For nearly three years, foreign ministries in Washington, London, and Brussels have debated arms embargoes on Israel in committee rooms, largely without result. Meanwhile, a much less formal network of ordinary people has been trying to accomplish the same goal from the ground up—one factory gate, one shareholder register, and one pension fund at a time.
Palestine Action , the direct-action network founded in the UK in 2020 by Huda Ammori and Richard Barnard, is built on a simple theory of change: if governments won’t stop arming Israel, activists will go after the companies that do it for them. Its central target has been Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer , which supplies the bulk of the drones, munitions, and surveillance equipment used in Gaza and the West Bank.
But the network’s real innovation is how it maps the entire supply chain—not just Elbit’s factories, but the banks that hold its shares, the recruiters that staff it, the cleanroom contractors that service its subsidiaries, and the local landlords who rent it space. Every link has become a pressure point.
How the N etwork A ctually W orks
Palestine Action isn’t a single organization so much as a constellation. Its hub-and-spoke structure includes a UK core, plus franchises, affiliates, and offshoots that have adopted its name, its tactics, or both. These affiliates include Unity of Fields, formerly Palestine Action US , and sympathetic cells in Canada, France, and Germany.
Tactics range widely. Some are the kinds of action that make headlines: blockading factory entrances, occupying rooftops, spray-painting military aircraft. Others are quieter and far more replicable by an average person—researching a company’s supply relationships, showing up to a shareholder meeting, filing a public-records request on a pension fund’s holdings, or simply refusing to bank with an institution that finances the war.
This second track has produced some of the most durable wins. In 2026, for instance, Urbana, Illinois became the first Illinois city to bar its pension investments from the top 100 global arms producers; Burbank, California divested from Caterpillar and Honeywell after a local coalition campaign; and the state of Maryland’s pension fund sold off 85 percent of its Israeli bond holdings—about $62 million—after more than a year of sustained pressure. None of those campaigns required anyone to climb a fence.
Palestine Action’s campaign against Elbit’s UK operations has been credited with forcing the closure of the company’s London headquarters , the cancellation of Ministry of Defence contracts, and the loss of its UK recruitment partner. Barclays bank—long a target of Palestine Solidarity Campaign’s parallel boycott— stopped holding shares in Elbit in 2024 , something campaigners point to as evidence that sustained pressure, even short of full divestment, moves institutional money.
None of this has stopped the war. But it has made doing business with Israel’s arms industry measurably more expensive and more reputationally toxic, which is precisely the mechanism that sanctions and embargoes are supposed to achieve when foreign ministries won’t act.
The S afety Q uestion
In July 2025, the UK government proscribed Palestine Action as a terrorist organization under the Terrorism Act 2000, making membership or expressed support punishable by up to 14 years in prison. A High Court panel ruled in February 2026 that the ban was disproportionate and unlawful, noting that only a small fraction of the group’s actions met the legal definition of terrorism, and that ordinary criminal law was already available to prosecute any violence. The government appealed, and in June 2026 the Court of Appeal reversed that ruling and upheld the ban. More than 1,600 people have been arrested in the UK simply for expressing support for the group since the proscription took effect, and four activists convicted only of criminal damage at an Elbit factory were sentenced on the basis of a “terrorist connection.”
That is a genuinely severe legal environment, and it is specific to the UK. Direct action involving property damage or blockades carries real prosecutorial risk anywhere, including the United States, where Unity of Fields and similar groups are not proscribed but individual activists can and do face criminal charges for actions like the 2023 blockade of Elbit’s Cambridge, Massachusetts office .
The boycott, divestment, and shareholder-pressure (BDS) track—writing to a pension board, organizing a bank boycott, supporting BDS-endorsed campaigns —carries none of that risk and remains fully legal free speech and civic organizing in the United States and most of Europe. The two tracks get conflated constantly, including by the UK government itself, but they are not the same thing. This kind of conflation is exactly what makes proscription such a blunt instrument: it criminalizes a banner alongside a blockade.
O ne P erson S till M atters
Much of this network’s actual leverage comes from single, unglamorous decisions. Huda Ammori didn’t wait for a government to act; she and a handful of others started a campaign against one company in 2020 that has since reshaped how a much larger movement thinks about supply chains. The Boycat app , the closest thing the BDS movement has to an official target list , exists because someone decided that consumer choice needed better information, not more slogans. A single city council member willing to bring a divestment resolution to a vote in Urbana did something no protest outside a factory could: moved actual pension dollars.
None of that required anyone to risk a UK terrorism charge. It required deciding that a supply chain is not too complicated, or too far away, to trace and interrupt.
A war sustained by a transnational arms and finance network, in other words, is being contested by an equally transnational, but far more improvised, citizen network. The citizen network’s most effective tool so far hasn’t been confrontation, it’s been documentation. Knowing exactly which bank, which pension fund, which subcontractor is implicated—and saying so publicly and persistently—has moved more money than any single blockade. This tactic is the most likely one to still be legal, and successful, in the near future.
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Trying to Choke Off the Weapons Behind Gaza
Aggregated summary from an independent source. Read the original at FPIP.