Activist jailed for over two years for protesting over arms companies supporting Israel’s apartheid
JVL Introduction
The British state is upping the ante as far as direct action protest is concerned (see The Coronation has hastened the Police State).
Interventions against those protesting about Elbit Systems are increasing with punitive sentences in the offing – 27 months in prison in the case of human rights activist Mike Lynch-White.
This is reported by the Canary below, explaining the background and the work of the group Scientist Rebellion, an important new international initiative, in this action.
Lynch-White’s crime: occupying APPH, a components supplier for Elbit, in order to disrupt weapon supply to Israel.
And in Shenstone 5 Elbit trial 4 of the 5 defendants have been found guilty and await sentence…
This article was originally published by the Canary on Wed 17 May 2023. Read the original here.
Activist jailed for over two years for protesting over arms companies supporting Israel’s apartheid
A court has jailed an activist in the UK for 27 months, after they were involved in shutting down an arms company that indirectly supplies weapons to Israel.
Scientist Rebellion: not just about the climate crisis
Scientist Rebellion [see here] is an offshoot of Extinction Rebellion. It describes itself as:
a growing climate activist group with 1,000+ scientists and academics across 32 countries. Members range from science students and professors to IPCC contributors and leading climate-related scientists.
However, Scientist Rebellion doesn’t just deal with the climate crisis. It also supports non-violent action in other areas – one of these being Israel’s apartheid against the Palestinian people. As the Canary has documented, for 75 years the Israeli state has repressed, violently occupied, and dehumanised Palestinians. Its forces have killed countless people. Most recently, Israeli authorities have killed at least 112 Palestinians this year alone.
The UK government is complicit in Israel’s apartheid. In this instance, it’s allowing UK-based arms companies to supply Israel’s security forces with equipment. So, activists have long taken direct action against these companies. Palestine Action is one such group. It has repeatedly shut down the factories of companies like Elbit, as well as its supply chains. One of these is a company called APPH.
Opposing Israel’s apartheid and complicit companies
Palestine Action took control of APPH’s factory in June 2021. Activists covered the building in red paint, and scaled the roof:
They also destroyed equipment so it could no longer be used to kill Palestinians:
Palestine Action explained why it occupied APPH:
APPH are a supplier of drone landing gear to Elbit Systems, through the latter’s Leicester-based subsidiary UAV Tactical Systems. UAV Tactical Systems hold multiple drone export licenses to Israel, and whose flagship drone (the Watchkeeper) is based on the ‘combat-proven’ Hermes, infamous for patrolling the skies of Gaza. Elbit have repackaged this as the Watchkeeper for export to Europe and the British military. APPH furthermore produce the landing gear for BAE Systems’ Hawk jet, used by Saudi Arabia in their assaults on Yemen, and a number of other fighter jets and military helicopters.
However, the British state has not taken this dissent lightly.
Activists: facing jail time
Cops and the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) charged three people over the June 2021 APPH incident. Now, one of the activists, who is also from Scientist Rebellion, has been imprisoned.
The group said in a press release that its:
co-founder and human rights activist Mike Lynch-White was today [Wednesday 17 May] sentenced to 27 months at Chester Crown Court for peacefully disrupting the production of military components manufactured in the UK and supplied to Israel.
He and his co-defendant Charlie Thomas had both been charged with criminal damage after climbing onto the roof of Runcorn-based factory APPH, a supplier of drone parts to Elbit Systems, one of Israel’s largest defence contractors.
Authorities have already detained Lynch-White for almost three months on remand. The CPS has also charged him in relation to two more non-violent protests, with the climate-focused groups Beyond Politics/Burning Pink and Heathrow Pause. Courts are yet to sentence him over these.
Palestine: showing solidarity
Lynch-White said in a statement:
I have seen how the Palestinian people are at best second class citizens on their own ever-shrinking lands. Clearly, this is apartheid. We have denounced and defeated it before and we must again.
Do not be brow-beaten into silent complicity by claims that supporting the near defenceless Palestinian people is antisemitic. The far-right government of Israel is doing this, not the Jewish people.
This is not complicated: stand with the defenceless, not the powerful.
It is unclear what the fate of the two other activists is yet. As the Canary has documented, the state increasingly criminalising protest is becoming a lot more common and authoritarian, with the Tories’ Police, Crime, Sentencing, and Courts (PCSC) Act. However, all this pales in comparison to the horror the Israeli state inflicts on Palestinian people, day in, day out. So, regardless of the consequences, activists in the UK will continue to show their solidarity with those living under apartheid – even if, like Lynch-White, it means a prison sentence.
Featured image via Scientist Rebellion
I don’t know how widely or not this has been reported in the MSM and elsewhere, but I just did a search re >scientist rebellion activist jailed< and the only outlets that came up in the results were The Canary and JVL. (and a sequence of seven tweets on SRs twitter page).
The following article – from four days ago on Common Dreams – came up in the results and begins thus:
More than 1,000 scientists and academics in over 21 countries engaged in nonviolent protest last week under the banner of Scientist Rebellion to demand a just and equitable end to the fossil fuel era.
At least 19 of the participating scientists were arrested in actions linked to the group's "The Science Is Clear" campaign from May 7-13, organizers said at a Monday press conference.
https://www.commondreams.org/news/scientists-take-direct-action-against-climate-crisis
Also came across this Washington Post article from May of last year which is very interesting:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/05/20/climate-change-scientists-protests/
Astonishing cruel treatment of activists.people who want to stop the killing of Palestinians. Law on the scale fe of murderers.
The sentence on Mike Lynch-White is indeed savage and follows similar sentences for 2 Climate protestors who halted traffic on a major road artery.
This is coupled with the rapid implementation of the Public Order Act 2023, the removal of all defences of justification and lawful excuse for those who damage property such as that of Elbit and a situation where the Police can preemptively arrest demonstrators.
As people may know I was one of the 4 defendants in the Shenstone 5 Elbit trial. We are awaiting sentence on June 26 and would like the biggest turnout. A number of activities are planned before that but the Judge has made it clear that our ‘offences’, intent to cause criminal damage crosses the ‘custody threshold’.
There is a concerted attempt by the judiciary to keep juries in the dark and not to inform them of their right to decide issues according to their conscience. Trudy Warner was recently arrested outside the Inner London Crown Court for holding up a placard informing juries of their rights and a number of other defendants have been gaoled by Judge Silas Reid for even mentioning to a jury why they were protesting.
We need to join Climate Action and other protestors who are prepared to defy these attempts to intimidate activists who are informing juries of their rights. 24 such protestors did so this week at Reid’s court and we should be planning to do this regularly at all trials.
Otherwise we are accepting the growing climate of repression without fighting back. There are major trials of Palestine Action and others coming up in London, Bristol and elsewhere and some defendants face long prison sentences if found guilty.
Coupled with the near abolition of the right to strike, the left has to move from talking to taking action.
Jurors should ask themselves why they are not being allowed to hear such arguments.
No arguments for the defence: No conviction.
Tony finishes his post by saying that the left has to move from talking to taking action. Well yes and no. What it’s all about in the end – whatever it is – is public awareness. Allow me to use a personal example to make my point:
About twenty-five years ago I did a survey asking people two things, the first of which was do they know how many people are killed on the roads every year in the UK. Not ONE of the dozens of people I asked actually knew, and so I then asked how many do they think it is, and practically everyone thought it was either around five hundred or a thousand a year. The actual figure at the time was over three-and-a-half thousand. (I also asked them if they knew of anyone who had been killed on the roads, and practically all of them knew of someone who had been killed – ie a family member, a friend, or a neighbour etc).
And the reason why none of them knew the actual road fatality figures is because the MSM rarely if ever mention them when they are published by the DfT at the end of September every year. And my point is this of course: That the most crucial element in trying to bring about change – or prevent something – is awareness of course, whether it’s the plight (and the history) of the Palestinians, or exposing the falsehoods regarding Russia and the conflict in Ukraine, or the A/S smear campaign – and the subversion of democracy – dissembled against Jeremy and the left. And the MSM itself of course!
What we need is a network of groups all across the UK putting leaflets together and printing off a thousand or two each and putting them through peoples doors (and at the end of each leaflet saying: PLEASE COPY AND/OR SCAN AND CIRCULATE TO FRIENDS & RELATIVES & WORK COLLEAGUES ETC.
I think the Good Law Project is challenging the legal basis of silencing defendants from explaining to judges and juries that their offences were committed to prevent greater wrong. It seems an opaque area of law at present.
The legal defence of “necessity” has long been accepted in principle and has been heard in a wide variety of cases in modern times. It’s often been persuasive, regardless of the nature of the case tried or which entity (judge or jury) decides the innocence or guilt of the offender(s).
From what I remember, when the “Stansted 15” case came up (they stopped a deportation flight taking off with refugees whose legal rights to asylum hadn’t yet been properly determined), the judge blocked the defendants from making their legal defence of necessity and from explaining how careful they’d been to ensure their actions were as minimally harmful as possible. The “Stansted 15” won on appeal against various rulings and behaviours by the judge.
What surprised me on looking up previous instances in which principled protesters had sought to defend themselves on the grounds of “necessity” was how MUDDLED the whole situation was. Many courts and judges allowed them to use the defence, others didn’t … in apparently similar cases. Who was or wasn’t allowed to put forward this defence seemed to be at the whim of the individual judge.
See the article about ‘Lawyers for Israel’ on Craig Murray’s website:
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2023/05/lawyers-for-israel-oppose-conscience/
Mike was given a heavier sentence than Charlie because according to the judge, Mike was an experienced activist. The assumption must therefore be that the more you support human rights, the more the system will punish you. Check Mike’s Go Fund Me page:
http://Rebelsinprison.uk/rebels/mike-lynch-white