International Glance
Last Tuesday, during the morning rush hour, 15 individuals from a group called Eject Elbit staked positions in the four-lane access road to the headquarters of banking giant Capital One Financial Corporation in McLean, Virginia. They mounted ladders in the road and climbed atop them, unfurling a banner from their perches that read “CAPITAL ONE FUNDS GENOCIDE.” They stretched across the road a second banner, fifty feet wide, that said “DIVEST FROM DEATH.” Another protestor, a disabled woman, blockaded the road while locked to her wheelchair.
Max, a former employee of the company who only used his first name for security reasons, said they flooded the streets to “shake people awake,” regarding Capital One’s $90 million loan to Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit Systems, the largest supplier of the Israeli Defense forces. Elbit produces everything from precision-guided rockets and bombs to state-of-the-art artillery ammunition, guidance systems for aircraft and helicopters, and killer drones that have been deployed in the genocide of Gaza.
Eject Elbit launched its new campaign against Capital One earlier this month across northern Virginia, Boston, Philadelphia, DC, Seattle, and New York City. A thirty-year-old queer activist named Cassian, who was posted atop one of the ladders that blockaded the McLean site last week, helped launch the Eject Elbit campaign in Washington, DC, after years of participating in protests with pro-Palestinian groups. “If the US government was not going to stop sending weapons for the genocide, then the people were going to have to stop it,” Cassian said.
For an hour and a half, the bank’s opulent campus—with its mini-golf course, sculpture garden, baseball field, and concert hall—was inaccessible as traffic backed up and irate motorists leaned on their horns and shouted.
Last September, in a special report titled “From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide,” UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese investigated the “corporate machinery sustaining Israel’s settler-colonial project of displacement and replacement of the Palestinians in the occupied territory,” in which Elbit Systems featured as a primary contractor to the Israeli state. Detailing how “the military-industrial complex has become the economic backbone” of Israel, the UN report says that Elbit Systems provides “a critical domestic supply of weaponry, and reinforce[s] Israel’s military alliances through arms exports and joint development of military technology.”
Israel said Monday that the remains of the last hostage in Gaza had been recovered, clearing the way for the next phase of the ceasefire that stopped the Israel-Hamas war. The announcement came a day after Israel's government said the military was conducting a "large-scale operation" in a cemetery in northern Gaza to locate the remains of Ran Gvili.
A new study from a US think tank has found that military casualties from the Kremlin’s nearly four-year unprovoked invasion have approached two million, with the invaders suffering the lion’s share of those dead and injured. The number represents soldiers either killed in action, wounded, or missing.
Former FIFA president Sepp Blatter on Monday backed a proposed fan boycott of World Cup matches in the United States because of the conduct of President Donald Trump and his administration at home and abroad.
Civil rights attorneys filed a federal lawsuit against the United States government on Tuesday on behalf of the families of two men from a small fishing village in Trinidad who were killed in a US military airstrike on a small boat in the Caribbean Sea on 14 October.
News that a unit of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement would be present during the upcoming Winter Games has set off concern and confusion in Italy, where people have expressed outrage at the inclusion of an agency that has dominated headlines for leading the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
The so-called Board of Peace that President Donald Trump officially launched in Davos, Switzerland last week is developing sweeping plans for a U.S.-backed administration to rule Gaza, according to a draft of the Board’s resolution.
