all elements of the elaborate tapestry of resistance, but marching alone isn’t enough. Thousands have been arrested in the US for civil disobedience since Oct 7; most of these arrests have been purely symbolic. Imagine if these bodies were blockading arms shipments, dismantling weapons companies, and actually threatening capital.

Power has shown it doesn’t move, even when millions have taken the streets, unless their profits are directly affected, or ruling class fear abounds. Beware of those who wish to co-opt the language of Direct Action for the benefit of their own opportunism and brand-building. Beware of “Shut it Down,” actions which are little more than theatrical performances, meant to contain the revolutionary instinct. For those who don’t live near a primary Elbit Systems location, there ARE targets near you. Bank of New York Mellon is Elbit System’s primary investor, along with being the fiscal sponsor for the Friends of the IDF, a non-profit which allows US citizens to materially support the Zionist Occupation Army. We have officially put Bank of New York Mellon on notice as a target of Palestine Action, and they are in major cities across the country and across the globe. Use this map to find Elbit Systems or Bank of New York Mellon locations near you, connect with Palestine Action US, and build an affinity group today.

Together, we become ungovernable, Together, we defeat the Zionist beast, beginning with Elbit Systems.

[lesbiansandgayssupporttheminers]

Blockading factories is probably one of the most effective thing people in the UK (and elsewhere in the Western world) can do to support Palestine right now.

Donations that will actually reach the ground are also good.

I'm not saying marches and other actions aren't worthwhile- I do think they are. If a senior UK politician called for a ceasefire, that would be something. And obviously if we could persuade the UK government to ban the export of arms and military parts to Israel, that would be huge.

But in the meantime, if we can stop arms from being built, if we can slow down the Israeli war machine at all, that may save lives.

And the more people who turn up to these actions, the better- this makes them safer and more effective.

Also, for transport workers, especially in ports, if we can stop this stuff leaving the country, that is incredibly valuable too.