It was the closest vote of the 2012 General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA). By the narrow margin of 333-331, commissioners turned aside a proposal to divest PCUSA holdings in three companies that sell non-lethal products to the Israeli military. Instead the commissioners chose an approach that emphasized “active investment” to build up the Palestinian economy.
Now the source of that 2012 divestment proposal, the PCUSA Committee on Mission Responsibility through Investment (MRTI), is bringing an almost identical measure back to the 2014 General Assembly. At least seven presbytery overtures, plus another denominational agency’s resolution, will also press the attack against Israel. Only one overture advocates a more reconciling approach that refrains from harsh words and punitive actions targeted against the Jewish state.
MRTI this year, as in 2012, recommends that “Caterpillar, Hewlett-Packard, and Motorola Solutions be placed on the General Assembly Divestment List until such time as they have ceased profiting from non-peaceful pursuits in Israel-Palestine.” These “non-peaceful pursuits” involve the sale of equipment that the Israeli military uses in maintaining its presence in the Palestinian-populated West Bank.
‘Non-peaceful pursuits’
Caterpillar “sells heavy equipment used in the Occupied Palestinian Territories for the construction of illegal Israeli settlements, roads solely used by illegal Israeli settlers, and the construction of the Separation Barrier extending across the 1967 ‘Green Line’ into East Jerusalem and the West Bank,” according to MRTI. Caterpillar equipment is also used to demolish Palestinian buildings that Israel believes to be illegal or implicated in terrorism.
MRTI reports that Hewlett-Packard “sells hardware to the Israeli Navy, and as a contractor manages all Information Technology.” Such technology is used in “the ongoing naval blockade of the Gaza Strip,” as Israeli ships interdict vessels suspected of bringing arms to the Islamist Hamas movement that rules Gaza. Hewlett-Packard also supplies biometric identification systems that are used at Israeli security checkpoints inside the West Bank.
Motorola Solutions “provided ruggedized cell phones” and “an integrated communications system” to the Israeli army, according to MRTI. The company also sells “wide-area surveillance systems” to protect Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
MRTI’s report to the General Assembly recounts a decade of “corporate engagement” with the three companies. In letters and meetings and through shareholder resolutions, the PCUSA committee has repeatedly urged the three to stop selling to the Israeli military.
Companies can’t control customers
Caterpillar, Hewlett-Packard and Motorola Solutions have consistently brushed aside these church entreaties. In communications with MRTI, they have noted that they sell their products to governments and militaries around the world, and they cannot control how customers use those products. The three companies point out that Israel is a U.S. ally eligible to purchase military-related supplies from U.S. companies. The same equipment that is used to patrol the West Bank is also used to guard against terrorist incursions across the pre-1967 borders of Israel. It would not be possible for the companies to decree that their bulldozers, cell phones and biometric scanners could be used in certain settings but not in others.
Since the 2012 General Assembly, MRTI has made attempts to renew conversations with the companies; however, it has seen no indication that any of them might yield to its demands. The committee is asking 2014 commissioners to conclude that “[t]his process of engagement has, in the case of three companies, produced no substantive change and, in the judgment of this assembly, is likely not to do so in the future.” Therefore, it is again recommending divestment as “the final step … where engagement is not resulting in any change.”
Why Israel alone?
MRTI is not proposing divestment from companies that supply military equipment to other U.S. allies such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia or Pakistan. Human rights groups generally assess those other governments as far more repressive than Israel’s. (Compare Freedom House ratings here.) Yet MRTI has pursued its “corporate engagement” and divestment strategy solely against companies that sell to the Jewish state.
Is this targeting of Israel—and Israel alone—fair? Is it conducive to Middle East peacemaking? The 2012 General Assembly, by the slenderest majority, answered “no.” The 2014 commissioners will have an opportunity to reconsider the question.
Related article:
Renewed barrage of overtures targets Israel for PCUSA rebuke
4 Comments. Leave new
One could make the comment based upon empirical and historical evidence that the PCUSA is in actuality an anti-sematic organization with tax-exempt status or with a religious-sectarian component. While that may be an extreme statement, the best can be said about the organization is there exists an institutional and structural bias where concerns the Jewish state. Or an agenda driven by extreme politics, as the purge of the chair of the committee demonstrates.
But lets talk reality. Israel as a nation-state has GDP of over 1 trillion. A world leader in bio-technology and pharmaceuticals. Economic growth will exceed over 3% this year. CAT, HP, MS all beat their quarterly estimates and combined will return over 1 billion to shareholders this year.
Whatever the entity known as the PCUSA, does or does not do in Detroit is irrelevant to Israel, the Middle East. The only comfort the GA or Detroit will provide is to the terrorists in the territories’, as it has provided to Castro’s Cuba, Mugabi’s Zimbabwe for over 5 decades. Its all about posturing and political theater.
All metrics, all numbers, all demographic, economic trends of the PCUSA point to its eventual demise. Politics, ideology can provide only so much comfort and security to Louisville cabal and their enablers. The waters are receding, the tide is going out. And the PCUSA finds itself naked on the surf.
HP, Motorola, and Caterpillar must be quaking in their boots at the thought of the mighty PCUSA selling the stock shares in their companies. How will these companies ever survive the divestment?
Pardon the sarcasm! HP, Motorola and Caterpillar will long outlast the Presbyterian Church USA.
The ‘cabal’ at the Presbytery, as Peter Gregory accurately calls them, should be dusting off their resumes. If they’re lucky, perhaps Human Resources at HP, Motorola, or Caterpillar will hire them. Those companies are expanding, while the PCUSA continues its inexorable decline, about a decade behind the collapse of the Episcopalian Church.
They’re “quaking in their boots,” Savannah? Did they just read 1 Timothy 6:17: “Charge them that are rich in this world, that they be not highminded, nor trust in uncertain riches, but in the living God, who giveth us richly all things to enjoy?”
“Caterpillar, Hewlett-Packard and Motorola Solutions have consistently brushed aside these church entreaties.” Reminds me of the Gibeonites, Alan, who brushed up their clothes and sandals to make them look absurd and worn out (Joshua 9:1-16). Their ruse didn’t work, and verse 16 tells how they were revealed to be a partisan advocacy group. But not before their treaty was affirmed, they were accepted into the denomination, and their recommendations prevailed. Caterpillar bulldozers are now ploughing up the ground to conceal both the Gibeonites and the Biblical principles they adopted.