Text written in consultation with Sara Saleh, Lana Tatour, Jeanine Hourani and Palestine Action.
RMIT University maintains a research partnership with Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems.
Elbit is Israel's largest privately-owned weapons company, proactive and complicit in the ongoing colonisation of Palestine.
Elbit provides the Israeli military with 85% of its killer drones, used to terrorise and surveil Palestinians. These drones are mounted with Elbit’s missiles and used to commit massacres.
Israel’s fighter jets and attack helicopters are furnished with Elbit equipment and munitions. These weapons are regularly used to attack residential neighbourhoods, family homes and refugee camps, and to suppress Indigenous resistance. Elbit weapons and technologies have killed thousands of people in Lebanon, the West Bank, and Gaza, while destroying vital health and cultural infrastructure.
Elbit manufactures cluster bombs and white phosphorous munitions, used in the occupation’s attacks on Palestinian families in besieged Gaza. Both Australia’s Future Fund and Norway’s KLP have banned investment in Elbit. Companies such as HSBC and AXA have also divested from Elbit over the production of such munitions.
Elbit is also a major provider of the electronic detection system used in the West Bank apartheid wall. It has also been contracted to make a new underground wall around the besieged and oppressed population of Gaza.
Elbit benefits from Israel’s attacks. They market their weapons to oppressive regimes globally, explicitly advertising their products as ‘battle-proven’ on Palestinians.
From Palestine to Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Honduras, West Papua, Myanmar, the Phillipines and Kashmir, Elbit enables and profits from invasion, colonialism, apartheid, land theft, environmental destruction, the killing of journalists and the oppression of Indigenous people. Elbit’s drones and towers are also used on the US-Mexico border, allowing the US regime to track, incarcerate and deport racialised migrants.
In an attempt to shut down opposition, RMIT has stated that its research partnership with Elbit ‘focuses’ on drones that ‘support emergency service’. However, Elbit is a weapons company. The distinction between military and emergency services — whatever it might mean — simply does not hold in Elbit’s case. This claim contributes to the whitewashing of Elbit’s crimes against Palestinians and against oppressed populations globally.
The moral implications of accommodating an arms manufacturer on a university campus are clear. RMIT is a public institution, with a duty to refrain from complicity in the violation of human rights.
If you live on the australian colony, this concerns you.
If you work, study or teach at RMIT in any capacity, this directly concerns you.
If you have used words like ‘decolonisation’ and ‘praxis’ in your academic theses, this – in particular – concerns you.
Now is the time for direct action.
A Closer Look at Elbit’s Drones, a footnote from Palestine Action:
Elbit’s Hermes 450 is said to be the ‘backbone’ of the IOF’s spying and targeting missions. Traditionally, the drone would find its target (i.e. a person) and transmit data back to soldiers to fire missiles. The missiles would then be fired to destroy that target. But since its launch, the Hermes 450 has been adapted to be an assault drone, and can now be mounted with its own missiles. It was used to bomb targets, including people, in the 2014 assault on Gaza – Operation Protective Edge – which killed 2,202 Palestinians.
During the attack on Gaza, four young children, all aged between 10 and 11, were murdered when they were targeted by Israeli drones. They were playing on the beach when a Hermes 450 captured footage of them. An Israeli air force commander then ordered the operators of a second drone to fire, killing one of the boys. After firing the first missile, the operators of the second drone pursued the rest of the boys. They did not receive orders to shoot again, but fired anyway, killing the other three.
In late 2019, the IOF unveiled its Momentum Plan, in order to make its military ‘deadlier’ and ‘faster’. As part of the plan, it will buy even more Hermes 450 drones.
Elbit’s lethal Hermes 900 carries two Spike-MR missiles. It was hurriedly launched in order to attack Palestinians during Operation Protective Edge. During the assault, Elbit employees worked ‘shoulder to shoulder’ with the IOF on the ground to maintain the drone, while mission stations had Elbit representatives that guided the operators during combat flights. So Elbit staff effectively acted as mercenary soldiers.
The Hermes 900 Starliner was unveiled in 2018, in Elbit’s bid to provide military drones for use in different countries’ civilian airspace.
According to Elbit, its Skylark I drone has ‘operational experience gained through tens of thousands of operational sorties by the IDF.’ The Skylark is an intelligence gathering drone, which was heavily used for support of ground military actions in Gaza in 2014.
The IOF admitted using the Skylark in Operation Brother’s Keeper in 2014. The drones facilitated 11 nights of raids throughout the West Bank, resulting in the arrest of about 350 Palestinians.
The IOF has used the Skylark in various countries, and the drone has crashed in Syria, Lebanon and Gaza.
The terrifying Skystriker loitering munition is described by Elbit as ‘a silent, invisible and surprise attacker.’ It can be programmed to hover above a target, and then dive at it at a speed of up to 300 knots, destroying the target on impact. Loitering munitions are nicknamed as ‘suicide drones’.