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israel occupation
L3Harris: Convert to Peace Work or We Will Shut You Down
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.
Mar 26, 2025
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!”
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UN Human Rights Chief Decries 'War Crime' of Rapidly Expanding Israeli Settlements
"The West Bank is already in crisis. Yet, settler violence and settlement-related violations have reached shocking new levels, and risk eliminating any practical possibility of establishing a viable Palestinian state."
Mar 08, 2024
The United Nations human rights chief on Friday condemned the record expansion of illegal Israeli apartheid settlements in the occupied West Bank including East Jerusalem and the "dramatic increase" in violence against Palestinians by Israeli occupation forces and settlers, developments that are occurring while the world's attention is focused on the Gaza genocide.
"Reports this week that Israel plans to build a further 3,476 settler homes in Maale Adumim, Efrat, and Kedar fly in the face of international law," U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk said in a statement responding to the far-right Israeli government's latest settlement expansion scheme.
Türk submitted a report to the U.N. Human Rights Council affirming that Israel is violating the Fourth Geneva Convention by "effectively transferring the civilian population of Israel to the occupied territory while displacing the Palestinian population from their land."
"Such transfers amount to a war crime that may engage the individual criminal responsibility of those involved," the report states.
The drastic acceleration in Israeli settlements is worsening long-standing patterns of oppression, violence & discrimination against Palestinians, says @UNHumanRights report published today
— UN Human Rights (@UNHumanRights) March 8, 2024
Both the occupation and settlements are illegal under international law. Israel conquered the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights in Syria in 1967 and has occupied the territories ever since. Although Israeli troops withdrew from Gaza and dismantled Jewish settlements there in 2005, Israel maintains a crippling physical and economic stranglehold that has become a total siege since October 7, when the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched a genocidal war in response to Hamas-led attacks.
The U.N. report notes that approximately 24,300 new homes in existing Israeli settlements in the West Bank were advanced between November 2022 to the end of October 2023, "the highest on record since monitoring began in 2017."
According to the publication:
The policies of the current government of Israel appear aligned, to an unprecedented extent, with the goals of the Israeli settler movement to expand long-term control over the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and to steadily integrate this occupied territory into the state of Israel...
During the reporting period, there was a dramatic increase in the intensity, severity, and regularity of Israeli settler violence against Palestinians, which is accelerating the displacement of Palestinians from their land, in circumstances that may amount to forcible transfer. This violence further spiked following the attacks on October 7, 2023.
"The West Bank is already in crisis. Yet, settler violence and settlement-related violations have reached shocking new levels, and risk eliminating any practical possibility of establishing a viable Palestinian state," said Türk.
According to the report, Israeli occupation forces and settlers have killed at least 413 Palestinians—including 107 children—while wounding more than 4,600 others in the West Bank since October 7. Palestinians killed 15 Israelis including four soldiers in the occupied territories during the same period.
In one of the most recent incidents, Israeli troops fatally shot 10-year-old Amr Mohammad Ghaleb Najar in the head while he sat in the front seat of his father's car with his younger brother as they drove through the village of Burin on Monday. Soldiers then opened fire on Palestinians trying to rescue the child, wounding two other people.
Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who also heads the Civil Administration—the governing body in the occupied territories—said this week that 18,515 new housing units have been approved in the settlements over the past year.
"The enemies try to harm and weaken us, but we will continue to build and be built up in this land," the far-right minister said on social media.
The administration of U.S. President Joe Biden, which has sanctioned a handful of extremist settlers, last month reversed a Trump-era policy shift under which the United States no longer officially viewed Israeli settlements as illegal. The U.S. State Department first declared the settlements unlawful in 1978.
"Our administration maintains a firm opposition to settlement expansion," U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said last month. "And in our judgment, this only weakens—it doesn't strengthen—Israel's security."
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Implications for ICC? SCOTUS Jerusalem Decision Shows Limits of Israel Lobbies
Jun 09, 2015
It has been the position of the US presidents for decades that the status of Jerusalem in international law is unsettled. That is why the US embassy is in Tel Aviv, and why US passports showing the place of birth as Jerusalem just list the name of the city without indicating a country. The Supreme Court on Monday upheld the president's right to make this determination, in a 6-3 decision. Justice Kennedy, writing for the majority, found that Congress was not given by the constitution any role in recognizing other countries (or parts of other countries), and that in contrast the constitution gives the president this prerogative.
The issue began with a 2002 law passed by Congress instructing the executive to let Americans born in Jerusalem list Israel as their birthplace. The State Department refused to comply, denying Menachem Zivotofsky a passport that listed his birthplace as Jerusalem, Israel. His family sued under the 2002 law. The Supreme Court just struck down that law as unconstitutional.
No one is bringing up that a lot of Palestinian-Americans born in Jerusalem would like their passports to read "Jerusalem, Palestine".
The law was pushed by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a powerful umbrella group for thousands of pro-Israel lobbies. These lobbies in turn play a major role in funding political campaigns, so that AIPAC has gained outsized influence on Congress. Jewish-Americans are less than two percent of the population, but those who strenuously support Israel on a "my country right or wrong" basis can usually get their way on congressional votes. They are aided, often, by evangelical Christians and also by old-time liberals who grew up before Israel entered its current Apartheid phase. Prominent right-Zionist congressional representatives have attempted to use Congress to push the US to recognize Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem.
The Israel lobbies have never been as strong with regard to the presidency or the courts as they are with regard to Congress, however. The Supreme Court decision showed the limits of their power. The reason this point is important is that the Israeli occupation of Palestine is increasingly being litigated not in national legislatures, where a lobby can sway votes, but in courtrooms. If the occupation and its Apartheid policies ever go to the International Criminal Court, the ICC will certainly rule against Israel. It already has, in a 2004 advisory opinion. Since the ICC is respected by signatories of the 2002 Rome Statue, in turn, that bodies ruling would be widely influential, including in Europe.
SCOTUS just showed what happens to such political campaigns for support of colonialism when they go to a court in a country with a rule of law.
The United Nations General Assembly in 1947 put forward a partition plan for the British Mandate of Palestine, giving the one-third of the population that was Jewish far more of the territory than the 6% it actually owned. The UN Security Council never signed off on the plan, so its status in international law is unclear. It was in any case overtaken by the 1948 war in which Israel took even more territory and consolidated borders far beyond what the General Assembly stipulated. But the UNGA envisaged that Jerusalem would be an international city not dominated by either Israelis or Palestinians.
In 1967 Israel unilaterally overturned the UN partition plan entirely, grabbing the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and Jerusalem and thereafter settling them and integrating them into Israel, while keeping millions of subject Palestinians stateless and without rights.
The rest of the world sees the status of Jerusalem as unsettled and as something that will be determined by final status peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians. In the meantime, Israel has illegally annexed all of Jerusalem, surrounded it with squatter settlements built on stolen Palestinian land, and found pretexts for expelling large numbers of Palestinians from their homes in East Jerusalem. The UN Security Council passed several resolutions on Jerusalem roundly condemning Israeli annexation. It should be remembered that one of the justifications given by the Neocons for attacking Iraq was that it had ignored UNSC resolutions. UNSC on Jerusalem:
" ' Adopted by the Security Council at its 2245th meeting, on 20 August 1980 (14-0, US abstention)
The Security Council,
Recalling its resolution 476 (1980),
Reaffirming again that the acquisition of territory by force is inadmissible,
Deeply concerned over the enactment of a "basic law" in the Israeli Knesset proclaiming a change in the character and status of the Holy City of Jerusalem, with its implications for peace and security,
Noting that Israel has not complied with resolution 476 (1980),
Reaffirming its determination to examine practical ways and means, in accordance with the relevant provisions of the Charter of the United Nations, to secure the full implementation of its resolution 476 (1980), in the event of non-compliance by Israel,
1. Censures in the strongest terms the enactment by Israel of the "basic law" on Jerusalem and the refusal to comply with relevant Security Council resolutions;
2. Affirms that the enactment of the "basic law" by Israel constitutes a violation of international law and does not affect the continued application of the Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, of 12 August 1949, in the Palestinian and other Arab territories occupied since June 1967, including Jerusalem;
3. Determines that all legislative and administrative measures and actions taken by Israel, the occupying Power, which have altered or purport to alter the character and status of the Holy City of Jerusalem, and in particular the recent "basic law" on Jerusalem, are null and void and must be rescinded forthwith;
4. Affirms also that this action constitutes a serious obstruction to achieving a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East;
5. Decides not to recognize the "basic law" and such other actions by Israel that, as a result of this law, seek to alter the character and status of Jerusalem and calls upon:
(a) All Member States to accept this decision;
(b) Those States that have established diplomatic missions at Jerusalem to withdraw such missions from the Holy City;
6. Requests the Secretary-General to report to the Security Council on the implementation of the present resolution before 15 November 1980;
7. Decides to remain seized of this serious situation.' "
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