By Rima Najjar
Introduction
In my previous essay, The Settlers Are Not Leaving, I argued that Palestinian liberation cannot hinge on hopes of settler withdrawal, a sudden moral awakening among occupiers, or some negotiated coexistence. Zionist domination is a stable, externally reinforced system — bolstered by military superiority, intricate legal frameworks, deep economic ties, diplomatic shields, and the quiet routines of international management.
I pushed back against the liberal dream of peace side-by-side and the romantic idea of a single decisive rupture restoring an intact Palestine. Instead, our urgent task is to pinpoint what sustains Israel’s grip and then strain, disrupt, or erode those supports.
Predictably, the immediate reaction from some readers returned to a familiar refrain: if Israeli power is so deeply rooted, what can possibly weaken it short of total military defeat? For many, direct action — however righteous — seems strategically irrelevant when set against Israel’s violence and the West’s unflinching backing.
That question is what draws me to the CAGE report, Putting Bodies on the Line, released in November 2025. It meticulously tracks how activists strike at the exact points where Israeli violence intersects with legality, profitability, public acceptance, and political accountability.
These are the pressure points where friction builds — making domination heavier, more visible, more expensive to sustain. The report offers no fantasies of swift triumph. Its force lies in showing how entrenched power can be burdened and worn down long before it crumbles. Through precise analysis and documentation, targeted action exposes the contradictions domination desperately hides.
Despair carries political force: it reinforces the very structures that generate it. Naming its sources becomes the first act of loosening its grip.
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- Why “Entrenchment” Breeds Despair
The reaction resonates because it grows out of hard realities: Israeli domination has shown extraordinary staying power. Institutions endure across governments, military dominance in the region goes unchallenged, and Western alliances provide steady diplomatic cover, economic integration, and technological backing.
For so many of us watching in anguish, this accumulates into a crushing sense of futility — if the system appears this unbreakable, anything less than overwhelming force feels like symbolism rather than strategy.
This despair draws strength from several harsh, interconnected conditions. Extreme power imbalances can feel self-perpetuating: superior arms, global patrons, territorial control — how does resistance outlast that?
Western complicity runs deep: arms flows uninterrupted, vetoes in international bodies, leaders willing to swallow domestic outrage to keep the status quo intact.
And on the Palestinian side, political fragmentation and decades of siege, displacement, and surveillance have exacted a brutal toll. Together, these render domination self-reproducing and resistance as forever outmatched.
There is emotional weight here, but also intellectual weight. It is born from lived trauma: repeated defeats, shattered agreements, settlements expanding without pause. It voices the exhaustion when every door to justice slams shut, when international law is wielded selectively, when today’s horrors echo yesterday’s without relief. Any honest strategy has to grapple with this despair, not brush it aside.
Yet acknowledging the depth of entrenchment clarifies the stakes rather than foreclosing possibility. Entrenchment describes how power operates today, not what it is capable of tomorrow. Recognizing its sources is how we prevent pessimism from calcifying into fatalism. And once the roots of despair are named plainly, a sharper question emerges: not whether domination is strong, but where its strength can be made to cost more than its defenders can bear.
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- Friction as a Strategy Against Entrenched Power
When Israeli domination feels immovable — fortified by military superiority and Western backing — it is natural to question whether anything short of war can shift it. Yet political theory and historical experience offer a different strategic horizon: friction that accumulates through sustained pressure, making the system grind harder, slower, and more expensively over time.
Antonio Gramsci helps illuminate the terrain. He argued that power endures not only through coercion but through the sense that its dominance is inevitable. Challenging that inevitability requires a “war of position” — a long struggle in which networks, counter-narratives, and persistent disruptions chip away at the cultural and institutional foundations that make domination feel natural.
James C. Scott extends this insight by showing how the powerless resist in ways that rarely appear dramatic but steadily erode the efficiency of oppressive systems. Slowdowns, refusals, and small acts of sabotage force rulers to spend increasing energy on basic maintenance. These forms of resistance accumulate drag, turning everyday life into a site of pressure.
Gene Sharp then maps how this drag becomes strategic. Power depends on the cooperation of workers, firms, bureaucrats, and institutions. When that cooperation is withdrawn — through boycotts, blockades, and civil disobedience — costs rise, legitimacy fractures, and the machinery of domination becomes harder to operate. Repression often accelerates this process by exposing the violence required to keep the system intact.
Frantz Fanon adds a crucial dimension: colonial regimes concede nothing without sustained pressure. Appeals to conscience fail in systems built on dehumanization. Yet Fanon also insists that resistance must be fitted to the moment — strategic, deliberate, and aimed at reclaiming agency by forcing power to yield because the price of maintaining domination becomes too high.
Taken together, these thinkers outline the logic of friction. It is not a softer alternative to confrontation; it is a form of pressure that targets the system’s dependencies — where violence intersects with profit, law, and legitimacy. By imposing costs at these junctions, friction burdens the apparatus of domination until its upkeep becomes increasingly difficult to justify or sustain.
My point here is not theoretical. Real-world examples show friction already working, undermining the sense that entrenched power is impervious.
In the UK, Palestine Action has repeatedly hit Elbit Systems — Israel’s largest private arms manufacturer — with blockades, occupations, and site shutdowns. These disruptions force expensive security upgrades, delays, and ultimately retreats, like the closure of the Bristol Aztec West facility in 2025, despite a lease extending to 2029.
Broader BDS campaigns deepen the pressure: firms distancing themselves from Israeli partnerships, pension funds divesting, port workers refusing cargo. Each action seems small in isolation, but together they slow procurement, complicate logistics, trigger reviews, and shift public debate. They make domination more expensive to administer long before any formal collapse.
Friction is the deliberate creation of administrative, economic, legal, and reputational burdens that force a system of domination to expend increasing energy simply to reproduce itself.
It promises no miracles. What it offers is something more durable: proof that the system has weak points, and that persistent strikes — boycotts, disruptions, divestments — can make injustice increasingly difficult to sustain.
This is a real, grounded strategy that refuses to let domination operate uncontested.
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- The CAGE Report in Detail: Mapping the Pressure Points
If theory outlines friction’s logic, the CAGE report Putting Bodies on the Line makes it tangible. Released in November 2025 by CAGE International — a group dedicated to exposing state repression — the study examines five years of direct action for Palestine in Britain (2020–2025). Drawing from more than 70 disruptions, including 45 attributed to Palestine Action, it documents how ordinary people channel indignation into targeted interventions that hit the system where it is structurally exposed.
The CAGE report functions as a map of where Israeli domination relies on British cooperation — and therefore where it can be pressured.
The methodology is meticulous: timelines, media coverage, court records, procurement data, and financial reports cross-checked to show ripple effects — delays, reviews, policy reversals, and reputational damage.
The core insight is straightforward but profound: these are not symbolic stunts; they are interventions that force Britain to reckon with its material role in Israeli violence. They make the infrastructure of complicity harder to conceal.
The report identifies four intersections where Israeli power, channeled through UK partnerships, is vulnerable: legality, profitability, public legitimacy, and political risk. Targeting these points produces compounding friction. These four domains — law, finance, legitimacy, and political risk — form the scaffolding that keeps Israeli military production stable. Each becomes a site where friction can be deliberately introduced.
Legality
Pressure begins in the legal arena, where activists turn the state’s own frameworks into sites of exposure. Strategic lawsuits, license challenges, and filings reveal how arms exports evade international obligations. Cases documenting ignored evidence of war crimes have triggered reviews and temporary shipment suspensions. Crowdfunded suits mire regulators in procedural knots, eroding institutional credibility and forcing officials to defend practices that once operated in silence.
Profitability
Legal strain quickly bleeds into financial strain. Once the law casts doubt on an operation’s legitimacy, the economic foundations become more vulnerable. Multi-year campaigns against Elbit facilities have halted production, damaged equipment, forced millions in security spending, and even prompted insurers to withdraw coverage due to “reputational risk.” Small groups of activists have generated disproportionate economic shock across Elbit’s UK operations, demonstrating how targeted disruption destabilizes a corporation’s cost-benefit calculus.
Public legitimacy
Financial pressure reverberates into the realm of public legitimacy. As companies scramble to contain losses, their ties to Israeli violence become harder to obscure. Student occupations have pushed universities to divest from arms-linked pensions; projections and leaked documents have exposed institutional partnerships that depended on silence. Jury acquittals further puncture the state’s narrative, signaling that the public rejects the criminalization of direct action taken in defense of Palestinian life.
Political risk
Eroded legitimacy inevitably heightens political risk. Once the public sees the machinery of complicity, elected officials can no longer rely on quiet consensus. Lobby disruptions have confronted MPs with hard data on arms transfers, prompting debates and motions for tighter export controls. When the UK government attempted to proscribe Palestine Action in July 2025, the move backfired — drawing international condemnation and revealing the political anxiety that sustained activism now produces.
Documentation as force multiplier
Across all four domains, documentation magnifies impact. Timestamped evidence, livestreams, and shared footage transform local disruptions into global templates. A blockade in one city becomes a blueprint for another; leaked contracts fuel lawsuits; acquittals circulate as precedents. Documentation does more than record — it multiplies the force of each action, accelerating replication and widening the terrain of pressure. In a landscape defined by institutional indifference to Gaza, documentation compels attention one disruption at a time.
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- How Friction Accumulates: The Evidence
Accumulation is the slow conversion of isolated disruptions into systemic instability.
The CAGE report quantifies what friction looks like when sustained over time. Between 2020 and 2025, more than 70 documented disruptions — 45 carried out by Palestine Action — inflicted substantial financial and operational strain on companies involved in supplying Israel’s military apparatus. These were not dramatic coups but steady, cumulative actions: blockades, occupations, strategic lawsuits, and repeated interruptions to production and delivery schedules. Each disruption forced delays, added costs, or compelled defensive adjustments; together they strained entire supply chains and corporate risk calculations.
The Elbit campaign is the clearest example. Persistent pressure led to site closures, such as the shuttering of Aztec West in 2025, years before its lease expired. Suppliers grew wary; insurers withdrew coverage; the company faced spiraling security expenditures. What appeared at a distance as isolated protests, once aggregated, revealed a steady degradation of Elbit’s UK footprint.
These shocks were amplified by broader BDS momentum. Barclays reported zero Elbit holdings after sustained activism. Universities withdrew millions from arms-linked pension funds. The Co-operative Group halted Israeli sourcing in 2025 due to human rights concerns. Each decision chipped away at the web of commercial relationships that insulate Israeli military production from accountability.
These dynamics are not confined to Britain. In the United States, dockworkers in Oakland have repeatedly refused to handle Israeli-linked cargo, delaying shipments and forcing companies to reroute logistics at significant cost.
Political effects followed. In September 2024, the UK government suspended nearly 30 export licenses over concerns about violations of international humanitarian law. Parliamentary debates exposed regulatory loopholes and escalated scrutiny. Support for Israel’s arms network became politically riskier, not safer.
Repression, of course, intensified. Repression is not a sign of activist overreach; it is a sign that the state has been forced into a defensive posture.
July 2025 saw Palestine Action proscribed; arrests mounted; facilities were fortified. But repression did not negate the strategy — it confirmed its potency. Crackdowns drew UN criticism, generated new solidarity, and emboldened activists through high-profile acquittals. The costs of maintaining domination rose faster than the state could contain.
Against the backdrop of Gaza’s devastation, these details are the evidence. They show that entrenchment is not immutable. They turn abstractions into evidence. They offer a sober but vital insight: persistence makes empires pay. Friction erodes the scaffolding of complicity one delay, one withdrawal, one disrupted shipment at a time.
Friction does not promise linear progress; its effects accumulate unevenly, often invisibly, until they suddenly become undeniable.
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- The Path Forward: Risks, Resilience, and Resolve
The CAGE report, and the actions it chronicles, mark a shift in the terrain of solidarity. Too often, global movements have relied on symbolic acts — marches, statements, social-media waves — that express moral outrage but rarely affect the infrastructures that sustain domination.
These actions matter; they build community and articulate dissent. But entrenched systems require something more: sustained, analytical intervention aimed at the structures that make Israel’s violence materially possible.
Friction reorients the struggle. It channels outrage into disciplined disruption. Palestine Action exemplifies this shift — mapping supply chains, selecting vulnerable sites, repeating strikes until companies retreat. Moral clarity becomes operational leverage.
These actions force public contradictions into view, impose financial and political consequences, and build a movement with the capacity to inflict real costs: delayed arms transfers, abandoned facilities, divestments, regulatory reviews.
Friction multiplies through connection. Documentation multiplies impact. A blockade’s footage feeds campaigns abroad; leaked contracts inform lawsuits; successes circulate as templates. Coordination spreads across borders: UK disruptions inspire actions in the United States and Europe; BDS victories in one country strengthen union and municipal resolutions elsewhere. Coalition-building weaves these threads together — labor boycotts, campus divestments, cultural refusals — creating a web of pressure no single corporation or government can easily untangle.
Hunger strikes transform the body into a site of political indictment.
In UK prisons, Palestine Action members — Teuta “T” Hoxha, Heba Muraisi, Qesser Zuhrah, Kamran Ahmed, Amu Gib, Jon Cink, Muhammad Umer Khalid, and Lewie Chiaramello of the Filton 24 — have surpassed five weeks without food. Hospitalized, weakened, yet resolute, they demand bail, fair trials, and the shutdown of Elbit. Their strike joins a lineage of political prisoners who weaponize their own vulnerability to expose the violence of the state.
The impact is immediate: solidarity hunger strikes from prisoners in the United States, amplified by networks such as Samidoun; renewed scrutiny of Elbit’s operations; mounting public pressure on the UK’s punitive excesses. Even behind bars, they reveal the brittleness of the system.
Burnout and despair are real dangers too. Gaza’s relentless horror drains the spirit; activism’s grind isolates those carrying its weight. But friction adapts faster than repression: every crackdown widens the audience, every arrest generates new alliances, every escalation of violence erodes the state’s legitimacy further. Costs accumulate across every layer of the system that once seemed unshakable.
Friction operates on a different timeline than spectacle; its power lies in duration, repetition, and cumulative strain.
It restores agency to a people pushed toward hopelessness, offering not romantic rupture but durable resistance. It provides direction amid devastation — document, coordinate, sustain — and transforms despair into determination. Each action, however small, is one more weight on the system’s supports, making domination less affordable, less stable, less permanent.
The state escalates because it cannot absorb the costs indefinitely. Each crackdown signals a system pushed into defensive posture, and each escalation widens the field of solidarity that sustains the movement.
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Conclusion
The arc of this essay — from the despair bred by entrenchment to the concrete evidence of friction’s effectiveness — reveals something essential. Weakening Israeli domination is the indispensable foundation of liberation’s long horizon.
Injustice rarely collapses spectacularly; it erodes as the structures that uphold it become too costly to maintain. Targeted disruption does not wait for the perfect balance of forces. It burdens domination now.
Here lies a sober form of optimism. No illusions of imminent victory, no fantasies of collapse — but proof of real shifts already underway: sites abandoned, holdings shed, sourcing halted, licenses scrutinized, juries unconvinced. These are the slow deconstruction of the supports that make domination viable. Each act of friction accumulates force, raising the cost of complicity for those who depend on it.
The task before us is clear. Not to redict when domination will fall, but to make its continuance increasingly untenable. Every disruption, every coordinated effort, every refusal adds weight. When despair feels justified — and it often does — this strategy offers something fiercer: a path that honors Palestinian urgency and refuses the constraints imposed by the oppressor’s imagination.
As I argued in my previous essay, Israeli settlers will not leave voluntarily. But collective friction can raise the price of their permanence until even fortified structures begin to crack. That is where real change begins.
Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem and whose mother’s side of the family is from Ijzim, south of Haifa.
13 December 2025
Source: countercurrents.org