500 People Having Written to Brighton & Hove Councillors Demanding That They Don’t Grant L3Harris Planning Permission to Help Israel Commit Genocide

On Saturday in Brighton 300 people held a demonstration at The Level and then marked 2 miles to an out of the way arms factory owned by L3 Harris on Brighton’s Moulsecoomb Estate.

 Previously the factory was called EDO-MBM. It too supplied weaponry to Israel. It was the subject of a major campaign ten years ago and also a famous trial in which all the protesters, who had caused over £¼ million damage  were acquitted.

The trial was presided over by an extremely sympathetic Judge Bathhurst Norman, whose summing up, as the Guardian reported, quoted favourably

the testimony by Caroline Lucas, the Green MP for Brighton Pavilion, that “all democratic paths had been exhausted” before the activists embarked on their action.

Bathhurst Norman, who was born in Haifa during the British Mandate, was later reprimanded by the judicial authorities, after a Zionist complaint, for the sympathy he had shown with the defendants.

The Jewish Chronicle was certainly not amused. It reported that

That case became notorious following the comments of Judge George Bathurst-Norman. He was formally reprimanded by the Office for Judicial Complaints after telling the Hove Crown Court jury: “You may well think that hell on earth would not be an understatement of what the Gazans suffered at that time [during Operation Cast Lead].”

Telling the truth has always been frowned upon by the judicial authorities.

L3Harris is the 12th largest weapons manufacturer in the world. It makes bomb release mechanisms for F-35 fighter jets being used by Israel to kill Palestinians.

Picket of L3Harris Arms Factory in Brighton

L3Harris is a major US weapons developer, which has facilities in the Massachusetts cities and towns of Northampton, Ayer, and Wilmington. L3 Harris supports Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their homeland, US militarism and imperialism, and the US government’s regime of tracking, detentions, and deportations of Black and Brown migrants.

Support for the Israeli ethnic cleansing

As reported by AFSC Investigate, L3Harris is a top supplier of component parts for Lockheed Martin F-35 warplanes, which Lockheed Martin sells to Israel, manufacturing a total of 1,600 components for each of Lockheed Martin’s F-35s. Israel used its fleet F35 warplanes during its May 2021 bombing campaign against Palestinians living in Gaza.

L3Harris also produces components for Boeing’s Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAM) guided bombs, or “smart bombs,” which enable increased precision in striking targets. These JDAM-guided bombs have been directly linked to the killing of at least 44 Palestinian civilians in Israel’s bombing of al-Wahda street in May 2021. L3 Harris has also previously supplied Israel with “SafeView body scanner machines,” which Israel used at the Qalandia, Bethlehem, and Sha’ar Efraim (Irtach) military checkpoints in the West Bank, and the Erez checkpoint in the Gaza Strip.

Together with its so-called “separation wall,” Israel’s military checkpoints function to immiserate Palestinians who refuse to leave their land to make space for Zionist settlement expansion. Israel’s checkpoints also function to fragment Palestinian society, physically separating Palestinians from one another and preventing Palestinians from moving freely across their land to travel to work, to tend their farmland during the day, and to visit loved ones.

L3Harris manufactured the management systems for the Israeli Navy’s fleet of Sa’ar 5 and Sa’ar 6 warships. Israel uses these warships to enforce its naval blockade on the Gaza strip, which denies the nearly 2 million Palestinians living in Gaza access to basic resources necessary to maintain water, sewage, electric, medical and other civilian infrastructure, significant amounts of which Israel destroys each time it bombs Gaza and which Palestinians cannot rebuild due to this blockade.

Israel then delays or denies Palestinians access to exit permits necessary to leave Gaza, preventing Palestinians from receiving life-saving medical care, which Palestinians cannot provide for themselves as the result of Israel’s naval blockade which prevents resources from coming into Gaza along with Israel’s bombing campaigns which destroy what infrastructure Palestinians attempt to construct in Gaza.

Accordingly, L3Harris bears responsibility not only for equipping the warplanes Israel has used to kill and injure thousands of Palestinians during its bombing campaigns against Gaza, but also for equipping the warships Israel uses to enforce its naval blockade of Gaza, which causes the mass preventable illness, death, and suffering amongst the people of Gaza.

Support for the US militarism and imperialism

L3Harris has derived $36.15 billion to date through US Department of Defense (DoD) contracts for the provision of products and services to the US Army, US Navy, US Air Force, and other branches of the US military. Recent L3Harris business dealings with the US DoD include this $750 million contract to equip the US Marines with “multi-channel handheld and vehicular radio systems,” as well as this this $947.3 million contract to support the US Air force’s “aircraft electronic warfare system initiative.”

Support for US tracking, detentions, and deportations of migrants

As reported by AFSC Investigate, L3Harris equips the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) (a sub-agency within DHS) with advanced surveillance technologies, which DHS and ICE use to enforce the US government’s brutal regime of tracking, detentions, and deportations of Black and Brown migrants.

Over the past decade, L3 Harris has provided DHS and ICE with tens of millions of dollars worth of cell-site simulators, known as “Stingrays,” and subsequently provided DHS and ICE with an upgraded version of The Stingray known as “The Crossbow.”

Stingrays and Crossbows mimic cell phone towers to make cell phones connect to them, allowing DHS and ICE to pinpoint the location of mobile devices or to identify phone numbers in their certain area, and thereby enabling DHS and ICE to more effectively track the movements of the migrants they target. In 2019, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) awarded L3 Harris a 5-year contract worth a potential $3 billion for “tactical communication networks,” by extending the contract DHS had previously established with L3 Harris in 2013.

This is reprinted from The Mapping Project