Outside a red-brick factory in Oldham, a large town near Manchester in the north of England, a diverse crowd of people embrace, clap, cheer and shed tears of joy. Together they’ve succeeded in kicking Elbit Systems – Israel’s largest private arms firm – out of the town. In January, that campaign ended in victory when the Israeli firm announced it was selling its subsidiary Ferranti Technologies Power and Control, based in Oldham’s Cairo House, a former cotton mill, for a sum of £9 million – £6 million less than it bought it for in 2007.
The sale was announced as part of a ‘company restructure’, but it has been received as the first major victory against Elbit’s operations in the UK. As a major supplier of armed drones to the Israeli military, Elbit has long been a primary target of the pro-Palestine movement. Its drones, according to US monitoring outlet Investigate AFSC, have been used extensively in Israel’s attacks on the besieged population of Gaza, in 2014 and in 2021. While concrete data is not yet available on the 2021 attacks, Elbit drones were used in 2014 as part of Israel’s 6,000 airstrikes in Gaza, which killed 2,251 Palestinians, including 1,462 civilians and 551 children. Neither Elbit’s British nor its Israeli offices responded to New Internationalist’s request for comment.
