By George Mills
The recent Israeli offensive against Gaza, which killed two hundred Palestinians, including 59 children, sparked a wave of protests across Wales and much of the world.
But the war on the Palestinian people continues long after the air raids have stopped. It is a long, ongoing attack on Palestinians homes ,villages, rights and very existence.
Israel is able to maintain and deepen it’s system of racial aparheid and occupation with the help of other, richer states that help fund its operations to support their imperialist objectives in the region.
Top of the pile is the US, which relies on Israel to defend its interests in the Middle East. In 2020, the country gave $3.8bn (£2.7bn) in aid to Israel. Almost all of this went on military spending.
Britain is also high up on the list, and plays an integral role in supporting Israel. Wales is used by the British military, with the support of Welsh Government, to support this reality. At the same, a number of major companies operating in Wales have deep links with the Israeli regime, and some have even received funding from Welsh Government.
A report by Declassified UK last year stated that ‘Wales has a major role in the UK arms industry, with the Ministry of Defence spending £310 per person to support the sector in the country, totalling almost a billion pounds worth of expenditure in 2017/18. This level of military spending is above average for the UK as a whole and higher than in Scotland or Northern Ireland’.
Detailed below are the alarming connections to the Israeli war machine, and the arms manufacturers that supply it from within Wales.
Elbit Systems UK
Elbit Systems have hit the headlines recently due to multiple of their factories and offices being occupied and having production of the lethal drones shut down by Palestine Action, a direct-action focus group whose primary objective is to shut down Elbit Systems operations in the UK.
Elbit Systems are one of the biggest arms companies in the world and the primary supplier of the Watchkeeper drones used by the IDF against Palestinian civilians in the Gaza strip. The company’s headquarters is in Haifa in Israel, their CEO is Bezhalel Machlis who has been at the helm since 2013, overseeing the company as it generated $4.7billion in revenue in 2020.
Voice Wales reported earlier this month that these Watchkeeper drones have for years been tested in Welsh aerospace from West Wales Airport near Parc Aberporth. The arms company also has subsidies and links to other areas across the UK, including RAF Valley in Anglesey.
The Aberporth site has also staged trials for the Hermes 900 model drone, the successor to the Hermes 450, one of the most widely used military drones in the world. These drones have been cited by a variety of international Non-Government Organisations for targeting civilians. The Watchkeeper drones are also based on the Hermes models. Elbit Systems boast of the drone’s capacity for surveillance and ‘target acquisition.’
‘It features over-the-horizon, persistent multi-mission, multi-payload capabilities with a class-leading payload carrying capacity of 350 kg. Hermes 900 is capable of performing missions for area dominance and persistent ISTAR (intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition and reconnaissance)’
Elbit Systems provide 85% of all the drones used by the IDF. These drones have been used across multiple campaigns by the Israeli military, including the 51-day siege of Gaza in 2014 that killed over 2000 Palestinians, including 551 children.
GE Aviation
General Electric Aviation are one of the biggest manufacturing companies in the world, and were ranked as the 24th largest arms producer in the world in 2018. In 2017, the aviation section of the company alone generated $27.4 billion, 14% of which came from military contracts.
In the same year, the Welsh Government granted the company £5million in funding for their plant at Nantgarw in Caerphilly, after the then First Minister Carwyn Jones flew out to meet General Electric directors in Washington D.C. The company overall generated $122.1billion in revenue in 2017.
GE Aviation provide engines and equipment for a variety of military vehicles including Apache Helicopters and F-16 and F-15 fighter jets, all of which have been used substantially by the IDF against Palestinian civilians over the years. GE Aerospace also manufactures the LM2500 gas turbines that are used in the Sa’ar 5 Israeli warships.
‘F-16 jets, Apache helicopters, Sa’ar ships, and other weapons systems with engines manufactured by General Electric have been used repeatedly in Israeli attacks on densely populated civilian areas, resulting in thousands of civilian casualties in Lebanon, the West Bank, and Gaza. The human rights community, including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, B’tselem, and United Nations commissions, has ruled these attacks to be human rights violations, collective punishment, and at times war crimes’
The GE Aviation MRO plant in Nantgarw oversees the maintenance and repair of a variety of commercial jet engines, including the GE9X for Boeing, the second largest arms company in the world and the creators of the Apache Gunship.
JCB
JCB, which has a large factory in Wrexham, is one of the largest military suppliers of diggers, tractors and other equipment, dedicating an entire section of the company specifically to ‘Defence products’, according to its website.
‘Our specialised military vehicles have been used in the toughest environments on operations around the world, where the levels of mobility and protection have been tested and proven by several armed forces’
One of these ‘several armed forces’ is the Israeli Defence Force. An extensive report published by War on Want highlighted how deep the company’s links are to the Israeli state;
‘The JCB High Mobility Engineer Excavator (HMEE) is one of JCB’s military vehicles recently sold for use by the Israeli army. The HMEEs were sold through the American Foreign Military Sales programme to the Central Command unit of the Israeli army for use by their paratroopers’ division; the machines are already in use by the Israeli army’s Combat Engineering Corps’
The Israeli Central Command Unit controls much of the occupied West Bank and has overseen the mass displacement of Palestinians through the demolition of their homes and communities. JCB’s equipment and machinery have been photographed and recorded on many accounts destroying Palestinian homes.
In February 2012, ‘Silwan residents awoke to the sight of bright yellow JCB equipment demolishing the only children’s playground in their town. The playground and sports field at the Madaa creative centre was used as a football pitch and recreation ground by local children. JCB’s machines were filmed and photographed carrying out the demolition of Madaa’s playground and sports field, which was carried out illegally on the instruction of the Jerusalem municipality without warning and without a demolition order’.
The Palestinian town of Silwan in East Jerusalem has been a target of Israeli destruction and forced eviction for many years. It is also one of the most impoverished communities in the occupied lands and faces an extreme shortage of community and education services and spaces.
As well as selling directly to the Israeli military through the American Foreign Military Sales programme, JCB uses an Israeli distributor called Comasco to bring their products to Israel. JCB have an enormous share of the market in Israel and as such, have huge, vested interest in the settler state.
‘JCB dominates the Israeli market with a 65% market share of all excavators, and a 90% market share of commonly used loading vehicles’
JCB Transmissions have a large factory that is located on the Wrexham Industrial Estate in Wrexham. JCB’s owner and multi-billionare, Lord Anthony Bamford, is a Conervative Peer who has donated over £10million to the Tories since 2001 and donated £10,000 to Boris Johnson himself in 2019.
The links between Wales and Israel run deceptively deep. There are a multitude of companies operating within the country that contribute directly to the suffering and killing of Palestinians. Welsh land and resources are used in the service of the Israeli military, something demanded by the British military and supported by Welsh Government.
But the workforce in Wales is dragged into this operation as well.
One of the most striking aspects of the recent international Palestine solidarity movement has been the action of workers, crucially in Palestine itself, but also in when workers in Italy and South Africa have refused to load Israeli arms cargo.
Without workers, the war machine would grind to a halt, and now more and more sections of labour are realising the power they have to stop it.
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