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In less than one year, Israel has managed to turn Gaza into rubble. A recent estimate by a global health expert suggested that around 335,000 Gazans could have been killed as a result of the Israeli attacks. 

Today, “Watchdog” host Lowkey speaks to one of the survivors of the Israeli bombing, Ahmed al-Naouq. Ahmed al-Naouq grew up in central Gaza and moved to the United Kingdom to attend Leeds University. In 2015, he co-founded We Are Not Numbers, a non-profit group that seeks to tell the stories of Palestinians to the world. 

The grief began right away for al-Naouq. “On the 7th of October, my fiancé’s house was bombed, and she lost her brother,” he told Lowkey, adding:

We were lucky because, only two days before the war, she managed to escape Gaza and go to meet with me. And I know that if she did not travel with her parents, all of them would have been killed on the first day of the war.”

For Lowkey, the Israeli attack on Gaza is of historic proportions. He compared it to the 13th-century Mongol invasion of Baghdad in its similarity in that it destroyed thousands of years of civilization. What has been done, he said, was so intensely violent, not just physically but culturally, that it is almost incomparable. On al-Naouq, Lowkey noted that his story:

Really tells us the wider way in which Palestinians have been stripped of their humanity and killed on an industrial scale in Gaza. And it stands as a testament to the will to survive, regardless of the bullying, gangsterism and intimidation from the Zionist project.”

Al-Naouq, a journalist by training, lambasted the deceitful Western media coverage of the attacks, stating: 

The media doesn’t care about its own audiences. They don’t care if they don’t know the truth or not. They are seeking their own interests. And clearly, those interests do not correlate with the truth, so we are challenging that by writing our own stories.”

After nearly twelve months of bombing, those attacks show little sign of slowing down, primarily because Western governments continue to supply Israel with the hi-tech weaponry it needs to continue and defend its actions in international bodies such as the United Nations. 

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Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.

On this episode of The Watchdog, host Lowkey is joined by three guests to discuss how progressive or radical change is blocked in the U.S. and the U.K. by our political establishment, specifically by the Democratic and the Labour Parties. 

Chris Williamson and his communications officer, Ammar Kazmi, join the show to discuss the political situation in the U.K. Between 2010 and 2019, Chris Williamson was a Labour member of parliament and was a shadow cabinet minister under Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. He was eventually forced out of the party he had joined in 1976 as a 19-year-old after he was the subject of a smear campaign depicting him as an antisemite. 

Also joining the show today is MintPress CEO and founder Mnar Adley. Adley notes that U.S. politics is set up to fundamentally limit the debate and framework for change by privileging the Democrats and Republicans over third parties, who are shut out of debates, ignored by corporate media, and censored by big tech platforms. All of this is done in order to promote voting for one of the two major parties. But “voting for the lesser evil is still evil,” she said. 

While in Corbyn’s cabinet, Williamson pushed him to take more radical positions, such as committing to ending poverty altogether. “We are the sixth-biggest economy in the world. There is really no excuse for anybody to be living in poverty in this country,” he explained to Lowkey. Corbyn, however, was “far too timid” and, ultimately, did not stand up to the vicious waves of attacks and smears against him and his followers, particularly on the question of anti-Semitism. As Williamson said: 

It was clear that antisemitism was being weaponized in order to destroy the Corbyn project, to destroy the prospect of a socialist, anti-imperialist government coming to power. But Jeremy lost the plot because he listened to idiots around him who said that he had to placate the Zionist lobby.”

No matter how hard they try, however, there is a growing movement in both countries demanding radical change. And if it continues to gather momentum, both Labour and the Democrats could be overtaken and consigned to the trashcan of history.

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The Watchdog is 100% independent and listener-supported.

We don’t take corporate ad money. We don’t have billionaire backers. Episodes like this are only possible because of you.

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Together, we can keep this work going.

Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.

The world holds its breath. Last month, the Nigerien military overthrew President Mohamed Bazoum, declaring an end to his corrupt reign and a new era of anti-imperialist, pan-African struggle. While most Nigeriens actually support the move (a new poll found that 73% of the country wants the army to stay in power) Niger’s West African neighbor Nigeria has strongly objected, and has tried to organize an invasion force to restore Bazoum. 

The regional body, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), has condemned the events in Niger. But its 15 member states are split on how to react. Western powers, however, including France and the United States, have supported boots on the ground, and even considered sending troops themselves – a move that could draw Russia into a conflict that could make Libya or Syria look minor by comparison.

Here to explain the tense situation that could ignite a world war is David Hundeyin. Hundeyin is an investigative journalist from Nigeria and the founder of “West Africa Weekly.”

While the coup has been opposed in the West, Hundeyin explains that inside the country, the military is seen – rightly or wrongly – as leading “anti-imperialist movement; a popular movement against French imperialism.”\

The threat of invasion is far from an idle one. Since 1990, ECOWAS has launched military interventions in seven West African countries, the most recent being in the Gambia in 2017. The group’s actions have ignited significant pushback across the region, with many describing it as a tool of Western imperialism. 

Currently leading ECOWAS is Nigerian president, Bola Tinubu. Tinubu has earned plaudits in the West as a defender of democracy and someone not willing to let another country be taken over by the army. While Tinubu has been praised in the media, his own background calls into question his democratic credentials. As Hundeyin’s reporting exposed, Tinubu made his fortune from trafficking heroin in Chicago and had hundreds of thousands of dollars seized by the U.S. government. There are many other U.S. cases against Tinubu which have never seen the light of day, prompting many to speculate that he is an American intelligence asset.

Will the new government succeed? Will African be plunged into war? And what is the U.S. role in all of this? To find out more, watch the full interview here.

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The Watchdog is 100% independent and listener-supported.

We don’t take corporate ad money. We don’t have billionaire backers. Episodes like this are only possible because of you.

If you value fearless journalism and critical conversations, please consider joining our community of supporters:

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Together, we can keep this work going.

Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.

Labour Party leader Keir Starmer is many bookmakers’ favorite to become the next prime minister of the United Kingdom. Yet behind the politician’s bland, squeaky-clean image lies an individual relentlessly obsessed with power and how to attain it.

From being an ally of socialist leader Jeremy Corbyn as recently as 2019, Starmer has pulled the Labour Party far to the right in an attempt to return them to their position as the red wing of the British oligarchy. 

Today’s guest on “The Watchdog” with Lowkey is Matt Kennard. Kennard is a writer and investigative journalist with the British outlet Declassified UK. Previously, he worked as a reporter for The Financial Times and was a fellow and a director of the Center For Investigative Journalism in London. He has recently published a five-part series of articles on Starmer’s past and his connections to British and American state power. His latest book is “Silent Coup: How Corporations Overthrew Democracy.”

Before becoming an elected politician, Starmer was a barrister and served as head of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), a body that oversees roughly 800,000 prosecutions per year. “Starmer started at the Crown Prosecution Service in 2008. And his time at the CPS is marked by how reactionary and how establishment-friendly he is,” Kennard told Lowkey. Kennard’s recent journalistic work also showed that Starmer secretly served on the Trilateral Commission, a shadowy organization with deep connections to the U.S. national security state. Starmer did not tell his boss, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, as the latter would surely have vetoed the appointment, especially as Starmer worked closely with two former heads of the CIA at the Trilateral Commission. Meanwhile, CIA chief Mike Pompeo declared that the U.S. would do everything it could to stop Corbyn from coming to power.

All the while, Starmer was living it up on the public purse. Kennard’s research has found that Starmer billed the British taxpayer nearly £500,000 (around U.S.$630,000) in expenses, including £160,000 on a chauffeur-driven car during his first two years in the position. “This is a guy who likes living it up, basically,” Kennard said. 

Support the show

The Watchdog is 100% independent and listener-supported.

We don’t take corporate ad money. We don’t have billionaire backers. Episodes like this are only possible because of you.

If you value fearless journalism and critical conversations, please consider joining our community of supporters:

🔗 Support us on Patreon

Together, we can keep this work going.

Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.

Today in “The Watchdog” studio, Lowkey is joined by Assange’s wife Stella. Stella Assange is a South-African born lawyer and human rights defender. Her most famous case is undoubtedly that of her husband, whom she married in 2022. For years, Stella has tirelessly traveled the world raising awareness of Julian’s situation. Before marrying Julian, she attained degrees from the School of African and Oriental Studies (SOAS) in London and from the University of Oxford. Earlier this year, she met with Pope Francis to discuss the situation of whom Lowkey described as “the political prisoner of our time.”

For Lowkey, Assange’s brilliance was taking his anti-war passions and finding a way to directly work with units within the U.S. military to make the public aware of the illegal, immoral, and deeply unpopular decisions being taken in our name. As he said today:

Some of the most deeply heinous and hideous aspects of the Iraqi and Afghan occupations by the U.S., Britain and their allies, have been revealed within the WikiLeaks files. We are talking about millions of documents being made available to the public to understand truly what was happening.”

Despite this, the media cheered Assange’s arrest. The Washington Post’s editorial board, for example, claimed Assange was “no free-press hero” and insisted the arrest was “long overdue.” Likewise, The Wall Street Journal demanded he faces some “accountability,” claiming, “His targets always seem to be democratic institutions or governments.” Yet, as Lowkey and Stella discussed today, the implications for a free press from this case are extraordinary and perilous.

Stella also put a human face to the story, discussing how difficult her husband’s persecution has been. “It’s a daily struggle. It is up and down… Prison life is part of our daily life,” she said, noting that prison authorities limit how much they can speak. When she first met Julian, he was 39. He is now 52, and his health has seriously deteriorated.

Yet even if Assange is somehow liberated, he has still suffered greatly, as Stella told Lowkey. “We will still have been robbed of our lives together. Our children will have been robbed of their early childhood with their father. We are never going to get that back,” she said.

Support the show

The Watchdog is 100% independent and listener-supported.

We don’t take corporate ad money. We don’t have billionaire backers. Episodes like this are only possible because of you.

If you value fearless journalism and critical conversations, please consider joining our community of supporters:

🔗 Support us on Patreon

Together, we can keep this work going.

Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.

The election of longtime peace activist and anti-imperialist Jeremy Corbyn to the position of leader of the U.K. Labour Party inspired hope and dread across the nation. Hope from millions of ordinary people, who, for once, saw a politician that represented them, and dread from the British establishment, who feared what a radical like Corbyn could do if he were elected prime minister. 

Corbyn was subjected to one of history's most prolonged and intense propaganda campaigns. He has been labeled everything from a terrorist sympathizer a communist spy, and a national security threat. 

However, the most sustained attack on Corbyn was that he was a raving anti-Semite. We now know this was in no small part down to a coordinated smear campaign from the Israeli government and its supporters. Here to talk about the forces working in harmony to destroy Corbyn’s movement is returning guest Asa Winstanley.

Asa notes how the movement to topple Corbyn started by targeting his allies. “People around Corbyn started to be picked off, one by one. And that, ultimately, just a few years later, led to Corbyn's political assassination and the movement's decapitation. It was a war of attrition,” he noted. Unfortunately, Corbyn did not see the danger and “appeasement became a knee-jerk instinctive response” from the people around him. 

While Asa’s work has shown how the Israeli Embassy was intimately involved in the skulduggery, the British deep state was also a key player. In 2015, a senior British Army general claimed that if Corbyn were elected, this would precipitate a military coup. Mike Pompeo, head of the CIA at the time, said that the U.S. would take measures to prevent Corbyn from reaching power.

Support the show

The Watchdog is 100% independent and listener-supported.

We don’t take corporate ad money. We don’t have billionaire backers. Episodes like this are only possible because of you.

If you value fearless journalism and critical conversations, please consider joining our community of supporters:

🔗 Support us on Patreon

Together, we can keep this work going.

Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.

It is often better to talk about solutions rather than problems. And today, on "The Watchdog," Lowkey talks to British-Palestinian intellectual Ghada Karmi about her new book, "One State: The Only Democratic Future for Palestine-Israel."

In "One State," Karmi envisages uniting the land, from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea, under one secular, democratic nation, allowing refugees to return to their homeland in safety and enjoy the same rights and securities that those currently living there have. She insists that this is the only way to end the anti-democratic nature of the Israeli state.

Lowkey and Karmi have previously teamed up to debate at the Oxford Union together, and earlier this summer, they were scheduled to discuss her new book in person at a London book launch with the Balfour Project. Yet the night before the event was planned, Karmi received a phone call telling her that it had been canceled. The reason? A Zionist organization called Yachad had pressured the Balfour Project over Lowkey's inclusion. 

For the Balfour Project, she alleges, "keeping them [Yachad] happy was more important than keeping me and you happy." Thus, the event was canceled. There is likely more to this cancellation than a misunderstanding; while the organization's official mission is to "empower British Jews to support a political resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict," in reality, it works closely with Israeli intelligence organizations Shin Bet and Shabak.

Karmi is a survivor of the Nakba of 1948 – the nascent Israeli state's systematic expulsion of Palestinians from their land. While many understand the Nakba as an ongoing process, there is no doubt that 1948 stands out as a particularly bloody and genocidal year in Palestinian history. Today, she talked of her childhood memories, how, despite her parents' assurances, she had a premonition that her family would never be back, and how her family never talked about Palestine because it was simply too traumatic.

One of the little-publicized aspects of the Nakba was the severance of human ties so that people who had been your neighbors, friends or employers somehow disappeared. Because in the rush to save one’s family, where were those people? And as so often happened, they were never reclaimed. Those people went, we don’t know where, and they didn’t know where we had gone. And that is a significant aspect of our eviction of our homeland that often is not talked about.

Support the show

The Watchdog is 100% independent and listener-supported.

We don’t take corporate ad money. We don’t have billionaire backers. Episodes like this are only possible because of you.

If you value fearless journalism and critical conversations, please consider joining our community of supporters:

🔗 Support us on Patreon

Together, we can keep this work going.

Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.

The truth can’t be racist, wrote British Home Secretary Suella Braverman in April of this year, as she peddled xenophobic and debunked tropes about South Asian men being a particular threat to British children. Braverman’s comments come after nearly a decade of national hysteria about so-called Pakistani “grooming gangs” roaming around the country, sexually abusing white children while overly woke authorities watch on, helpless, too scared to act, lest they be called racist.

Braverman, who herself is of South Asian (Indian) origin, made these comments in the far-right magazine The Spectator, an outlet that has published articles with titles such as “In Praise of the Wehrmacht” and "A fascist takeover of Greece? We should be so lucky." Nevertheless, her screed breathed new life into the relentless push to demonize British Muslims.

Here to talk about “grooming gangs,” academic malpractice, pseudoscience, and the malfeasance of the ruling British Conservative Party is Dr. Ella Cockbain, an associate professor in the Department of Security and Crime Science at University College London. Cockbain has been at the heart of scrutinizing the dangerous media tropes presenting Muslims as a threat. She is the author of the article “Failing Victims, fuelling hate: challenging the Harms of the ‘Muslim grooming gangs’ Narrative,” published in the academic journal Race & Class.

Cockbain claims that Braverman is an “overtly racist” politician, noting her (false) comments that members of grooming gangs are “almost all British-Pakistani” and that their victims are “overwhelmingly white girls from disadvantaged or troubled backgrounds” have done much to undermine tolerance and coexistence in the United Kingdom.

“These things are not facts,” Cockbain said; “actually, they [Braverman’s claims] directly contradict the findings of her own department, the U.K. home office.” While Cockbain agrees that men of Pakistani origin have committed horrific crimes against children, so have people from all other racial, ethnic, religious and class backgrounds. Yet when other offenders – particularly white men – attack children, their race is never singled out as a causal factor. Thus, when Jimmy Saville, Rolf Harris, Prince Andrew or a host of other high-profile white abusers hit headlines, there is no campaign to demand all white men be put under high surveillance, and there are no far-right marches demanding payback for what whites have done to “our children.”

Support the show

The Watchdog is 100% independent and listener-supported.

We don’t take corporate ad money. We don’t have billionaire backers. Episodes like this are only possible because of you.

If you value fearless journalism and critical conversations, please consider joining our community of supporters:

🔗 Support us on Patreon

Together, we can keep this work going.

Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.

It is now over four years ago that Julian Assange was spirited away from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London and detained in Belmarsh's maximum security prison. Being locked in a tiny concrete room for more than 1500 days has taken a serious toll on the Australian publisher; reports from this week suggest that his health is “deteriorating by the minute.”

One man who has covered the Wikileaks co-founder’s case closer than almost anyone is Kevin Gosztola. Gosztola is an American journalist, the managing editor of Shadowproof and co-hosts the Unauthorized Disclosure Podcast with Rania Khalek. He is the author of the new book “Guilty of Journalism: The Political Case against Julian Assange.” Today, he joins “Watchdog” host Lowkey to talk all things WikiLeaks, Assange, leaks and cybersecurity.

The U.S. government has always been hostile to leakers revealing embarrassing or compromising information about its actions. But Gosztola states that the Central Intelligence Agency’s “gloves came off” in 2017 as it ramped up its attacks on Assange. By 2017, CIA Director Mike Pompeo had labeled WikiLeaks as a hostile non-state intelligence service and began turning the screw. For Gosztola, the CIA’s response was a symptom of the agency’s insecurity; “And so at that point, the CIA probably feels they are threatened, their whole regime of pursuing the global war on terrorism is in jeopardy as a result of WikiLeaks,” he told Lowkey.

It is often forgotten how much incredible, extraordinary information WikiLeaks provided the world. This included the Guantánamo prison manuals, which showed that the U.S. Army hid prisoners from Red Cross inspectors and illegally held captives in solitary confinement to soften them up for interrogation.

What WikiLeaks published was barely a toothpick in a forest compared to the amount of information the U.S. national security state keeps secret. Every day, Gosztola said, Washington produces tens of millions of pieces of classified information. This means, he added that it is becoming increasingly difficult and unwieldy to keep all these secrets under lock and key. If this continues, it might become “impossible for the U.S. government to keep doubling down and adding more infrastructure… eventually, the system might actually collapse in on itself because it isn’t able to support all of the stresses that are being put on it to protect” itself, he adds

Support the show

The Watchdog is 100% independent and listener-supported.

We don’t take corporate ad money. We don’t have billionaire backers. Episodes like this are only possible because of you.

If you value fearless journalism and critical conversations, please consider joining our community of supporters:

🔗 Support us on Patreon

Together, we can keep this work going.

Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.

Even as Israel’s war against Palestine continues unabated, a new movement has arisen in the United Kingdom, challenging the Israeli war machine – and it has been winning some impressive victories.

Founded in 2020, Palestine Action is a grassroots activist movement that seeks to end British complicity in Israeli war crimes by shutting down arms manufacturing sites across the U.K. Today, Lowkey welcomes back Palestine Action co-founder Huda Amori to talk about the rise of her organization that has taken the country by storm and has weapons manufacturers fleeing. Born in the U.K., Amori is a Palestinian-Iraqi whose father was chased out of his home by Israeli soldiers in 1967, and forced to flee, without even a pair of shoes.

Decades later, Amori has found a way to fight back, using direct action to occupy and shut down Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest arms firm. With the help of the community in her native Oldham, Amori and Palestine Action’s occupation has forced Elbit Systems to leave the town and sell their factory at a substantial loss. Last summer, they abandoned their London headquarters. And last winter, the British Ministry of Defence canceled around £280 million (around U.S.$350 million) of contracts with the company.

Elbit’s products, such as drones and surveillance tech, are directly used on the civilian population of Palestine, Amori explained. They are then marketed as “battle tested” around the world and sold to countries like Australia and India.

“If you are building weapons here to be sent back to Israel to be used against Palestinians, or if you are a customer of weapons that have been developed on the Palestinian people, then you are just as guilty,” Amori said, adding:

For example, the British Ministry of Defence buy many of these weapons after they have been developed and used against the Palestinians, which only encourages the further development and use of weapons on Palestinians, and to continue the occupation. This cycle of violence just continues to benefit the oppressors and work against the oppressed.”

While Amori and Palestine Action are constantly charged and regularly appear in court for criminal damages, they are yet to be convicted. Indeed, once they get in front of a jury to tell their story, it is often Elbit Systems that seems to be on trial. At the end of last year, a jury at the Crown Court unanimously found Amori and her colleagues innocent, accepting that they were trying to prevent an even bigger crime from taking place. The jury even proceeded to thank the activists for their bravery publicly. Some, Amori claimed, went so far as to blow kisses at them.

Support the show

The Watchdog is 100% independent and listener-supported.

We don’t take corporate ad money. We don’t have billionaire backers. Episodes like this are only possible because of you.

If you value fearless journalism and critical conversations, please consider joining our community of supporters:

🔗 Support us on Patreon

Together, we can keep this work going.

Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.