Stop Bulldozer Genocide: campaigners target JCB as part of mass disruption at London arms fair
SEPTEMBER 10, 2025
By the Stop JCB Bulldozer Genocide Campaign
Yesterday morning, Tuesday 9th September, campaigners, coming together under the banner of #ShutDSEIDown, blockaded the entrance to the three-day Defence and Security Equipment International ( DSEI) trade exhibition in East London during its opening. Despite facing violent policing as well as a small fascist presence targeting the protestors, the protestors succeeded in effectively disrupting this obscene showcasing of the purveyors of war and genocide, which included no less than 51 Israeli companies.
British bulldozer manufacturer JCB, owned by Reform-supporting billionaire Lord Anthony Bamford, is one of the companies exhibiting its equipment at DSEI. Members of the Stop JCB Bulldozer Genocide campaign joined the protests. Campaigners held a banner with the slogan “JCB: Stop Bulldozer Genocide in Palestine, India and Kashmir” and joined other protestors in vocally reminding the arms buyers and sellers attending that “Your profits are covered in Palestinian blood” and “You are killing children too.”
In January 2025, the Stop JCB campaign published a report detailing JCB’s role in ethnic cleansing and genocide in Palestine, India and Kashmir.
In Palestine, JCB operates through its sole dealer, the Israeli company Comasco, which holds contracts with Israel’s Ministry of Defence for the same model of JCB machines used in the demolitions and construction of settlements.
From as early as 2006, the Israeli military has been photographed demolishing Palestinian homes in the West Bank with JCB bulldozers.
Currently, JCB is also complicit in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, having been listed in UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese’s July report among numerous companies directly aiding and profiting from the genocide. Armoured, unbranded JCB High Mobility Engineer Excavator (HMEE) machines, known as Ami in Hebrew, have long been used by the Israeli army and are now being used in Gaza.
In India, Narendra Modi’s Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government has consistently used JCB bulldozers to demolish Muslim homes, shops and places of worship across various Indian states in an ongoing project disturbingly named ‘bulldozer justice’.
In fact, JCB is so closely intertwined with this project that it has come to symbolise attacks on Muslims. JCB bulldozers have been used to carry out both punitive and arbitrary demolitions. In the punitive demolitions, the homes of people accused of crimes, which include protesting against the BJP, are destroyed.
In recent months, a targeted campaign of evictions, including demolitions by JCB bulldozers, has been underway across the country.
In the northeastern state of Assam, 1,080 families were displaced on 12th July, and 19-year-old Sakuar Ali was killed in police firing in the Goalpara district on 17th July. According to Human Rights Watch, the BJP government is fuelling discrimination by arbitrarily expelling Bengali Muslims from the country, including Indian citizens.
Border Guard Bangladesh reported that India expelled more than 1,500 Muslims to Bangladesh between 7th May and 15th June. In July, around 3,400 Bengali Muslim homes were demolished in five eviction drives across Assam. In Siasat Nagar, Gujarat, 8,000 Muslim homes were demolished in May; and in the Wazirpur area of Delhi, JCB bulldozer demolitions in June destroyed the homes, built several decades ago, of Dalit, oppressed caste and Muslim working class families, originally migrants from Bihar, with no rehabilitation.
In Kashmir, which is one of the most militarised zones on earth, JCB machines have consistently been used in house demolitions during large-scale evictions, despite many residents providing proof of ownership.
This is just one aspect of a broader regime of human rights violations of the Kashmiri people by the Indian state, particularly since 2019, when the limited autonomy of the state of Jammu and Kashmir was revoked by the Indian government. In order to facilitate the entry of Indians and Indian capital, land and property are being acquired, dispossessing local owners without any due process.
The campaign JCB: Stop Bulldozer Genocide is a coalition of organisations with two main demands. The first is that JCB must end its relationship with the Israeli Ministry of Defence and cease all activities in occupied Palestine.
The second is that JCB must commit to ensuring that its products are not used for human rights violations in India and Kashmir through robust monitoring and prevention systems. This includes making compulsory the use of its existing LiveLink technology to trace and locate JCB machines.
JCB equipment – including the HMEE machines – has routinely been exhibited at the annual DSEI exhibition.
A member of the campaign stated: “DSEI is a hub for many of the most genocidal and warmongering companies in the world. JCB is no exception. They are proudly exhibiting the same machinery that is directly used to demolish homes, businesses and places of worship in Palestine, India and Kashmir, fuelling programmes of ethnic cleansing and genocide. JCB’s presence at DSEI is a reminder to the world that they are not just a construction company, but a producer of military equipment openly used to further war and violence. JCB defence products have been displayed at DSEI for years – we will not let this continue in peace so long as they remain complicit in genocide. JCB have blood on their hands.”
Images c/o author
"The people who run these companies are war criminals," said one campaigner. "They should be investigated for crimes against humanity, not invited to profit from the unspeakable devastation they have caused."
Demonstrators protest outside the DSEI arms fair in London on September 9, 2025.
(Photo by Peter Marshall/Facebook)
Brett Wilkins
Sep 09, 2025
COMMON DREAMS
Thousands of demonstrators rallied Tuesday outside a major London arms fair to protest what one campaigner called the United Kingdom's "peak complicity in genocide" in Gaza, where Israeli forces have killed more than 64,600 Palestinians—mostly women and children—and wounded over 163,000 others since October 2023.
The Independent reported at least three arrests for alleged assaults on police officers outside the the biennial Defense and Security Equipment International (DSEI) UK trade show, which is being held at Excel London at the Royal Victoria Dock. At least one person was also reportedly taken away in an ambulance.
Video posted to social media showed police officers shoving people to the ground, as well as DSEI attendees smirking and recording on their phones as they passed demonstrators.
Protesters chanted "shut it down," waved Palestinian flags, and held up signs with messages like "stop arming Israel," "only war criminals past this point," and "we hope that the screams of babies will haunt them in their sleep."
Ajahn Santamono, a Buddhist monk taking part in Tuesday's protest, lamented to Middle East Eye that "people who contribute to genocide and mass murder are protected and supported, while people of conscience who try to protest this are the ones who are arrested, criminalized, and treated with violence."
On Monday, members of the direct action group Shut the System sabotaged fiber optic internet cables and splashed red paint over portions of the DSEI venue.
"How can anyone with a shred of humanity build their fortune on mass slaughter?" the group asked. "Shut the System's answer—they are a symptom of a global financial system that prioritizes extreme, psychopathic profiteering for growth's sake alone, above solid healthcare and the natural support systems underpinning all life on Earth."
More than 50 Israeli arms manufacturers and US weapons giants including Lockheed Martin—which makes the F-35 fighter used by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to bomb Gaza—are among the approximately 1,600 exhibitors taking part in DSEI.
The United States is far and away the world's leading enabler of Israel's war on Gaza, which is the subject of an ongoing International Court of Justice genocide case and International Criminal Court arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.
Some of the IDF's most powerful arms—including 1,000- and 2,000-pound bombs that have been repeatedly used to massacre Palestinian civilians—are provided by the United States and the tens of billions of dollars in armed aid it lavishes upon Israel.
"The US and Europe-backed slaughter of families in Palestine is the frontline of our struggle for climate and social justice globally," said Shut the System. "If we can't stop this genocide, power holders will use it as a blueprint to commit genocides elsewhere."
The advocacy group Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) said ahead of DSEI that the UK government "keeps insisting it is doing everything in its power to hold the Israeli government to account for its actions."
However, a report published by the group last week shows that "this is an outrageous and offensive lie."
The report notes that "the UK is deeply complicit in supporting Israel's genocide in Gaza: through arms sales, [Royal Air Force] reconnaissance flights over Gaza, from which it is suspected intelligence is shared with Israel, training of Israeli soldiers, and other forms of military cooperation."
According to the report:
Despite the government's decision on September 2, 2024 to suspend arms export licenses to Israel... they are still allowing the supply of crucial components for Israel's 45 F-35 combat aircraft, so long as they are supplied indirectly via the US or other countries, rather than directly to Israel. These are used to bomb Gaza, at an extraordinary level of intensity, requiring a constant supply of spare parts. By its own admission at the time of the decision, the government accepts that these UK-supplied components may well be used by Israel to violate international humanitarian law in Gaza.
CAAT media coordinator Emily Apple said that the UK has "reached peak complicity in genocide in allowing 51 Israeli arms companies to exhibit at DSEI."
"It is allowing companies to market their genocide tested weapons to human rights abusing countries around the world," Apple added. "The people who run these companies are war criminals. They should be investigated for crimes against humanity, not invited to profit from the unspeakable devastation they have caused in Gaza."
Other actions Tuesday included a Quaker meeting at Waterloo Station attended by around 200 people, part of No Faith in War Day.
Anti-DSEI protests are set to continue Wednesday, when the Palestine Solidarity Campaign is planning a 5:00 pm "pots and pans protest" meant to "greet the arms traders with a wall of noise."
The protests against DSEI follow last weekend's arrest of nearly 900 supporters of the banned UK-based group Palestine Action in London's Parliament Square.
