Vi wrote and read their testimony in German. A loved one has authorised this translation.
Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest private arms manufacturer, has its headquarters in the heart of Ulm. Whilst the people of Ulm take their children to school, do their shopping in the pedestrian zones and enjoy the spring sunshine in the parks, instruments are being built in the immediate vicinity, in the halls of Elbit Systems, which have been used for decades to surveil, terrorise and murder people in Palestine and elsewhere.
The vast majority of the drones deployed in Gaza – which reduced entire neighbourhoods to rubble and bombed supposedly safe places such as hospitals and schools – were and are produced by Elbit Systems.
There is no longer any functioning medical care in Gaza. Imagine having to endure a caesarean section without anaesthetic, or having your child’s limbs amputated without anaesthetic – conditions brought about by the murderous weapons manufactured by Elbit Systems, through which this company has made and continues to make enormous profits. Elbit Systems boasts that its own products have been tested in Gaza – murder, destruction, and the mass extermination of the civilian population as a special mark of quality.
Every day, people like you and me are dying as a result of Elbit Systems’ products. Civilians. People with hopes, ambitions, and dreams. Among them, above all, children, whose murder has wiped out an entire generation. A friend living in Gaza told me how people, on the brink of starvation and desperately queuing for the little flour still available, were blown up by drone strikes or deliberately shot at.
In the occupied West Bank, Palestinians are being monitored, harassed, murdered, and stripped of their dignity. Here too, this is made possible largely by Elbit Systems’ products.
And all this has been going on for a long time. Since 1948, for 78 years, Palestinians have been oppressed, robbed of their land and their culture. Heavily armed soldiers are breaking into the homes of the Palestinians living there and forcing them to hand them over to Israeli settlers. The violence of the Israeli occupiers has been a daily reality since 1948. Gaza and the West Bank are open-air prisons. Countless martyrs have died and continue to die in resistance against the degrading living conditions and the theft of their land.
Well before 2023, drones were flying continuously over Gaza and the West Bank. Just imagine: the moment you wake up, you hear the noise of the drones. It is the noise of the drones that keeps you awake at night. Whilst you are cooking, sleeping, working, celebrating weddings, or mourning the loss of your loved ones at funerals. You always hear the noise of the drones. Those drones that monitor you and can destroy your home or kill a loved one at any moment. This is nothing short of torture. The vast majority of these drones are produced by Elbit Systems.
The reality in Gaza is almost impossible for me to put into words. After the mass murder and destruction, Gaza is nothing more than a pile of rubble. Countless bodies lie beneath the rubble. Among the rubble are children without parents. The soil and the water have been poisoned by the war. Fields have been destroyed. According to leading experts, it would take 80 years to restore the already catastrophic state of the natural and infrastructural foundations of life for the people of Gaza that existed prior to October 2023.
None of this would have been possible without the equipment manufactured by Elbit Systems, the sale of which has generated enormous profits for the company.
How is it possible that such a company is allowed to operate right here in Germany, in Ulm?
The German government supports the genocide politically, militarily, and financially. The German government continues to delegitimise recognised international institutions. Despite the ruling of the International Court of Justice, which found plausible grounds for the claim of genocide in Israel’s actions, and despite the arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court against Netanyahu and other ministers in his government: Germany supports the crime against humanity being committed against the Palestinians.
All of this is unbearable for me as a human being capable of empathy and compassion. It breaks my heart. To stand by and watch the mass murder in Gaza is unimaginable to me.
That is why I have been politically active for years. Just like thousands of other people in this country. My, our, political activities to date, our campaigning for a free Palestine, have not only gone unheard; I, we, have also faced extreme state violence.
Pro-Palestinian demonstrations stopped being allowed to march through the streets of Berlin; they were physically suppressed or banned outright from the outset. Absurd restrictions were imposed on peaceful demonstrators. For example, a sticker of a watermelon was enough to be beaten by police officers, and pro-Palestinian comments on social media were sufficient to obtain a court order authorising a violent raid of someone’s home.
In Berlin alone, thousands of criminal proceedings are being brought against people who have peacefully opposed the genocide. Most of these are for ‘speech offences’. Artists have been disinvited and defunded. Professors who speak out in support of their students’ right to peaceful protest are defamed in the press as antisemites and silenced – the same baseless supposition with which the attorney general’s office is also attempting to politically and morally delegitimise our action.
What else could I do to stop this terrible bloodbath, this horror, this crime against humanity?
I had no choice but to use my own hands to prevent the construction of yet another drone. In the hope that perhaps one fewer person might have to die. To intervene where these objects – designed solely for murder, destruction and surveillance – are being produced. And to do so within my own community, using the means at my disposal. In Germany.
I demand an end to this terrible violence. I demand a free Palestine. I demand: Elbit Systems needs to get out of Germany.
My comrades and I are in custody because we are demanding an end to this never-ending, horrific violence and have taken a stand against it – because we are demanding humanity. Our criminalisation, our imprisonment, is an attempt to deny the legitimacy of this demand, of this struggle. If you convict us for this, you are protecting profit through mass destruction, violence, the total destruction of land and people, and the fuelling of the war machine, supporting the crime against humanity being committed against the Palestinians.
