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The final criterion addresses the Israeli government’s ongoing construction of a separation barrier, which the Assembly condemned in another action in June.
It was a tense and not always polite meeting of the Committee on Mission Responsibility Through Investment (MRTI), which includes two representatives from each of the denomination’s two investing agencies — the Board of Pensions (BOP) and the Presbyterian Church (USA) Foundation (PCF) — and five at-large members.
BOP and PCF representatives and their investment officers, who were also present, were antsy about outrage provoked by the Assembly’s decision — particularly among Jewish groups. They said the nuances of the divestment process are lost on many critics, including some of their own pensioners and investors.
Major Jewish organizations vilified the Assembly’s action and launched a campaign to pressure the 2006 Assembly to rescind the divestment decision. Panicked by parallels to the successful campaign to disinvest in South Africa in the 1980s in order to bring down that country’s apartheid system, at least nine Jewish groups are working to preempt Israel divestment decisions by other churches.
The 80 million–member worldwide Anglican communion, for instance, has already put divestment recommendations on its meeting dockets, and other mainline Protestant bodies in the United States are studying the possibility as well.
Indeed, the PC(USA) decision seems to have galvanized the worldwide Christian community around human rights violations committed against ordinary Palestinian civilians living in the Occupied Territories, including minority Christian population in cities like Bethlehem. That is a subject that Christians often dodge because it creates tension in Jewish-Christian interfaith relations.
Palestinian Christians argue that there is no security for Israel or Palestine as long as the occupation continues. The suffering imposed by the Israeli military on civilians in the West Bank and Gaza, they argue, simply evokes more hatred and worsens the conflict.
That was also the stance taken by PC(USA) General Assembly Stated Clerk Clifton Kirkpatrick when he met with Jewish leaders here on Sept. 28.
The establishment of criteria enables MRTI to focus its research so that it may begin identifying which companies — from the PC(USA)’s perspective — further conflict instead of peace and ought to be engaged in dialogue with the church.
Since the church cannot engage every perceived offender, MRTI also determined other factors that it will weigh in choosing which companies to engage: the corporations’ history in Israel and Palestine, the magnitude or strategic importance of their involvement, whether they have assisted any victims of the occupation, and whether they have supported development of a viable economy for an independent Palestinian state.
No companies will be named until MRTI’s research is completed, hopefully, committee members said, in the spring of 2005.
“It’s a set of criteria to organize the work,” said the Rev. Bill Somplatsky-Jarman, who is MRTI’s longtime head and the denomination’s primary liaison with the New York–based Interfaith Committee on Corporate Responsibility, a broad-based organization of Christians and Jewish groups with which MRTI works closely.
“There are hundreds of companies involved [in the occupation] and hundreds [that operate in Israel] who are not involved. … It’s better to focus on criteria that are focused on General Assembly policy on Israel and Palestine.”
The four criteria that target the occupation seek to identify multinational corporations that:
- provide services to or for use by the Israeli police or military to support and maintain the occupation;
- provide products, services or technology of particular strategic importance to the support and maintenance of the occupation;
- have established facilities or operations on occupied land; and
- provide products and services, including financial services, for the establishment, expansion or maintenance of Israeli settlements on occupied land.
For decades PC(USA) policy has called for an end to the occupation, home demolitions, and uprooting of Palestinian vineyards and orchards. It has long opposed Israel’s settlement expansion — a tactic irrevocably linked to the occupation. To build the settlements the Israeli government confiscates land in violation of international law and then escalates its military presence for security.
The fifth criterion targets multinational corporations that provide products, services or financial backing to Israeli or Palestinian groups that commit violence against innocent civilians.
While the Assembly’s action calls for divestment of companies “operating in Israel,” it also reaffirms earlier denominational statements that condemn attacks by suicide bombers or by the Israeli military as “abhorrent and inexcusable by all measures and a dead-end alternative to a negotiated settlement of the conflict.”
According to Somplatsky-Jarman, addressing Palestinian violence is within the mandate of MRTI, even if it is not explicitly stated in the divestment legislation. “Human rights violations are human rights violations. And we want to be sure our work covers all the human rights violations in an area.
“It’s what we’ve done in other countries and it seems appropriate here,” he said, adding that the denomination’s goal is peace in the region that creates security for two states, Israeli and Palestinian.
The sixth criterion targets corporations that finance or assist in the construction of Israel’s enormous separation barrier. Alleged to divide Israelis and Palestinians, the barrier in some places separates Palestinians from each other and from their schools, fields and houses.
The controversial barrier has significantly reduced the number of suicide bombings in Israeli towns. Portions of the barrier are built of 25-foot-high slabs of concrete. In other sections, razor wire tops fencing that is patrolled by soldiers.
Although the barrier was proposed as a security measure, the route of the wall has subsequently been condemned by many of its proponents, according to Rabbis for Human Rights in Jerusalem, because it juts deep into West Bank territory that has not yet been negotiated politically.
The Israeli High Court ordered that a segment of the wall be re-routed because it causes undue hardship to Palestinian civilians living in its path. And many in the international human rights community are demanding that the whole wall be torn down.
“This is not about the Jewish people,” Somplatsky-Jarman told MRTI as he ticked off years of Assembly policy that urges Israel to end settlement construction and the enlargement of existing settlements, both of which are ongoing. It also has demanded a halt to house demolitions, extra-judicial assassinations by the Israeli army, and collective punishment of the Palestinian people, which frequently includes putting entire communities under curfew or virtual house arrest.
The PC(USA), Somplatsky-Jarman said, has “consistently expressed” abhorrence about violence on both sides.
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