I remember that at a certain point we began to break stuff. It’s really fun to smash up things, frankly, I think it’s a fantasy most people have—throwing a television set out the window if they only could…I found myself and several others in a moment of this kind of frenzy, breaking tables and doors to bits, scattering a whole bunch of documents in each room, stuff like that. This possibility brings out all the madness in you, I’d say. It’s possible, so why not do it? Exactly. You can go ahead and smash….It’s the kind of fantasy that makes sense, but over there you have the power to act it out, and these are not your own things, and what’s more, you’re at war.
IOF Soldier, Golani Brigade, Ramallah, 2002
When you’re on the roof of a [weapons] factory…and you’re using a sledgehammer to dismantle the air conditioning units, windows, etcetera…CCTV or whatever, they can’t operate and no one works inside. But also people have used that as an entry point to break into the building and go inside and actually destroy the weapons of war, from the inside.
Huda Ammori, Palestine Action, 2022
There is no shortage of testimony to the atrocities perpetrated by soldiers in the Israel Occupation Force (IOF), spanning decades; a first sergeant recounts the military incursion in Nablus in 2003, as dictated by a company commander:
Therefore we developed a tactic of avoiding the alleys altogether and passing through walls of buildings. As buildings are very close to each other, and have mutual walls. So you take a dynamite brick, attach it to a wall, explode it, and climb through the hole in the wall. This is a very slow advance. When you reach a strategic building, commanding its surroundings, you set up a post there to observe the surrounding alleys and roof tops.
The IOF’s barbaric violence against the land of Palestine and its people launched its most brutal phase during the Second Intifada that persists today. Flanked by tall, buzz-cut Shin Bet officers in a security cordon with over a thousand armed policemen and helicopter aerial surveillance, Ariel Sharon led a group of Israeli legislators and press into Haram al Sharif (the Temple Mount) on September 28, 2000, as a bombastic assertion of supremacy. The belligerent incursion triggered fierce Palestinian opposition; the failures of the Camp David Summit, shortfalls of the newly-formed Palestinian Authority, surge in illegal settlement expansion and hastening of tyrannical, racist policies against Palestinians came home to roost—Sharon’s charade sparked الانتفاضة الثانية (the Second Uprising).
Sharon, The Butcher of Beirut—whose mendacity was hardly limited to his involvement in the Alexandroni Brigade during the Nakba, Unit 101’s Qibya massacre (1953), his command of Unit 202 during the Suez War (1956), or his unprecedented coordination between the Israeli military and the South African Defence Force during Operation Opera—was the driving force behind the (ceaseless) construction of the apartheid wall, which began in June 2002. In lockstep with the Bush administration’s War On Terror, Sharon’s retaliation against a string of bombings by Palestinian resistance fighters proved swift and ferocious.
In early March 2002 with Sharon at the helm, Operation Defensive Shield was launched—the largest military operation across Palestine since the 1967 Naksa, purportedly in response to the March 27 bombing in Netanya; the occupation forces invaded Tulkarem, Qalqilya, Bethlehem, Ramallah, Nablus, and Jenin, with Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade (kata’ib shuhada’ al-aqsa) and Forces of Badr (quwwat badr) foremost in the crosshairs. In his April 2002 speech to Israeli Parliament, Sharon insisted:
[Soldiers] and officers have been given clear orders: to enter cities and villages which have become havens for terrorists; to catch and arrest terrorists and, primarily, their dispatchers and those who finance and support them; to confiscate weapons intended to be used against Israeli citizens; to expose and destroy terrorist facilities and explosives, laboratories, weapons production factories and secret installations. The orders are clear: target and paralyze anyone who takes up weapons and tries to oppose our troops, resists them or endanger them—and to avoid harming the civilian population.
It is integral to grasp what is meant by to enter, here. This speech was delivered the week of the IOF’s brutal incursion into the most densely populated cities of the West Bank. With Sharon at the helm, commander of the paratrooper brigade Aviv Kokhavi led the operation, Edjteyah, into the casbah (old city) of Nablus. Beginning April 3, 2002, tactical maneuvers—by tank, Caterpillar D9 armored bulldozer, booby-trapped routes and improvised explosives—generated widespread destruction by design; an “inverse geometry,” whereby the urban syntax was wholly reorganized by the IOF’s whims. Eyal Weizman details in Hollow Land (2007):
For anyone who might imagine that moving through walls constitutes a relatively “gentle” form of maneuver, it is worth describing [the IOF’s] tactical procedures: soldiers assemble behind a wall. Using explosives or a large hammer, they break a hole large enough to pass through. Their charge through the wall is sometimes preceded by stun grenades or a few random shots into what is usually a private living room occupied by its unsuspecting inhabitants. When the soldiers have passed through the party wall, the occupants are assembled and, after they are searched for “suspects,” locked inside one of the rooms, where they are made to remain—sometimes for several days—until the military operation is concluded, often without water, sanitation, food or medicine.
The Hard-Sell of Seeing
This practice of walking through walls is integral to the military’s tactics of ravaging cities and the urban fabric across the West Bank. The speed and scale of devastation inflicted by the IOF amounted to full-fledged urbicide in the casbah and in the Balata refugee camp, as well as throughout the Jenin refugee camp. Testimony of this atrocity, now paradigmatic across the entirety of Palestine in recent decades and most blaringly throughout Gaza since October 2023, was documented in Mohamed Bakri’s film, Jenin, Jenin (April 2002).
Figure 1. Still from Jenin, Jenin (2002).
Kokhavi claims, in interviews with Weizman, that “space is only an interpretation,” and that the troops’ “movement through and across the built fabric of the city reinterprets architectural elements (walls, windows, doors) and thus the city itself.” His use of theoretical language in these recounts suggest that “victory” is claimed not by the destruction of these cities, but by their reorganization; “if the wall is only the word or a ‘wall,’ un-walling also becomes a form of rewriting—a constant process of undoing fuelled by theory.”
In addition to the flagrant brutality against Palestine’s land and its people during Operation Defensive Shield, Sharon and Kokhavi’s approaches birthed a new generation of technologies of intrusion and carceral capture. For example—Camero, founded in 2004 and based in the Kfar Netter Israeli settlement, is a company focused on providing “real time images through barriers.” Created by Samy Katsav (founder of SK Group, an umbrella for Israel Weapon Industries; he is also chairman of Israel Shipyards Ltd. at the Kison Port/Port of Haifa), Camero’s core technologies include the See Through Walls Xaver family of products. These ultra wide band (UWB) devices transmit large amounts of signal energy sans interference with traditional narrowband and carrier wave transmissions in the same frequency bands; put otherwise—these are portable, highly accurate, real-time locationing devices for tactical situational awareness in urban environments. The Camero Xaver products can sense bodies through walls, for militaries and law enforcement agencies to glean intelligence and “step into the known.”
In a February 2025 missive, Camero founder and CEO Amir Beeri’s “The Fantasy of Seeing Through Walls—Is It Really Possible?” attempts to synopsize a history of spying through walls—rather, to justify the operational needs and desires of ever-evolving imaging capabilities, and provide a hard-sell of the Xaver systems:
Military forces, Law Enforcement teams, Intelligence agencies, and Search & Rescue units require an answer to several critical questions regarding what happens on the other side of the wall—Are there any people inside? If so, how many are on the other side of the wall? Where exactly are they located? Do they stay still, or do they move? In that case, where are they going? Which position are they in, Standing, sitting, sleeping? Do they appear to be children or adults? What is the interior layout and size of the rooms within? Where [are] the entry and exit points? Does the room contain any large stationary objects? And so on.
Packed into this pitch is the chilling implication that those with access to these technologies are able to watch you and your children while you sleep. The company boasts, “[the Xaver 1000] ‘has the ability to distinguish whether the object is an adult, a child or an animal,’ and offers ‘unprecedented resolution of body parts and position: sitting, standing, lying down, and the height of the live objects.’” This phantasm of seeing/moving through walls is concurrently taken up by the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in recent years to expediently get “through-wall sensing technology” into the hands of US law enforcement. In June 2025, DHS S&T announced that MaXentric equipment is now sold to law enforcement agencies nationwide and that the Federal Bureau of Investigations is now purchasing units. Over the course of this research and development process, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lincoln Laboratory (MIT LL) has been an integral collaborator for more than a decade; MIT LL engineers test prototypes at the lab’s facilities across Boston.
We can consider this ultra wideband imaging as an additional layer of surveillance and the nonconsensual penetration of domestic spaces—practiced throughout the Second Intifada and increasingly honed in the research centers of Ivory Tower universities. This “seeing through walls,” or, “un-walling of the wall” collapses the public and private, inside and outside—a brutish reorganization of space in the image of the colonizer that violates barriers in advance of obliterating them.
To focus on the chirurgical removal of building components—walls, ceilings, windows—we can better understand how these tactics employed by the IOF during Operation Defensive Shield scaled-up the once-microtactical method of walking through walls—carving out new terrains for urban warfare—also used by the United States military during their occupation of Iraq in 2003.
If we increasingly are denied the protection and privacy of the architectures, the walls of our most intimate spaces, and if the global circulation of punitive technologies–tested on Palestinians for generations–now proliferate in the cache of carceral capture across European and American cities, what is left for us to build? Rather–the case for tearing down the walls.
In Architecture and Disjunction, Bernard Tschumi asserted:
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- There is no architecture without action, no architecture without events, no architecture without program.
- By extension, there is no architecture without violence.
The charge, here, is that nothing we build is static—whether the structure is suffused with love and care or with the vibrational insatiability of a monster’s greed. Resource pilfering and labor exploitation is required to construct, to demolish, to redevelop all forms we inhabit, regardless of their function. Each of us is a place on the sliding scale of culpability—damaging the land and its people. If we trace the arguments of the genocidaires’ demands to un-wall the walls, then we are tasked with dismantling the architectures, and ipso facto the machinations, of munitions manufacturers.
Un-walling Walls as Direct Action
Palestine Action’s efforts predate October 2023; the group formed in the UK as the world still smoldered from 2020 protests. While there isn’t space to itemize their actions and efficacy here, we can note a few examples of their sustained campaigns against the global arms trade. In the early hours of June 1, 2022, activists scaled the roof of Thales in Glasgow, Scotland, calling “for a #FreePalestine and to end the Scottish complicity in apartheid and military occupation. #glasgowFreepalestine” (@pal_action_scot). Thales employees were forced to evacuate and halt operations, tasks which include manufacturing missile systems and military drones, among other weaponry, alongside Elbit, on the Watchkeeper Drone scheme. On July 10, 2022, the group posted: “WE’RE BACK ON THE ROOF.” On July 11, 2022, protestors occupied the Thales factory in Govan: “According to Palestine Action Scotland, the protesters climbed onto roof and started to ‘damage’ facilities early on Monday morning. In a tweet they claimed to be ‘smashing up’ the building.”
Figure 2. Photograph posted by The Aftershock on February 1, 2026: “BREAKING: Three HSBC branches were targeted this week by autonomous groups. This action was in Finsbury Park, London. The bank is now constantly being tarnished across Britain, over investments in Israeli weapons firm Elbit Systems. After a similar direct action campaign, Barclays was forced to get rid of its shares in Elbit. When will HSBC do the same?”
Palestine Action, too, is un-walling the walls—producing a similar inverse geometry of urban and suburban spaces by ripping off roofs, busting through glass pane windows, blockading building and lot entrances, and shattering CCTV devices. Their targets are, of course, not limited to Elbit Systems and their constellation of accomplices; generating a de-banking crisis for the financiers and insurers of occupation and genocide (such as Allianz and Barclays) and interrupting the hasbara promoters (like the BBC) who plot in otherwise banal city buildings are also outcomes of Palestine Action’s sustained efforts. An un-walling of the walls means all of the architectures of empire that scaffold the stealing of land and life, as underscored by the group’s founders in 2022:
These factories are here, on our doorsteps, making weapons used to kill and maim. There is a simple solution: we force them to stop. And, through rooftop occupations, window-smashing sessions and paint-dousing, we have built great momentum—aided by community organising—without whom there would be no mass movement. We’ve made company operations untenable, spurred on hundreds to take action, and exposed Elbit’s business to thousands of people who want the killers gone. Arms dealers and war criminals are only welcome in Britain for as long as we welcome them.
We can consider the productive destruction, the un-walling, also as a form of blockade; as Charmaine Chua and Kai Bosworth insist, following The Invisible Committee’s The Coming Insurrection (2009):
…Infrastructures are the primary expression of the contemporary power of governance: logistical systems and cybernetic networks have become such omnipotent social forces that they have transcended institutions and states to become sites of a networked “architectural and impersonal” power that displaces government. Blockades are effective because anybody can participate: “the subject of the blockade is whoever.” As [the committee] elaborate, attacking sites of contemporary antagonism requires recognizing and acting on a simple maxim: “Power is logistical. Block everything!”
Building anew entails breaking through, tearing down, the Zionist settler colonial constructions and the hydra of political, cultural, and economic deprivation of the current moment—the foundations of a century-long occupation of Palestine. This is un-walling as blockade that, returning to Chua and Bosworth, exemplifies a modality of struggle. Rafeef Ziadah et al. stress we must follow (and rupture) the network of infrastructures at various scales that reinforces and sustains the settler colonial project; the global circuits of complicity that “sustain military dominance and infrastructural warfare is deeply embedded in transnational supply chains, weapons industries, and financial institutions that fund, arm, and legitimize its operations.”
Figure 3. Photograph posted by The Aftershock in November 2025, with caption “Action takers target Keysight Technologies in Edinburgh. Keysight provides electronic components to Elbit’s weapons factory in Leicester which produces Israeli military drones. The group said: ‘We are committed to taking direct action against all those who enable Israel’s weapons trade and Keysight will continue to be targeted until they drop all ties and contracts with Elbit….’”
This method of un-walling the walls necessitates ungovernability, and a commitment to co-constructing better worlds. This is a movement that no proscription can contain.
A few weeks prior to the July 2025 proscription, the annual Paris Air Show took place at Paris–Le Bourget Airport, where thousands of exhibitors from aerospace and defense sectors convened to flaunt the latest advancements and build strategic networking opportunities. Among this year’s participants, representatives from RTX, Rafael, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Anduril Industries, Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), and Elbit were stationed to show off the latest in the cache of deathmaking. Stakeholders and the general public were shocked to encounter Elbit, Rafael, and IAI’s booths walled-off by solid black partition; while the upper portions of the companies’ displays remained visible, the approximately ten-foot-high barrier entirely obscured the products, their details, and their dealers’ individual identities. French authorities claimed Israel violated an agreement by “refusing to remove offensive weapons” from their displays.
Figure 4. Image by the author, 2025.
Machlis lambasted on Twitter:
Sixty years after Elbit Systems was founded—on the eve of the Six-Day War and in the shadow of the French arms embargo—we are once again witnessing a blatant and aggressive act by the French Government. This embarrassing attempt to ‘conceal’ Elbit Systems’ groundbreaking technology behind a fictitious cover will prove futile—just as it did 60 years ago. Our world-leading technology continues to prove itself operationally and commercially, with growing demand across Europe and beyond. Elbit Systems remains committed to global leadership, innovation, and partnership. ‘But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread.’ (Exodus 1:12).
While much could be said about this scriptural stoking and the CEO of a twenty-one-billion-dollar weapons manufacturer feigning victimhood, this moment of walling at once demonstrates the fragility of the promotion and praise for this equipment—increasingly scrutinized, boycotted, and broken by resistors—while also lending coverage to clients’ collaboration in this genocide.
The transnational behemoths whose products are prototyped, assembled, and utilized globally are as rapacious as we allow them to be, and to invert the settler-colonial drive for extermination, we are charged to not only name these perpetrators and elucidate their violences for the world, but also to un-wall the walls they’re hiding their latest models behind, and all of the walls where these technologies are manufactured.
Optimistically—because, perhaps, militant optimism and care are all we have—I believe that we’ve collectively reached a tipping point for this status quo of forever war. The declaration—We Are All Palestine Action—is an appeal to break the cogs of the war machine. We tear down these buildings to bring down empire, and we are tasked with concurrently co-constructing—life—in their wake. Can a weapons manufacturing warehouse then become a preschool? Can their gated lots be liberated, and the concrete turned into garden beds? As the rates of rough sleeping soar globally, can we turn a building where Skylark and Hermes UAVs are made into a community kitchen, surrounded by truly affordable housing? Rip the roofs off the buildings, un-wall the walls.
