Students are going on strike for Palestine – with the picket line outside ELBIT in Bristol

School children, university and college students, teachers, professors, and parents, babies, toddlers, and supporters – including Queers for Palestine solidarity group – will gather outside Elbit Systems UK to stand with the people of Palestine and Lebanon and against Israel’s ongoing genocide. It’s the latest School Strike for Palestine.

The strike will take place from 10am-12pm on Thursday 10 October 2024 outside Elbit’s Aztec West office in Bristol.

School Strike for Palestine

Marking a year of Israel’s genocidal bombardment of Gaza as well as its recent and ongoing bombardment of Lebanon, there will be speeches, songs, poems, and children’s activities. Many children and young people will return to their school or university for afternoon classes.

School Strike for Palestine is a collective of students, campaigners, and parents, supported by Stop the War coalition. The school and university strike has been called as part of a national day of action where students and employees will walk out of their schools and workplaces in solidarity with people in Palestine and Lebanon. Other cities involved include London and Glasgow.

This school strike will be the eighth in Bristol since last November, previously held outside Bristol City Council offices. Each walk-out has all called for a ceasefire and an end to the killing of Palestinian children in Gaza and the West Bank. For the first time the action is being held outside Elbit UK’s headquarters.

Missing school and university to protest for Palestine and Lebanon at the site of an Israeli arms company is an empowering action for children and young people to get involved in when so many feel helpless, angry and fearful at what they are seeing.

At previous school strikes young speakers have spoken of Britain’s complicity, their disillusionment with politicians, and their solidarity with Palestinian children.

Shutting down Elbit in Bristol

Elbit Systems UK is the British arm of Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer, Elbit Systems. Striking outside its national headquarters is one of the most tangible ways to voice discontent with Bristol and Britain’s role in Israel’s crimes against humanity. The company manufactures weapons marketed as ‘battle-proven’ on Palestinians.

It produces some 85% of Israel’s military drone fleet and land-based equipment, among other weapons that have been used to kill thousands of people in Gaza this year alone, as well as in previous bombardments of the Strip.

Elbit UK also has a weapons factory in nearby Filton, opened in July 2023 by Israeli ambassador Tzipi Hotevely, accompanied by former Conservative MP for Filton and Bradley Stoke Jack Lopresti. The British government continues to award contracts to the company and grant it export licences for the selling of weapons to Israel.

Both the company headquarters and factory are common sites of direct action and protest in Bristol. Palestine Action and other activists have long made the demand to Shut Elbit Down. Ten activists, dubbed the Filton10, were jailed for causing damage to the Filton factory in August.

Elbit UK headquarters and factory are located near other companies that manufacture parts for weapons supplied to Israel, such as Aerospace and Rolls Royce, with both the constituency’s previous MP and the current Labour MP Claire Hazelgrove supportive of the industry. A secondary school is five minutes walk away from Elbit UK’s headquarters.

Conservative estimates suggest 42,000 people, including over 16,500 children, have been killed in Gaza by Israeli forces since 7^th October 2023, the true figure is thought to be far higher and does not include the thousands trapped in the rubble.

Israel’s genocidal assaults continue

Before 7 October, Gaza’s two million strong population had been living under a land, sea and air blockade imposed by Israeli forces since 2007. This year Palestinians marked 76 years since the nakba (catastrophe) – the forcible expulsion of Palestinians from their land to make way for the settler-colonial state of Israel.

This year has also marked 57 years of Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank, since 1967. Palestinian citizens within the state of Israel (sometimes referred to as historical Palestine or 1948 Palestine) are routinely treated as second class citizens and denied many rights on the grounds of their nationality.

On 17 and 18 September, Israel drastically escalated its conflict with Lebanese armed resistance group Hezbollah by concealing explosives in pagers meant for Hezbollah members, and on 23 September began its bombing campaign in the country.

So far some 2,000 Lebanese people have been killed. That number is expected to rise as Israel has not agreed to a ceasefire. According to Israel’s Jerusalem Post, ‘bunker-busting bombs’ made by Elbit (MPR-500) were used by the Israeli Air Force on 27 September to bomb Hezbollah’s headquarters in Lebanon’s capital city of Beirut, as well as targeting ‘nearby missile launch sites’.

School Strike for Palestine: the demands

The group Bristol School Strike for Palestine said in a statement that its demands were:

To shut Elbit down. Somerset Council leased the building to Elbit until August, when it then sold it to an unknown buyer for an unknown sum of money. That Somerset Council reveal the name of the new owner and that they evict Elbit immediately.

That Bristol, Somerset and South Gloucestershire councils end their complicity in the Gaza genocide and Lebanon invasion by ending the lease on any property hosting weapons makers, and that they make the South West a hostile place for weapons dealers and arms fairs.

That the British government halt all arms sales to Israel.

An immediate ceasefire in Gaza and Lebanon.

An end to targeting children in airstrikes and sniper fire in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon.

An end to censoring Palestine voices and Palestine solidarity in all academic institutions.

Featured image supplied