Activists shut down UK arms factories ahead of a month of protests
Protesters bar the entrance to GE Aviation Systems in Cheltenham, March 2024
Katherine Hearst reports in Middle East Eye on 20 March 2024:
Hundreds of workers and protesters blockaded arms factories in England and Scotland on Wednesday that produce components for F-35 fighter jets, currently being used by Israel to bomb Gaza.
The protesters – including health workers, teachers, hospitality workers, academics and artists, who are members of a wide range of trade unions – are taking the action under the banner Workers for a Free Palestine, in order to disrupt the flow of arms to Israel.
Around 15 percent of the components of all F-35s is produced in Britain. According to the US producer Lockheed Martin, “the fingerprints of British ingenuity can be found on dozens of the aircraft’s key components”.
Both of the sites targeted in Wednesday’s action, GE Aviation Systems in Cheltenham and Leonardo UK in Edinburgh, manufacture components for the jets.
The blockade marks the beginning of a month of disruptive action to demand the UK end all its arms sales to Israel and support an immediate and permanent ceasefire.
In a statement, the group said the action was in response to Israel’s impending invasion of Rafah, the city where the majority of Gaza’s population have been forced to take refuge, and calls by Palestinian unionists to workers around the world to help stop their governments’ complicity in war crimes being committed by Israel.
The group added that the action was also “a defiant response to the criminalisation of protest in the UK and the misrepresentation of the campaign for a free Palestine as extremist.
“We’re demanding our government immediately halt arms supplies to Israel before it launches this offensive in Rafah using British-made bombs. But we are not waiting for this genocide-appeasing prime minister to act,” Zad, a housing support worker and union member taking part in the blockade, was quoted as saying in the press release.
“We’re taking action ourselves to stop the flow of arms from Britain to Israel before it launches an illegal assault on Rafah, which the United Nations has made clear will cause catastrophic levels of death and destruction, and plunge Gaza into famine.”
“We’ve organised these arms factory blockades in response to that call to disrupt the Israeli war machine and try to end Britain’s complicity in the genocide being perpetrated by Israel,” Salma, a trade union member of the group, told Middle East Eye.