PITTSBURGH, July 3, 2012 – A fateful decision on divestment now lies before the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)
On Tuesday the assembly’s Middle East Peacemaking Issues Committee voted 36-11, with one abstention, to send forward a proposal to place three companies that supply defense-related equipment to Israel – Caterpillar, Hewlett-Packard and Motorola Solutions – on the General Assembly’s divestment list.
Brian Ellison, head of a group that monitors church investments, told the Middle East Committee Monday that, despite years of efforts by the PC(USA), the three companies have made no meaningful response to appeals to stop supplying equipment used in non-peaceful activities in the West Bank and Gaza.
“To not divest at this point would represent a substantial change to the 40-year history of socially responsible investment” the church has pursued, he said.
Ellison, chair of the church’s Mission Responsibility Through Investment Committee, said the Israeli Defense Forces have used Caterpillar equipment, including giant D-9 bulldozers, to build a separation barrier meant to exclude Palestinians from Israeli-occupied territory. The Israelis also use Caterpillar equipment to demolish Palestinian homes, uproot centuries-olive trees and build Israeli-only settlements and connecting roads on Palestinian land, he said.
He said Hewlett-Packard supplies Israelis with computer equipment and software used in Israel’s blockade of Gaza and biometric scanners used on Palestinians at checkpoints in the separation barrier. Motorola Solutions supplies technology used for surveillance around Palestinian communities in the West Bank, he said.
The proposal to divest from Caterpillar has provoked the most controversy within the church. Gary Davis, moderator of Great Rivers Presbytery, told the committee Monday that divesting from the company would “drive many members away from the church.”
Ellison said Caterpillar has claimed it sells to Israel only through U.S. government programs and claims that failure to continue supplying equipment would be illegal. He said legal experts have told MRTI that no law prohibits a refusal to sell products based on a company’s moral principles.
The PC(USA)’s holdings in the three companies are split between the Presbyterian Foundation and the Board of Pensions. Church officials give varying figures for the value of those assets.
Judith Freyer, the board’s chief investment officer, said the board holds about $10 million in Caterpillar shares, $6 million in Hewlett-Packard shares and $422,000 in Motorola shares.
Ellison told the Middle East Committee the recommendation to divest was “not about a financial impact we’re having on the company. The purpose of divestment is social witness and the collective conscience of the denomination.”
Committee members discussed ways to redirect money from the three companies to other uses in Israel/Palestine that would be consistent with Presbyterian values, but Ellison and Freyer said that might be impossible.
They said divestment must take place in a manner consistent with the fiduciary responsibilities of the foundation and Board of Pensions. Ellison said that means, among other things, that assets cannot be sold in haste or at a loss and funds removed from companies cannot be reinvested in mission.
“So it’s not a matter of what we are doing with the profits,” Ellison said. “It’s what we would choose to profit from.”
In the end, rather than propose mandated rerouting of funds that would be recouped through divestment, the committee inserted in the divestment measure sent to the General Assembly language emphasizing “our continuing investment in those companies operating in Israel and Palestine that support peaceful pursuits.”
It also inserted a simplified explanation of how divestment works below the key recommendations in the proposal. Peter Grosso, a committee member from Pittsburgh, said he was looking for a way to “tone down the shock” the word “divest” was likely to cause his Jewish friends and neighbors.
Ellison urged the Middle East Committee members to consider the divestment recommendation in context of the denomination’s full divestment list, which he said includes many companies – such as tobacco and liquor companies and defense contractors – that are automatically excluded because their business conflicts with the church’s values.
Kenneth Page, a committee member from Grand Canyon Presbytery, abstained from the final vote, as he had done from at least one prior vote during deliberations on the measure. During the committee’s opening session Monday, Page said his impartiality had been questioned because he recently took a trip to Israel sponsored by the Jewish Council for Public Affairs.
On Monday, the committee heard testimony from advocates and opponents of divestment – among them Palestinians uprooted from their ancestral homes, Presbyterians on both sides of the question, Jews who favored divestment and other Jews who spoke of disappointment in their Christian friends.
Rami Khouri, a Palestinian Christian, said Presbyterians should the divestment issue was a call to action based on faith.
“When Jesus walked into the temple to overthrow the money changers, he overthrew the money changers.” That sets an example for Christians today “to pursue justice, not to preach it, not to think about it, not to write articles about it, but to actually do it,” Khouri said.
Divestment, he said, affirms Christian and American values, shows Presbyterians are drawing a line between what’s right about Israel and wrong about illegal occupation and sends a message to the private sector that it “is not immune from accountability.”
Carol Hylkema of Dearborn, Mich., a former chair of MRTI, said great care went into the denomination’s selection of companies for divestment. “It’s time to support the MRTI report,” she said.
Nile Harper, a Presbyterian minister and the director of Urban Church Research, Minneapolis, called the Office of the General Assembly’s divestment proposal “very moderate” and “a reasonable position for our Presbyterian Church to adopt and affirm.” Rick Ufford-Chase, a former Presbyterian General Assembly moderator, said he had been thanked repeatedly by Muslims for the “bold work that Presbyterians have done.”
But other Presbyterians, including the presidents of two Presbyterian seminaries, described divestment as useless at best and at worst destructive.
Stephen A. Hayner, president of Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Ga., said there is “not a shred of evidence that divestment will contribute anything” to the well-being of children or the cause of peace. Katharine Henderson, president of Auburn Seminary in New York, said divestment would sow division rather than bring justice.
Bill Harter of Chambersburg, Pa., called divestment “a simple but destructive answer” to a complex situation, and Bill Crawford, moderator-elect of Hudson River Presbytery, called it “a flawed, bad strategy.” John Vest, a youth pastor in Chicago, said that in big cities like his own, Presbyterians are called to build relations across lines of culture and faith, and “divestment is not a strategy to get us there.”
Bill Moore, who said he served in 2006 on the GA committee that dealt with Middle East affairs, called divestment “a symbolic gesture” that would do nothing to change the lives of children in Israel or Palestine. He likened it to the 18th Amendment, which he said Presbyterians strongly supported when it was ratified in 1919.
“A vote for divestment may be our Prohibition,” he said.
Cindy Corrie, mother of a young woman who some witnesses say was killed by an Israeli bulldozer, urged the committee to “follow my daughter’s call and the call of our Palestinian Christian friends and our Jewish Israeli friends who say that they need our help and yours.”
Rachel Corrie, a 23-year-old peace activist, was killed in Gaza in March 2003. The Israeli Defense Forces reported she died after being struck by falling debris.
Several Jews spoke to the committee in favor of divestment. Rabbi Alissa Wise said she heads a divestment campaign aimed at the same three companies as the measure headed to the General Assembly. Becca Wolf, an American Jew married to a Palestinian, said she “watched as Caterpillar bulldozers uprooted 1,000-year-old olive trees” on her husband’s farm.
Anna Baltzer, a Jewish-American activist for Palestinian rights, told the committee: “Today you’re invested in the suffering of a people. … You do not need my permission to do what you think is right.”
She said there is “nothing Jewish about racial profiling by Hewlett-Packard” or building separate roads for Jews and Palestinians. “Jews are divided here, and it is up to you to decide what is right.”
But Rabbi Alvin Berkun, rabbi emeritus of Tree of Life Congregation in Pittsburgh, said that, every two years, “you manage to bring the Jewish community” in opposition to Presbyterians’ consideration of divesting from companies that do business with Israel.
Berkun said 1,500 rabbis had signed a resolution condemning the divestment proposal. He drew a laugh from committee members when he added, “Not in the history of this republic have 1,500 rabbis signed onto anything.”
Ethan Felson, vice president and general counsel of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, said divestment “embraces one narrative,” but peacemakers are called to embrace multiple narratives.
Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein, director of interfaith affairs for the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, said in an interview Monday that Jews who say they support divestment “are as significant to the Jewish community as members of the flat-earth society would be to a geologists’ convention.”
Jews are “beyond disappointed” with Presbyterians, he said. “… And I think that we are we may be at the end of the line, at least in terms of engaging with the PC(USA) as a church,” though not with individual Presbyterians.
“The eyes of American Jews are definitely upon this building right now.”
