Protesters Denounce Lockheed Martin’s Genocide for Profit in Victoria

About 125 protesters occupied the parking lot of Lockheed Martin’s office in Esquimalt to denounce its profiting off Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories, and more recently its graphic campaign of genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza.

The event was organised by mothers and promoted as family-friendly, and indeed several people brought their toddlers to the facility’s parking lot. It unfolded in a blunter manner than one would expect from that description, however, as none in the crowd were in the mood for a well-behaved intervention. More about that in a moment.

Multiple mothers came forward to speak, and while their speech was polite, their words were incisive. Lockheed Martin was labelled a war crime and genocide profiteer for providing arms to the so-called Israel Defence Forces (IDF), including thousands of tonnes of bombs meant to be mounted on fighter jets; hardly the kind of weapon to take on a million defenceless civilians, much less rescuing hostages.

They described conditions on the ground that drove health care for mothers and newborns in particular back to pre-industrial ages, where mothers were far more likely to die of childbirth and complications thereof than most casual observers in developed nations care to remember. To say nothing of the displacement by raining bombs part. Or hospitals struggling to keep premature newborns alive without incubators for lack of electricity. In short, they described a quintessential aspect of genocide: the engineered killing of newborns and expecting mothers, all on Western taxpayer’s dime in military aid to Israel.

Volunteers then tentatively read names from a nonexhaustive list of Palestinians killed since October 7, which still included over 6000 entries spanning across roughly 200 pages. Even an hour on, they had barely made a dent into that list, which included many victims not even one year old.

The protesters, however, would not limit themselves to spreading their message with words that scatter into the wind as soon as they were spoken. They also painted the facades of the facility with bloody hands, and littered those walls with posters of children killed during the ongoing massacre, presumably by bombs manufactured by Lockheed Martin. By the time they dispersed, the building was an utter mess of condemning messages.

I had a conversation with a fellow protester on my way back, at the bus stop. We’re both of the opinion that targeted direct action events like this have more of an impact than rallying at the Legislature every weekend while no public officials are in attendance. In this case, we could imagine what kind of conversation engineers would have at the dinner table tonight, when they told their families how their day went. I wonder whether they can imagine their own kids being shooting targets for the bombs they build; if so, there’s an obvious avenue for them to show their solidarity to the Palestinian people, and their humanity to their next-door neighbours.