At the Arms Fair

Every two years, the UK hosts one of the world’s largest arms fairs at the Excel centre in East London. The Defence and Security Equipment International (DSEI) describes itself as the ‘flagship event for the UK’, relied on by ‘the world’s leading defence organisations and most influential stakeholders … to bring the right people together’. It also brings together protesters in a network called Stop the Arms Fair, which has disrupted every DSEI since 2011. This year, their numbers have been bolstered by hundreds of demonstrators protesting in particular at the presence of companies profiting from the genocide in Gaza.

The UK government – which co-organises the fair – declined to invite an official Israeli delegation to DSEI. This was a largely symbolic act, given that among the 1600 exhibitors there are 51 Israeli arms companies, including Rafael Advanced Defence Systems Ltd, Israel Aerospace Industries (both owned by the state) and Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest private military contractor, whose British subsidiary was one of Palestine Action’s targets. The Ministry of Defence is considering offering a £2 billion contract to a consortium led by Elbit Systems UK to train the British military. Keir Starmer welcomed the Israeli president, Isaac Herzog, to Downing Street yesterday. Herzog has said that Palestinians are collectively responsible for the Hamas attacks in October 2023.

This year’s DSEI has been buoyed by newly swollen military budgets as states have fallen behind the US-led consensus on rearmament. The event coincides with the launch of the UK’s Defence Industrial Strategy, which aims to ‘make defence an engine for growth’, spending billions ‘to make the UK the best place in the world to start and grow a defence firm’. Meanwhile, health, education and welfare budgets are subject to ongoing austerity. The defence secretary, John Healey, reaffirmed Starmer’s commitment to making Britain ‘battle-ready’ – and giving ‘our own forces the battlefield edge’ – in his keynote speech this afternoon.

Inside the Excel centre, owned by a subsidiary of an Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund, the real beneficiaries of this new military largesse traded their wares: Lockheed Martin UK and General Dynamics Land Systems (both subsidiaries of giant US firms) unveiled a new armoured vehicle, part-manufactured in Bedfordshire, that will increase the ‘lethality’ of the British army. In the Manufacturing Zone, delegates could learn about ‘eco-friendly production techniques’, an oxymoron that belies the catastrophic ecological impact of the arms industry.

DSEI’s Space Forum is sponsored by Project Kuiper, Amazon’s answer to Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet constellation. Elbit presented Frontier, a new AI-powered border surveillance platform.

Stop the Arms Fair organises protests throughout the two weeks it takes to set up and run DSEI. Before the fair opens, queues of lorries bring weapons, vehicles and other equipment to the Excel centre. When I went to the peace camp last week, there was a handful of tents in the strip of green beside the goods entrance on Royal Albert Way. The activists said the gathering was the smallest it had been in years. A man in a faded red bomber jacket, who lived locally and said he had been at every protest since they started, was pleased that people had been motivated by Palestine to come down for the main event but said the set-up week was when there was real potential for disruption: ‘Imagine if you got the numbers going on the national marches to block these lorries going in – we could actually shut it down!’

On Tuesday, the opening morning of the arms fair, attendees swarmed off the Elizabeth Line at Custom House station and made straight for the Excel entrance; protesters were funnelled the long way round, almost rubbing shoulders with the grey suits and lanyards filing in from the hotels at the centre’s western end. Someone dressed as the grim reaper, a keffiyeh draped around his neck, stood silently in the thoroughfare. A smiling woman in sunglasses held a sign that read ‘only arms dealers past this point’.

As delegates hurried through the barriers at the main entrance, the line of police protecting them stood with blank faces as protesters chanted: ‘Over sixty thousand dead – you’re arresting us instead!’ (At the weekend, nearly nine hundred people were arrested in Parliament Square on suspicion of supporting Palestine Action.) One speaker – a medic who had worked in Gaza – described the horror of handing the lifeless bodies of children back to their parents, and appealed to the police to ‘do the right thing.’ The mother of a Palestine Action activist who is in prison awaiting trial said to them: ‘You are protecting the real terrorists!’

More than a hundred groups co-ordinated to try to shut DSEI down. There were banners from the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, the Global Women’s Strike and Quakers for peace, among others. Speakers made connections between repression at home and the obliteration of human rights in Palestine, Congo, Sudan and Haiti. Groups of different faiths gathered on a triangle of grass as a Jewish woman said the Mourner’s Kaddish ‘for all those lives unnecessarily lost and all those irreparably damaged’.

A group of mothers with babies and toddlers stood a little outside the main throng, waving cardboard doves painted in the colours of the Palestinian flag. Sun cream, bottles of water and flapjacks were passed around. Two local estate agents were mistaken for DSEI delegates and met with calls of ‘shame on you!’ before explaining that they had just left the office to show their support for the protest. I gave one of them a Free Palestine badge to avert the same happening on their way out.

By mid-morning the crowd had splintered to block the other entrances through which police and security staff were herding the delegates, heads down amid heckles of ‘blood on your hands!’ At one point someone reported that all entrances had been blocked, but not for long. When protesters tried to break through the police line, they were pushed to the ground. I met a young woman from Newcastle who said an officer had punched her in the face. In the melee, one young person broke their ankle and was taken away in an ambulance.

I spoke to two junior doctors, dressed in blue scrubs, who said they had tried to administer first aid but been obstructed by the police. They said they were there because everyone should be, but also as colleagues of the medical staff whom Israel has systematically targeted in its assault on Gaza. One of them, an A&E doctor, said she had worked at the Excel centre in 2020 when it served briefly as the Nightingale Hospital to treat Covid-19 patients. She described the ‘state abandonment’ during the pandemic of the racialised minorities who were disproportionately ‘essential workers’. Coming back for the arms fair made her think of the many ways in which state violence is inflicted on the marginalised.

By midday, the crowd had thinned out. Several far-right YouTubers milled around, commentating on the ‘antifa’ protesters and offering to escort the few delegates who were still trickling in. The police line suddenly moved forward, pushing the crowd back past a large multi-faith group sitting in silent prayer. The front row of protesters held a banner several metres long, naming some of the more than twenty thousand children killed in Gaza in the last 23 months.

A phalanx of police in riot gear rushed in from the other side, screaming ‘halt!’ It looked as if we were going to be kettled. People scattered, but the police seemed more interested in hastening our departure than detaining us there. As I walked back to Custom House, I ran into the man in the red bomber jacket I had met the week before. He was telling two young women about local opposition to the Excel centre when it was built in 2000. He waved as I passed, calling: ‘See you at the next one!’