To End the Genocide, We Must Hold Weapons Manufacturers Accountable (or Shut Them Down)

Sophie Shepherd

 December 16, 2025

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Image courtesy, Demilitarize Brooklyn Navy Yard.

Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank just passed its 800^th day (and 77^th year): at least 70,000 have been confirmed dead, including 20,000 children – and Israel shows no sign of stopping. Since a ceasefire was agreed to on October 10, Israel has attacked Gazans with bombs, snipers, and ground mobilizations nearly 500 times. In the West Bank, Israel has killed and detained hundreds of Palestinians and approved 19 new settlements.

None of this carnage is possible without assistance from the United States: we supply two-thirds of Israel’s foreign weapons and sent $12.5 billion in military aid in 2024 alone. While other countries reckoning with Israel’s war crimes have restricted or ended weapons transfers to Israel, the U.S. is contemplating legislation to fill in the “gaps” created by those embargoes.

For those of us living in the U.S., “Solidarity,” in the words of Gandhi Peace Award winner Omar Barghouti, “becomes moral duty.”

The weapons Israel is using to murder innocent Palestinians are manufactured right here in the United States. 2024 was the industry’s most profitable year on record, making $679 billion in revenue. Billions of dollars in profit are made every year off the weapons “battle-tested” against children in Gaza and the West Bank.

Our moral duty, then, is to hold these weapons manufacturers accountable for their complicity in Israel’s war crimes.

A new campaign in Brooklyn, New York, is doing just that. In October, the grassroots community organization PAL-Awda, which has advocated for the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their ancestral homeland since 2000, launched a campaign against Mini-Circuits, a small company manufacturing radar and microwave technology – and several critical parts for weapons used in Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

“It is our moral responsibility to organize against the companies in our own communities that enable and profit off of the genocide of our people,” a PAL-Awda spokesperson told me.

Mini-Circuits, headquartered in a dull concrete building in South Brooklyn, produces radar components for weapons manufactured by Lockheed Martin and used to kill Palestinians in Gaza. Public records on the HigherGov database show Mini-Circuits has won over $2.2 million in subcontracts with Lockheed Martin to produce these components in the last four years.

These Lockheed Martin weapons include the Hellfire Missile, Patriot Missile, and Joint Air-to-Ground Missile. Survivors in Gaza have found remnants of the Hellfire Missile – known as the “fire-and-forget” missile – in the rubble of residential buildings, schools, and health care centers. The U.S. has sold at least 3,000 Hellfire Missiles to Israel since October 2023.

PAL-Awda has held two rallies outside Mini-Circuits’ headquarters since the campaign began, hoping to speak with employees. Both times, the company sent all employees home before the rally began.

“We understand that many of these employees may not be aware of the impact of their work,” PAL-Awda’s spokesperson said. “We are here to remind workers that they too have agency: they can agitate within the company in support of our demands to cut weapons contracts, refuse to work on projects that are intended for weapons, or quit in an act of protest.”

PAL-Awda’s goal is to pressure Mini-Circuits to drop its contracts with Lockheed Martin and other weapons manufacturers complicit in genocide, “a victory that certainly feels possible, as these contracts make up only a fraction of Mini-Circuits’ total revenue,” the spokesperson said.

The Mini-Circuits campaign isn’t the only promising anti-militarism campaign in New York. Just ten miles north, there are two more military manufacturers hidden inside the old Brooklyn Navy Yard: Easy Aerial, a drone manufacturer; and Crye Precision, a tactical gear manufacturer. Both make products for the Israeli Defense Forces.

The Demilitarize Brooklyn Navy Yard campaign has spent over a year fighting to evict these companies from city property. In September, State Senator Jabari Brisport joined the campaign at a press conference outside the Navy Yard: “Mark my words: they will be removed.”

These campaigns have a track record of success: in 2024, the Boycott, Divest, Sanction (BDS) Boston campaign forced Elbit Systems to vacate its office in Cambridge.

The U.K.-based Elbit Systems is Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer, and they had initially chosen the Cambridge office to be in close proximity to Harvard and MIT. After two years of sustained protest, which included pickets, noise demonstrations, and spray paint, Elbit vacated the office. The local community made the weapons giant unwelcome in Cambridge’s tech sector.

While an office closure for a weapons giant like Elbit may not be financially devastating, the same can’t be said for a smaller company.

If evicted, Easy Aerial and Crye Precision would both need to relocate their headquarters – at a hefty cost. By leasing in the Navy Yard, they avoid real estate taxes and are eligible for multiple tax credits and reduced energy costs. These benefits should be reserved for the artist studios and small businesses that make up most of the Navy Yard’s tenants – not companies profiting off a genocide.

“When you know something unjust is happening in your own neighborhood, you have to speak up,” a parent who lives near the Navy Yard told me in June.

Mini-Circuits also appears to be vulnerable to community input, if their closure ahead of PAL-Awda’s rallies implies anything. They manufacture radio and microwave components for a variety of industries, including telecommunications, medicine, satellites, cable networks, aerospace, and defense. It is entirely within their power to stop making parts for Lockheed Martin’s horrific missiles – and they have a moral imperative to do so.

Lockheed Martin cannot manufacture its missiles without Mini-Circuits’ components. If PAL-Awda succeeds, Lockheed will need to find another supplier. It is up to us, in communities around the country, to make sure that no company in our neighborhood is complicit in genocide.

Sophie Shepherd is a Brooklyn-based writer and an organizer with Planet Over Profit (POP), a youth-led climate justice group. She graduated summa cum laude from Scripps College in 2024, where she received a B.A. in Environmental Analysis and Writing & Rhetoric.

Back to Cold War?

Evaggelos Vallianatos

 December 16, 2025

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After ten-year-old American Samantha Smith wrote a letter to the leader of the Soviet Union, Yuri Andropov, expressing her fear of nuclear war, Andropov invited Smith to the Soviet Union. USSR stamp, Samantha Smith, 1985, 5 kopecks. Wikipedia, Public Domain.

During December 2025, the Editorial Board of the New York Times published several articles “on why the US military needs to reinvent itself.” It described the state of US military as “Overmatched,” presumably wishing to remind the readers that the US military is threatened by China and Russia. The Editorial Board opened its overview of the US military with the philosophical reflection that “Algorithms and autocrats have rattled global stability. To safeguard liberty, the US must remake its military. A free world needs a strong America.”

Cold War

This rhetoric reminded me of similar war hymns during the dark days of the so-called Cold War, 1945-1989. And indeed the editorial penned for publication on December 14, 2025, was devoted to the “triumph” of America during the Cold War.

“Trump,” says the editorial, “and his administration are grievously wrong to think the “America First” approach they’ve adopted meets the moment. America cannot adequately defend itself and its vital interests unless it recovers the strategies and instincts that served it well in its greatest triumph of the past century — not World War II, but the Cold War.”

There’s no doubt that rethinking the purpose and readiness of the military would be a step in the right direction. The military has been shaped primarily by military contractors and the vast corruption wedded to the billions they earn for proposing and constructing the weapons of the US military.

Drawing models from the near annihilating outcomes of the Cold War is wrong. The US did not win the Cold War. No one did. The Soviet Union and its leader Mikhail Gorbachev decided to abandon communism and empire for something better. Such a self-dismantlement of an empire had no precedent in history. I studied Russian and Soviet history at the University of Illinois. In vain I tried to find a legitimate reason for the collapse. This does not mean I supported the rule of Russia over other countries. No. And, of course, neither do I approve America ruling over other countries. Being Greek I know something about freedom. But neither could I be convinced that American military or American “soft power” had anything to do with the end of the Soviet Union or the end of the Cold War.

The New York Times is right saying: “A country’s military is only as good as the purpose to which it is harnessed. And the central purpose of American power should be to defend political liberty and the rule of law that undergirds it, against all enemies foreign and domestic…. That mission may be impossible for… [the Trump] administration whose defining trait is the assault on the rule of law, which is as much a foreign-policy crisis as it is a domestic one. The United States cannot lead the free world, inspire those who want to be a part of it, or oppose those who seek to undermine and destroy it if we cease to be a model democracy ourselves.”

Back to Gorbachev. His vision, as he explained it to President Reagan, was also unprecedented. The Soviet Union would become history. Yet Gorbachev also urged Reagan to agree with him and eliminate nuclear weapons.

President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev at the First Summit in Geneva Switzerland, 11/19/1985. Wikipedia, Public Domain.

Reagan agreed to reduce the number of nukes, but certainly not to their total elimination. His advisors falsely convinced him America would build a dome that would make the sky above the country impervious to nuclear weapons. The nonsense about a dome continues to this day. In the 2025 Trump National Security Strategy, we read:

“We want the world’s most robust, credible, and modern nuclear deterrent, plus next-generation missile defenses—including a Golden Dome for the American homeland—to protect the American people, American assets overseas, and American allies.”

The near nuclear war between the US and the Soviet Union in 1962 over the Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba, convinced President John F. Kennedy, who saved the day, to plan nuclear disarmament, though he was assassinated in late 1963. This deadly confrontation between US and Soviet Union and the national tragedy of the assassination of President Kennedy taught nothing to the military advisors of Reagan, other presidents, including the advisors of Trump.

American diplomats, who invented the myth that American strategies and wars against impoverished countries like Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and Afghanistan, won the Cold War, promised Gorbachev that NATO would not take advantage of the disappearance of the Soviet Union and the Warshaw Pact military alliance, the Soviet equivalent of NATO. These promises were quickly forgotten. In the 1990s, the Clinton administration started recruiting former Soviet republics into NATO, countries like Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Poland, Slovakia, Czech Republic and Slovenia. The NATO expansion raised anxieties and strategic concerns to Russia that, repeatedly, warned NATO not to entice Ukraine to join it. But NATO recruiters continued and in 2014, with American soft power (money) overthrew Victor Yanukovych, leader of Ukraine who also did not want to join NATO. This started the war in Ukraine in 2014, a war between NATO-Ukraine and Russia.

Despite his unconventional and selfish policies, Trump is trying to bring the war in the Ukraine to an end, thus preventing another and potentially more dangerous Cold War / nuclear war. His National Security Strategy is urging “strategic stability with Russia.” Moreover, it shuts down any more NATO expansion. But Trump is threatening Venezuela with invasion and war to grab its oil. He is also a man who likes deals, especially deals that enrich him. He is extracting promises from Ukraine that US companies will exploit Ukrainian regions for rare earths.

Meanwhile, the war continues in Ukraine and Israel-Palestine-Middle East. Iran probably has built its own nukes. The Cold War rhetoric is pretty loud in Europe that has the dangerous and irresponsible illusion it can defeat Russia by arming Ukraine and the killing of Ukrainian and Russian soldiers.

Epilogue: Luck is not a Strategy

It’s possible we may avoid a repetition of the Cold War, but we are not too far from the precipice. On August 1, 2022, UN Chief Antonio Guterres addressed in New York the conference on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. He warned the world of the gathering storm of “nuclear danger not seen since the height of the Cold War”

Ukraine was in Guterres mind. But he explained that the war in the Ukraine between nuclear-armed states did not come out of nothing. He denounced the massive arsenals of some countries, though he was quick to point out that “entire regions declaring themselves to be nuclear-weapons-free.” He warned that luck has saved the world from “suicidal mistake of nuclear conflict.” He continued:

“But as the years have passed, these fruits of hope are withering. Humanity is in danger of forgetting the lessons forged in the terrifying fires of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Geopolitical tensions are reaching new highs. Competition is trumping co-operation and collaboration. Distrust has replaced dialogue and disunity has replaced disarmament.  States are seeking false security in stockpiling and spending hundreds of billions of dollars on doomsday weapons that have no place on our planet. Almost 13,000 nuclear weapons are now being held in arsenals around the world. All this at a time when the risks of proliferation are growing and guardrails to prevent escalation are weakening.  And when crises — with nuclear undertones — are festering.  From the Middle East and the Korean Peninsula. To the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, and to many other factors around the world. The clouds that parted following the end of the Cold War are gathering once more. We have been extraordinarily lucky so far. But luck is not a strategy. Nor is it a shield from geopolitical tensions boiling over into nuclear conflict…. Today, humanity is just one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation.”

Evaggelos Vallianatos, Ph.D., studied history and biology at the University of Illinois; earned his Ph.D. in Greek and European history at the University of Wisconsin; did postdoctoral studies in the history of science at Harvard. He worked on Capitol Hill and the US EPA; taught at several universities and authored several books, including The Antikythera Mechanism: The Story Behind the Genius of the Greek Computer and its Demise. He is the author of Freedom: Clear Thinking and Inspiration from 5,000 Years of Greek History (Universal Publishers, 2025).

The Path Through an Uncertain Future: Rebuild Community by Reclaiming the Commons

Patrick Mazza

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Source: The Raven

 December 16, 2025

It is hard to recall a time when uncertainties have been so great or come from so many directions.

In the U.S., the sense of having a stable, reliable political system seems gone. Trump has breached so many boundaries, upset the balance of the three branches of government. He has openly flouted court orders, and assumed to himself powers reserved to Congress. Notably, by refusing to spend money Congress has allocated. The Supreme Court just seems to go along with an unprecedented expansion of executive power.

In the economy in general, jobs are being cut while people wonder if AI is coming for theirs. At the same time, AI is driving what looks like an unsustainable investment bubble. Responsible for most economic growth and increased stock market valuations, a popped bubble could set off a deep recession, or even worse. It’s not the only bubble. Several real estate sectors also look sketchy.

But the greatest uncertainty, and the one from which the world seems to be turning its attention, is the increasing heating of the climate. Temperatures are at or near record levels, while climate pollution concentrations in the atmosphere have never been greater. Scientists are having a lively debate over whether temperature increases are accelerating. German scientists recently made a terrifying statement lining out the possibility of an absolutely catastrophic 3 deg. C rise by 2050. Meanwhile, the Trump Administration is doing all it can to gut climate action, while Europe and many corporations are staging retreats on net zero commitments. Meanwhile, severe flooding is hitting all over the world, including record river levels in my own wet state of Washington.

It is hard to live through such times, though most of us in the U.S. have it easy compared to people living in war torn regions such as Gaza, Sudan and Congo. Nonetheless, the voices of those who say we are headed for some kind of collapse here are on the rise. A new depression, a second civil war, these seem like more real possibilities than they have in a long time.

How do we make it through these times? A key is to understand the common thread running through the uncertainties that confront us. It is a loss of a sense of the common good, of community, of the commons themselves, in the face of rising corporate and oligarchic power.

In the U.S., long efforts by the oligarchic elite to divide and rule have set people and regions against it other and made it almost impossible to address critical issues, which is the intended result. So people’s lives become more difficult and unaffordable while those same oligarchic interests accumulate money and power. Unaffordable housing, grocery bills that amount to what rent used to cost, a health care system that delivers poor results for high costs, all while corporate profits in these sectors explode.

The AI bubble is driven by promises of increased “productivity,” though so far that doesn’t seem to be panning out. But “productivity” is really a codeword for automating out jobs. Again, corporate and oligarchic interests are serving their own ends without reference to the common good.

Towering over all this is the climate crisis, fueled by the insatiable greed of the fossil fuel industry and its allies. In no area is the ravaging of the global commons for private interests more stark, or the need to reclaim the commons more crucial.

We don’t know what is going to happen. We have no way of knowing how these uncertainties will work out. But one path stands as the way through whatever we must face. It is to rebuild community by reclaiming the common good, to reclaim the commons themselves. We instinctively understand this, and are pursuing this along multiple routes. Recent triumphs of municipal election candidates promising to address the affordable crisis through city action are a prominent example. So are efforts to create public banking, to institute single-payer health plans in states, to build social housing, and to drive forward clean energy and climate action at local and state levels. The revival of the bioregional movement over recent years is another example of people seeking to reclaim the commons in its most basic sense, the common natural places in which we live. Each of these efforts exhibits a unifying thread, an assertion of the common good over private interests, a strengthening of community by creating new common spaces.

In my next post I plan to lay out several scenarios for how events might unfold, with an emphasis on the U.S., and how a movement unified around the principle of rebuilding community by reclaiming the commons works through each one. We don’t have any certainty about the future, but we can be certain the way to address anything that is coming is through community. And the natural place to start, the one that is most available, is the communities where we live. We must build the future in place.

This first appeared on Patrick Mazza’s Substack page, The Raven.