Disrupting the genocidal military-industrial machine is not a crime : freedom for the ULM5 !

il y a 20 heures
4 min de lecture

When states protect Israel and their arms manufacturers, those who try to stop them become the accused. We refuse this inversion of justice.

In September 2025, five activists made a decision that governments refuse to make : to act.

Faced with an arms industry that manufactures the tools of mass killing and destruction, faced with companies that turn the deaths of peoples into profits, the ULM5 chose to concretely oppose the military-industrial machine. They entered the site of Elbit Systems, a company complicit in genocide and a major Israeli arms manufacturer, whose technologies equip the Israeli army and are used against Palestinians.

Direct action targeted the facility's production equipment, disabling tools used to manufacture military components, particularly drone systems. Company officials estimated the resulting damage at approximately one million euros.

Activists frame the disruption as a response to global military spending, arguing that arms manufacturers profit from conflicts across the Global South, including the ongoing genocide and heavy loss of life in Palestine.

The action highlights a growing legal crackdown, with protestors facing severe prison sentences while arms supply chains remain uninterrupted.

Despite these stakes, it is peace activists like Vi, Zoe, Leandra, Crow, and Daniel who now face imprisonment.

The real crime is manufacturing weapons, not trying to stop them.

For months, Gaza has been devastated by a military campaign that has caused massive destruction and a humanitarian catastrophe. The Palestinian population suffers daily bombardments, forced displacement, organized starvation, and the systematic destruction of its conditions of existence.

In the occupied West Bank, colonization and settler violence against Palestinians continue. The apartheid state suffocates and kills every day. Behind this colonial domination lies a military infrastructure: companies, technologies, production chains, and states that allow it to function.

This system does not stand only with soldiers and bombs. It stands with factories. With lucrative contracts. With corporate shareholders. With governments that turn a blind eye or, worse, are directly complicit.

The profits and mechanisms of control forged through human suffering do not stay on the "other side" of the world. What is field-tested on populations abroad is inevitably exported back to our own doorsteps, seen clearly in the escalation of militarized borders, mass surveillance, and punitive deportation laws. The tools of foreign occupation become the machinery of domestic repression.

While political powers speak of “international law” and human rights, they continue to politically, legally, and materially support state like Israel. Meanwhile, the ordinary people who attempt to intervene, who place their bodies in the gears of weapons production to stop the flow of arms, become prisoners of the state.

We refuse this hypocrisy. We reject a world where property damage to a war machine is treated as a severe crime, while the destruction of human lives is treated as business as usual.

The ULM5 are being prosecuted because they refused to be complicit.

The five activists of the ULM5 - Vi, Zoe, Leandra, Crow, and Daniel - have now been imprisoned in Germany for ten months in pre-trial detention. Kept in separate prisons across southern Germany, their detention has been marked by deeply concerning practices: systematic isolation, humiliation, forced nudity, lack of adequate medical care, and being moved in handcuffs and leg chains. These treatments are an attack on their dignity and on the fundamental principles of human rights.

Their high-security show trial is taking place in Stuttgart-Stammheim, one of the most notorious judicial complexes in Germany, where Crow is currently being held. Inside the courtroom, the state has built a psychological battlefield: the five are locked behind a thick glass cage, deliberately isolated to present them to the public as dangerous criminals. They are forbidden from sitting next to their defense attorneys, prevented from speaking with one another, and returned each day to isolation for 23 hours in their cells.

Their trial must not become a warning sent to all those who refuse to remain spectators in the face of mass crimes. Because behind the ULM5, it is a political message that is being judged: the idea that individuals can still stand up against military and economic powers.

We will not allow solidarity with Palestine to be criminalized.

Meanwhile, politicians like Netanyahu and Gallant move freely despite facing international arrest warrants. It is those who orchestrate mass violence - not peace activists - who pose a threat to the world, and it is they who belong behind thick glass and bars.

Opposing a war machine is not a crime.

Refusing to look away from a genocide is not a crime.

Attempting to disarm those who manufacture weapons of destruction is not a crime.

The real scandal is not the action of the ULM5. The real scandal is that an industry can produce the means of killing with complete impunity, while those who step in to stop it are thrown into prison cells.

Their struggle is a struggle for life. Their courage reminds us of a stark truth: when institutions do not merely fail, but actively refuse to prevent atrocities, ordinary people must mobilize to enforce justice.

Freedom for the ULM5 !

We call on all who refuse state-sanctioned barbarity to rise and mobilize.

We must confront the German judicial institutions that act as legal shields for imperialism and war profiteers.

We demand an immediate end to pre-trial torture, an end to high-security isolation, and the total restoration of their fundamental rights.

Stand in solidarity with Palestine. Stand with the thousands of Palestinian political prisoners languishing in occupation dungeons for the crime of resisting land theft and genocide, and stand with all who face the state’s cages for taking action to stop the war machine.