L3Harris: Convert to Peace Work or We Will Shut You Down

On March 19, 2025, five members of Demilitarize Western Massachusetts were arrested for occupying the public lobby of the L3Harris plant in Northampton, Massachusetts, and serving a “people’s warrant” against CEO Chris Kubasik for perpetrating, and profiting from, the genocide in Gaza. As they read a statement noting that L3Harris weapons shipments violate the U.S. Leahy Law and related laws, they threw fake money splotched with red paint on the floor of the L3 lobby.

Their--and our--demand is simple: L3Harris, convert to peace work or shut down!

Like all weapons manufacturers, L3Harris profits from militarism, genocide, and occupation. Incongruously nestled in the luscious green ecology of the Connecticut River Valley, the L3Harris Northampton plant makes submarine periscopes and optical targeting sights for naval vessels. The plant is merely one node in L3Harris’ global weapons empire reaping $19.4 billion in profits in 2023 alone, making it the world’s 12th largest weapons manufacturer.

By allowing L3Harris to operate in our communities, we are all complicit in genocide, occupation, and militarism.

For decades, L3Harris has supplied weapons systems and components used by the Israeli Occupying Forces (IOF, commonly known as the IDF) in Palestine. For example, L3 Combat Propulsion Systems, L3Harris’ former subsidiary, manufactured the engine of the Merkava IV, used by the IOF in its 2006 invasion of Lebanon and the 2012, 2014, and 2021 assaults on Gaza. L3Harris also manufactures components for multiple weapons systems used by the IOF in Gaza, including Boeing’s JDAM (guided bomb) kits, Lockheed Martin’s F-35 warplane, Northrop Grumman’s Sa’ar 5 warships, and ThyssenKrupp’s Sa’ar 6 warships. L3Harris’ webs of violence extend worldwide. In addition to supplying surveillance technology used at the Qalandia, Bethlehem, and Sha’ar Efraim checkpoints in the occupied West Bank, L3Harris manufactures surveillance equipment used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security against immigrants in occupied Turtle Island.

The Demilitarize Western Massachusetts action on March 19, 2025 came 17 months into the Zionist entity’s genocidal assault on Gaza, 75 years after the mass dispossession of Palestinians known as the Nakba, and after nearly a century of the settler-colonial occupation of Palestine. The action came two days after the Zionist entity’s resumption of airstrikes on March 17, which killed over 400 Gazans in a single night, two weeks after the Zionist entity cut off all humanitarian aid to Gaza, and during the largest forced displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank since 1967.

The occupation’s relentless pursuit of annihilation, trauma and maiming, ecocide and scholasticide is unquantifiable. The numbers we recite to tally this genocide--186,000 direct and indirect deaths, 110,000 injured, 1.9 million displaced, 217 journalists and over 1,000 doctors murdered, 85% of schools bombed, healthcare infrastructure obliterated, and over 85,000 tons of bombs dropped—fail to adequately describe the existential and ongoing horrors of occupation and settler-colonial violence in Gaza. As Palestinian poet and organizer Mohammed El-Kurd writes, “Not a corner of our geography is spared, not a generation.”

Yet, occupation and violence have been immensely profitable for L3Harris, revealing capitalism’s grotesque and parasitic capacity to reap value from death and destruction. Like other weapons manufacturers, L3Harris has been the target of an ongoing global campaign for demilitarization and an end to war profiteering. In the past year and a half, Demilitarize Western Mass blockaded the entrance to L3 in October, 2023 and again in June, 2024, demanding that L3 stop arming the genocide. In Brighton, England, Stop L3Harris successfully organized to prevent the weapons manufacturer from expanding; The struggle to permanently shutter the factory is ongoing. Over the past two years, L3Harris factories across Canada have been repeatedly blockaded. These and similar actions follow the 2023 call from Workers in Palestine to “intervene and disrupt the flow of arms that sustain genocide.”

For more than a decade, members of Demilitarize Western Mass have held weekly vigils and street protests and blockades of the Northampton plant’s entrances, imploring L3Harris to convert to life-affirming, rather than life-destroying, work.

By allowing L3Harris to operate in our communities, we are all complicit in genocide, occupation, and militarism. From our position in the imperial core, with war profiteers as our neighbors, it is our duty to do everything in our power to end the genocide and occupation. We hope that this direct action at L3Harris inspires others. As the Secretariat of Student Frameworks in Gaza urged in their March 21 statement, “This must not be a moment of resignation—it must be one of escalation!”