Seventy-six years since the horror of Israel’s violent mass expulsion of Palestinians from their homes and land, direct action group acts against factories producing weapons for the occupiers
On today’s seventy-sixth anniversary of the Nakba (‘catastrophe’) in which Israeli militias violently forced around 800,000 Palestinians from their homes and lands, UK pro-Palestine direct action group Palestine Action (PA) has hit several targets across the country.
At the Elbit Systems subsidiary UAV Engines Ltd (UEL) factory in Shenstone, PA activists from locked on and used vehicles to block the plant’s gates and prevent delivery vehicles and workers from entering. At Teledyne Defence & Space (TDS) in Shipley, activists are occupying and dismantling the roof of the factory to bring operations to a halt.
PA says that the UEL factory is a crucial part of Israel’s war machine because it is owned by Israel’s largest weapons firm, Elbit — which provides most of Israel’s military drone fleet, designing and producing engines to power Elbit’s drones, which are used for both the surveillance and bombing of targets during the ongoing genocide.
At Teledyne, activists began taking it apart to render the factory inoperable, halting the production of key components for missile systems – missile filters – that the firm exports to Israel. The American arms maker has often boasted of its involvement with missile products procured by Israel, including the AGM-Harpoon, AIM-120 AMRAAM, and AGM-114 Hellfire missiles – the latter reportedly used by Israel to strike Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza. The site also produces parts fitted in F-35 Fighter jets, such as the Phobos ESM System used in the AN/APG-81 AESA radar (listed as ‘radar warning receiver’ on their radar components page).
In 1948, Israeli militias destroyed more than five hundred towns villages, massacring over thirteen thousand people – including entire families. This started a process of dispossession and ethnic cleansing, which culminated in the ongoing genocide being perpetrated on Palestinian civilians by Israel since last October, killing well over forty thousand people and, by some estimates, as many as a hundred thousand, overwhelmingly women and children, and driving almost two million from their homes.
A Palestine Action spokesperson said:
It is a common phrase by Palestinians to say: the Nakba is not an event but a process. And just like the actions of Israel today were set in motion by the Nakba, so too was Britain’s complicity.
The Zionist militias which perpetrated the catastrophe were trained by British soldiers, and today we see history repeat when Britain allows the companies we have targeted today to continue with their business backing brutality whilst Israel butchers Palestinians en masse. This is a crime, and one we fully intend to stop. As we have always said: we won’t stop till the Nakba does.
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