FRFI 216 August/September 2010

On 3 July the eight defendants charged with committing and conspiring to commit criminal damage to the EDO-MBM arms components factory in Brighton in January 2009 were found not guilty by a unanimous decision of the jury. Charges against a ninth were dropped earlier due to lack of evidence.

It was during Israel’s 22-day assault on Gaza, code named ‘Operation Cast Lead’, that activists from ‘Smash Edo’ broke into the factory. For an hour they systematically destroyed the war factory with hammers. Filing cabinets and computers were hurled from top-floor windows. Machinery was also sabotaged and ‘war criminal’ was painted on the wall. The action was a response to a rising Palestinian death toll of over 1,000 and the complicity of the British ruling class, who refused to end the export of arms components to the Israeli military.

In 2007 EDO-MBM was taken over by the ITT corporation. ITT is the 19th largest weapons manufacturer in the world. It produces components for Paveway guided missiles and bomb-release chips for F-15 and F-16 fighter aircrafts used by the Israeli military. It has a long history of supporting and supplying fascists: it supplied Nazi Germany with weapons and communication equipment, ensured effective coordination between General Franco’s troops by providing and fixing damaged telephone equipment during the Spanish Civil War and financially assisted the CIA coup in Chile in 1973 which ousted democratically elected president Salvador Allende, replacing him with the notorious dictator Augusto Pinochet. Following this tradition, it now supplies the arms components Israel needs to maintain/increase its oppression of the Palestinians.

In a preliminary hearing on 3 March 2010, Judge Kent ruled that the case should be heard by a jury and that each jury member should receive a short summary of the Goldstone Report, which found Israel guilty of war crimes during ‘Operation Cast Lead’, to give them an idea of the background to the case. This ruling was crucial as it placed the decommissioning in a political and humanitarian context, disrupting the attempts of EDO and the British state to depoliticise and criminalise the actions of the defendants. During the trial a witness, Sharyn Lock, who was volunteering as a human rights activist in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead and had captured footage of an Israeli missile strike on a hospital, gave evidence of atrocities committed by the Israeli military. She closed her evidence by saying that those who armed the Israeli air force ‘had children’s blood on their hands’.

The six decommissioners did not at any point during the trial deny responsibility for causing upwards of £180,000 worth of damage to the factory, but argued that the damage caused was justified and not criminal as it was an attempt to prevent much greater crimes being committed by the Israelis. The six decommissioners (the two others were arrested outside the factory) had pre-recorded videos, which were posted on Indymedia after the dismantling of the factory, explaining why they had participated in the action. In his video Elijah Smith said ‘I don’t feel I’m going to do anything illegal tonight, but I’m going to go into an arms factory and smash it up to the best of my ability so that it cannot actually produce munitions and these very dirty bombs that have been provided to the Israeli army so that they can kill children. The time for talking has gone too far. I’m not a writer, I’m just a person from the community and I’m deeply disgusted’.

Paul Hills, the managing director of the EDO/MBM factory, was forced to admit, during a five-day cross-examination, that his company had owned the rights to the main bomb-rack used on Israeli F-16s since 1998.  Furthermore he admitted that evidence of this was deliberately removed from the company’s website in 2004, around the time the first protests challenging EDO’s presence in Brighton began. His claim to have police permission to interfere with the crime scene by retrieving debris and papers before police photographers arrived was not backed up by the police evidence. At one stage the judge warned him he was at risk of perjuring himself if he contradicted his evidence in earlier court cases, and crucially he ended by admitting that anyone looking at the evidence presented to him in court would form the reasonable belief that his company was involved in arms sales to Israel. Campaigners’ work of painstakingly assembling a dossier on EDO-MBM over the years paid off by exposing Hills in court; however, it is unlikely that he and his US warlord bosses will ever be held fully accountable for their complicity in war crimes.

The not guilty verdict is a personal victory for the eight defendants, including Elijah Smith who was imprisoned for over a year without trial, but it is also a victory for the wider struggle to defend the democratic right to protest against Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians. In Derry activists who carried out similar protests against the world’s fifth largest defence contractor, Raytheon, have also been acquitted. We must continue to expose and oppose the financial and military backing Israeli war crimes receive from US and British imperialism. We must now demand the release of the imprisoned Gaza demonstrators and pledge to put on trial those who abuse and destroy human life, while supporting those, both inside and outside prison, who seek to improve and defend it.

Dominic O’Hara