General Assembly set to tangle again over Israel divestment
By Alan F.H. Wisdom, Special to The Layman, December 15, 2011
As the Middle East is shaking with revolts against longtime dictators, Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) activists are keeping their fire trained on the region’s only established democracy, Israel. Their aim is to enlist the denomination in the international campaign singling out the Jewish state for “boycott, divestment, and sanctions.” They want to add financial teeth to the PCUSA’s longstanding verbal criticisms of Israel.
On September 12 the PCUSA’s Mission Responsibility Through Investment Committee (MRTI) announced its recommendation that the denomination divest itself of any holdings in Caterpillar, Hewlett-Packard, and Motorola Solutions. The divestment would be a protest against the companies’ sales of construction, computing, and communications equipment to the Israeli military. Israel was the only Middle Eastern nation that MRTI targeted for potential divestment. The recommendation will have to go through the General Assembly Mission Council before it reaches the 2012 General Assembly.
Another Round in a Long Fight
This MRTI proposal presages another round in a long-running fight that has erupted at every PCUSA assembly since 2004. In that year, anti-Israel activists persuaded the assembly to mandate a process of “phased selective divestment in multinational corporations operating in Israel.” That action triggered a volley of negative reactions. The 2006 assembly responded by replacing the anti-Israel mandate with a broader instruction that PCUSA funds should “be invested only in peaceful pursuits.”
The 2008 General Assembly warned against “taking broad stands that simplify a very complex situation into a caricature of reality, where one side clearly is at fault and the other side is clearly the victim.” The 2010 assembly moved to moderate a harshly anti-Israel report that had been drafted by an activist committee. But it also “strongly denounce[d] Caterpillar’s continued profit-making from non-peaceful uses of a number of its products.”
MRTI had been badgering Caterpillar and the other two companies for years to cease their sales to the Israeli military. The companies noted that their products—bulldozers, biometric identification systems, cell phones, and the like—were not weapons designed to kill. They said they had no control over how Israeli forces might use those products in military operations. Pro-Israel Presbyterians asserted that the Jewish state had a right to defend itself against terrorist attacks launched from Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon.
MRTI was not satisfied with the answers it received from the companies. “Today we are sadly reporting that these efforts have not produced any substantive change in company policies or practices, and that there is little reason for hope they will do so in the future,” declared MRTI chair Brian Ellison, a pastor from Kansas City, MO. “According to the Assembly’s prior directives and the church’s ordinary engagement process, we have little choice but to recommend divestment.”
Dissenting Voices
Others disagreed. Jewish groups were quick to voice their displeasure with MRTI. Rabbi Steve Gutow, president of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, objected, “This kind of proposed action promotes the delegitimization of Israel.” He called the divestment proposal “an invitation to more conflict and more division, without the prospect for fostering peace in a region that so desperately needs it.” The chair of the Jewish council, Dr. Conrad Giles, contended, “Divestment should be saved for the most intractable and odious regimes, when all other means have failed; not for liberal democracies [such as Israel] committed to an ongoing peace process.”
Presbyterians for Middle East Peace (PMEP), a moderate group in the denomination, regretted that MRTI’s divestment “recommendation will, no doubt, increase the divisions within the PCUSA.” It criticized “a small group of activists within the PCUSA that has relentlessly sought to punish Israel.”
PMEP was confident, however, that “there is no reason to believe that the General Assembly of the PCUSA will respond positively to the MRTI recommendation. In the past, the GA has consistently rejected calls for divestment. Polling of Presbyterian lay people and clergy has consistently rejected suggestions for the PCUSA to be an advocate for any one side in this multi-sided situation.” The moderate group vowed “to make sure the 2012 General Assembly continues to play a positive rather than inflammatory peacemaking role in the Middle East.”
The Anti-Israel Alliance
On the other side of the debate at the Pittsburgh assembly will be the National Middle Eastern Presbyterian Caucus. An October 11 press release from the caucus announced that it had “endorsed the call by the Palestinian civil society for a boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaign against the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands.”
The Middle Eastern caucus went beyond General Assembly policies asking Israel to withdraw from the West Bank. Instead the caucus echoed maximalist Palestinian demands that Israel commit to “ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands.” Many Palestinian factions regard all of Israel as “Arab land” that must be reclaimed from the Jews.
Standing alongside the caucus in pushing harsher anti-Israel measures will be the PCUSA-sponsored Israel/Palestine Mission Network. In October 2010 the network voted to “to join the international boycott of goods produced in illegal Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.” It also stated its intention to put forward “an initiative that will seek to make its position that of the entire denomination when their General Assembly meets in 2012.”
The General Assembly has yet to approve the campaign of economic pressure sought by the anti-Israel activists. But assembly officials continue to side rhetorically with the Palestinians. Stated Clerk Gradye Parsons signed an October 24 statement by mainline Protestant leaders insisting that “[t]he Palestinians deserve membership in the United Nations” now. The Palestinian bid for UN membership is widely understood as an attempt to gain statehood without having to negotiate with Israel.
Parsons and his colleagues opposed “moves in Congress to cut development aid to the Palestinian Authority” in retaliation for its end run around peace negotiations. By contrast, a PCUSA policy statement adopted by the 2010 General Assembly urges “the withholding of U.S. government aid to the state of Israel as long as Israel persists in creating new West Bank settlements.”