Weighing The Unweighable
Human Lives vs. Elbit Systems Profits
Several people have asked me to share what I would have said if called as an expert witness for the defense in the Elbit 8 case:
We didn't start criming yesterday. We wrote letters, op-eds, and articles. We made phone calls to elected officials. We spoke at gatherings in our community. We tabled and leafleted. We made videos and wrote songs. We marched in parades. We created visuals: puppets, banners. We protested with signs at big intersections. We protested where weapons are made.
We sat-in at elected officials' offices, and left when we were asked to leave. We bird dogged elected officials in public. We disrupted meetings. We did banner drops at political events. We sat-in at elected officials' offices, and did not go when we were asked to leave. We blocked roads and didn't get arrested.
We blocked roads and got arrested. We blocked access to weapons factories and didn't get arrested. We blocked access to weapons factories and got arrested.
The war machine kept grinding on.
Elbit is the worst of the worst. It makes 85% of the drones used in Israel's war on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, and on their supporters in Lebanon. In Merrimack it also makes components for night vision goggles that Israeli warplane pilots use to target and murder civilians including children.
It has closed some of its blood-soaked facilities this year due to relentless protests at every one of its locations worldwide. We will continue to keep up the pressure to shut down Elbit.
One of many mass graves in Gaza this year
Now, let's hear from some others involved in the effort to shut Elbit down.
Bruce Gagnon of the Elbit 8 has shared his account of our day in court here on his blog.
Jamila Levasseur, a supporter who has been to law school and takes great notes shared them with me and commented about Tuesday's trial:
After allowing the State over half the day to make their case, with much repetitive testimony, the judge denied defense motions to dismiss. He didn't bother to hide his bias, saying he would not allow us to argue a necessity defense and would only allow us to put on enough of a case to use for an appeal.
"Don't burn up too much time," he snapped at one point.
March 22 blockade in progress at Elbit Systems in Merrimack, New Hampshire
Yasmin Alani, who supported the protesters on March 22 and again in court this week, observed:
The video where [defendant JEM] was searched was horribly shocking and left the whole room very still... I was so sad for [JEM].
This video must be very damaging to the policeman who kept saying, I don’t remember on the witness stand. Then attorney Kira Kelley showed him his own bodycam video that contradicted what he was saying.
At one point in the video, while [JEM] was screaming for him to leave them alone, the policeman said: There are no legal observers here, and do you know why? Because you are here illegally. So there is only you and us. I thought, what a sadistic thing to say. He should not have said that.
He was a young police officer who entered the room acting like a peacock and left the room hunched over and looking so small.
My thoughts on the trial was that our group looked dignified and ethical and the court was filled with supporters. And the opposition looked small and clumsy.
The court had given so much time to the repetitive testimonies of the police that by the time it was our turn to have witnesses everyone was tired and wanted it to be done. I am wondering if it was among their tactics to have multiple repetitive boring witnesses as part of a plan to get us tired and to not leave enough time for our important testimonies.
Shouldn’t they want to know why we were there to begin with?!
9:30-4:00 and they still managed to claim not enough time!
Palestinian children wounded in Israeli strikes at Shifa Hospital in Gaza City on Oct. 11, 2023. Ali Mahmoud/AP
Dr. Yusuf Ebrahim of the Elbit 8 shared his notes for testimony with me. Several people have commented on how moving his testimony was, though he was only afforded enough time on the witness stand to say some part of what follows.
To describe my motive for this act of civil disobedience,
I would like to help put you in my headspace.
I work as a resident doctor in Maine. I would say that the best
part of working in healthcare is the beautiful feeling of: many
helping one. It’s the feeling of knowing that, although the
patient is going through something very difficult, you can be
part of a team of people that’s working hard, doing their best,
using every resource at their disposal to help them get
through it, to make it easier in every little way possible.
And as a corollary to this, the worst feeling when working in
healthcare, is to have this taken from you; the moral distress
when the resources and capability to give your patients the
care they need is ripped from you.
In Gaza, over 40,000 people have been killed, most of them
being women and children, and nearly 100,000 more
wounded. Over 16,000 of those who have been killed are
children. Because there are so many still missing, still buried
under rubble, or who never even reach a hospital for their
death to be counted, these numbers are thought to be severe
underestimates based on a research study published by the
Lancet medical journal, which estimates at least 186,000 have
been killed by Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Israel’s bombing
campaigns have targeted shelters, hospitals, schools,
mosques, churches, and homes. Of the 36 hospitals in the
Gaza strip, all have been bombed, many have been
completely destroyed, and the latest estimate is that only 2
remain in partial service. 2 partially functioning hospitals
taking care of over 100,000 wounded. To aid in visualizing
the scale of the destruction, the Gaza strip is packed full of 2
million people – that’s 14 times the population of Merrimack
County – and those people have all been displaced from other
parts of occupied Palestine over decades and squeezed into an
area 1/7th the size of Merrimack County. And on the Gaza
strip, on this area 1/7th the size of Merrimack County,
82,000 tons, or 164 million pounds of explosives have been
dropped by Israel. A huge proportion of those munitions
have come directly from the U.S. government. Naturally, this
has caused unimaginable infrastructural damage and
internally displaced nearly the entirety of its 2 million person
population.
For me, those numbers are beyond my mind’s ability to
comprehend. So, I want to take you away from the numbers
for a moment and put you in people’s shoes. I want to
challenge us all to awaken our empathy because I know it
exists inside each of us.
I want you to imagine that you are Ashraf El Attar. He was a
nurse in Gaza. His wife Hala was a teacher at a UNRWA
school for refugees. They had six children together that they
loved very much. Four of their children were the same age
because they were quadruplets. When the quadruplets were
born, they faced severe health issues and nearly
died. They needed surgeries, they needed oxygen cylinders at
home. But they got through that time. He and his wife worked
tirelessly to give their children a better future. This year, their
quadruplets turned 10. They also had a 1 year old girl and a
15 year old boy.
One morning, at 6am, Ashraf was getting ready for work
when he suddenly lost consciousness. He then awoke in
severe pain and saw all the walls of the house were destroyed. He
said, “I desperately called out for my children and my wife,
but it was too late. My wife and my six children, including
the four quadruplets, were killed instantly in the attack.”
Imagine your family being vaporized in an instant.
I want you to imagine that you are Ahed Bseiso, a 17 year old
university student studying pharmacy. When her home was
shelled by occupation tanks in December, she woke from a
fog to realize her most of her right leg was missing. Her older
cousins carried her downstairs covering her eyes, and
someone rushed to get her uncle who was a doctor. Their
house still surrounded by tanks, he had to amputate her leg on
the dining table using a kitchen knife and needle and thread
from a sewing kit, with no anesthetic. They were both crying
throughout the surgery. In the following days, her family
searched the house for every antibiotic and painkiller they
could find to give her; because their house remained besieged
by occupation tanks for five more days before she could be
brought to a hospital.
Imagine you are Hind Rajab. In January 2024, paramedics
from the Palestinian Red Crescent received a call from a car
holding a family of seven, that their car had been hit by an
occupation tank while they were trying to evacuate south. The
call was from 6 year-old Hind, who told the medics that
she was injured and the other six family members were killed.
Several crews of medics went to rescue her, but when each
one arrived dispatchers would lose communication with it.
It was several days later that the medics who came to rescue
her were found dead in their ambulance having been shot by
occupation forces, the ambulances burned. The little girl Hind
had succumbed to her injuries.
Imagine what Hind was going through. Imagine what the
girl’s mother, Wissam, is still going through now.
Imagine having to learn a new acronym: “WCNSF,” meaning
“Wounded Child No Surviving Family,” an acronym that has
been used all too often since the start of this genocide.
One of the people who has had to learn this acronym is Faress
Arafat, a 22 year old nursing student who began his training
at the University of Gaza under occupation in September,
only a month before the genocide began. At the beginning, he
stayed in Ash-Shifa hospital nonstop day and night, helping
the injured and displaced people, cleaning and stitching their
wounds, while being unable to contact his own family in
northern Gaza.
The nursing student Faress recalled a story from early on of
encountering a little girl, the sole survivor of her family after
a bombing, who was so in shock she could not speak. When
he entered the exam room with the doctor, the doctor asked
the girl’s name, and Faress replied “Unknown #44,” because
there were 43 others like her in the waiting in room, nameless,
in shock, and alone.
American surgeon Dr. Mark Perlmutter wrote an
article for Politico titled "We Volunteered at a Gaza Hospital.
What We Saw Was Unspeakable." And I will read you three
passages from Dr. Perlmutter's experience.
• First passage: "On April 4 two young siblings, Rafif and
Rafiq, arrived in the emergency room. An airstrike in
Gaza City earlier in the war killed their mother along
with 10 other members of their family and ripped
through their immature and malnourished bodies. Both
were being treated at Shifa Hospital in Gaza City when
Israel raided the hospital for the second time in March.
Medical Aid for Palestinians, a British charity, repeatedly
requested that Israel allow MAP to evacuate these two
critically ill children from Shifa. Israel repeatedly
refused, according to MAP. Perhaps sensing what was to
come, the children’s family members somehow got them
out of the hospital, onto a donkey cart, and walked south
for two days until they came to European Hospital. The
siblings arrived with their IVs still in place. Rafif, a keen
and bright-eyed 13-year-old girl, had a chronic ulcer on
her amputated right lower leg, an external fixator on what
remained of her right leg and malnutrition that was
obvious from her sunken face and recessed eyes. Still,
she was without major complications. With access to
food, proper wound care and future surgical treatment —
none of which is guaranteed, but possible — she could
survive. But her brother, 15-year-old Rafiq, was so
severely malnourished that he could barely speak. The
explosion that ripped his sister’s foot off and killed his
mother had also sent shrapnel through his abdomen,
tearing his intestines apart. He had open wounds on his
buttocks that made it impossible for him to lie on his
back or sit upright, and a broken left shoulder that had
never healed, leaving it frozen. He screamed in pain with
any attempt at examination and was constantly terrified.
We asked the hospital to admit Rafiq for tube feeding —
pumping nutrients into his stomach until he grows strong
enough to eat on his own — but the hospital lacked the
equipment needed for this simple intervention, and the
hospitals that had these basic capabilities have been
destroyed. We told Rafiq’s family to look for foods that
he would eat and to feed him slowly throughout the day,
but we knew we were giving them false hope. If he is not
evacuated from Gaza he will certainly die, for want of an
$11 piece of plastic and a protein shake."
• Second passage: "Israa, a 26-year-old woman with a fair
complexion and a quiet voice, arrived with our first mass
casualty event around 4 a.m., on our second day in Gaza.
In the chaos nobody could translate for us, so we were
forced to improvise as she sobbed uncontrollably on a
stretcher. All the ligaments in her right knee were torn;
she had three open fractures in her two legs; and a
massive chunk of her left thigh had been torn off. Both of
her hands had second degree burns, and her face, arms
and chest were stippled with shrapnel and debris. We
took Israa to the operating room and operated on her…
After three days in the hospital, Israa, a mother of four,
told us how she was injured: Her home was bombed
without warning. She saw all her children die in front of
her when the ceiling collapsed on top of them. Her
relatives confirmed that her entire immediate family was
buried under the rubble of their home. We didn’t have the
heart to tell Israa that some of her children were probably
still alive at that moment, dying unimaginably cruel
deaths from dehydration and sepsis while trapped alone
in a pitch-black tomb that alternates as an oven during
the day and a freezer at night. One shudders to think how
many children have died this way in Gaza."
• Third passage: "While touring the hospital we walked
through one of the ICUs and found multiple children
admitted with gunshot wounds to the head. One might
argue that a child could have been injured unintentionally
in an explosion, or perhaps even forgotten when Israel
invaded a children’s hospital and reportedly left infants to
die in a pediatric intensive care unit. Gunshot wounds to
the head are an entirely different matter. We started
seeing a series of children who’d been shot in the head.
They’d go on to slowly die, only to be replaced by new
victims who’d also been shot in the head, and who would
also go on to slowly die. Their families told us one of two
stories: the children were playing inside when they were
shot by Israeli forces, or they were playing in the street
when they were shot by Israeli forces."
This is not about politics for me and it's not about activism for
me, and it never was. It's about human life.
Others can tell you about genocide experts who will tell
you the statistics and demographics and give you the
academic evidence. But for me, the cry of the Palestinian
child is something that I hear louder.
These are stories I want to share to put us in the shoes of what
our fellow humans are going through. But none of these are
isolated incidents. Remember that I only told you these
stories because I wanted to put the numbers in perspective.
When you hear numbers: over 40,000 killed; over 100,000
injured; over 10,000 children having lost one or both their
legs; remember that each of those numbers is a story.
And I hope that by putting you in the shoes of a small fraction
of the Palestinian people, their stories will not feel so distant.
But if their stories still feel distant to anyone, if you’re still
wondering why we are discussing them in this court in New
Hampshire, then I will say that the unspeakable acts of this
genocide would not have been possible without the
complicity of the U.S. government. The U.S. government
provides $3.8 billion in military aid to Israel every year. In
total, it has provided $50 billion in aid, which is more than it
has provided to any other country. In the midst of this
genocide specifically, it has sent dozens of warplanes and tens
of thousands of bombs – these bombs being the several-
hundred pound or several-thousand pound varieties that are
used to massacre people in large numbers.
As for Elbit Systems, its complicity in the genocide is
unquestionable. Elbit is a multibillion dollar Israeli-based
international defense contractor which provides 85% of the
land equipment and drones used by the Israeli army for the
genocidal acts I described previously. This particular factory
in Merrimack received a multimillion dollar contract to work
on JHMCS II systems, which are helmet display systems for
Israeli fighter jet pilots.
Our action on March 22 was a peaceful act of civil
disobedience, carried out in a time of extreme necessity. We
saw genocide. We heard the cries of children bombed in their
homes. We saw the complicity of the U.S. war machine in
these acts. We tried for months and months calling and
writing letters to our representatives, begging them to make it
stop, and our pleas were ignored time and time again. We are
not professionals. We are not violent. We are simply human
beings of conscience, who saw human suffering, saw it
getting ignored and cast aside, and we knew we had a
responsibility to act urgently. Our peaceful protest harmed no
human beings. It was a symbolic pebble thrown against the
side of a tank.
Today, we are weighing the unweighable. We are weighing
the infinite value of tens of thousands of innocent human lives,
against the pocketbook of a multibillion dollar defense
contractor. And the emptiness of this comparison is apparent
to any human being of conscience.