United Methodist Church set to vote on Israel divestment
By Lorne Bell
The Jewish Advocate
April 18, 2008
Investment initiatives are an increasingly popular way for organizations and government entities to send a message to corporations involved with human rights violators. From Sudan to China, companies face pressure from activists to reject partnerships with corrupt regimes. But Jewish organizations have recently expressed serious concerns about an initiative of the United Methodist Church (UMC) that seeks to divest from companies doing business in Israel.
“The Jewish community, together with other friends of Israel, is deeply concerned about any efforts that distract from the goal of peace and a two-state solution,” read a statement issued last week on behalf of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, the American Jewish Committee, the Jewish Community Relations Council, and several other Jewish groups. “Targeted anti-Israel divestment is one such distraction."
The controversial measure will be voted on at next week’s General Conference of the Untied Methodist Church in Fort Worth, Texas. It focuses on $5.5 million the church has invested in Caterpillar, an American-based supplier of construction equipment that has been criticized for supplying Israel with land-clearing machinery in the Palestinian territories. The money is only a fraction of the church’s $17 billon portfolio, but divestment advocates say the move is largely symbolic.
“We want to raise awareness of the difficulties that the [Israeli-Palestinian] peace process involves, and of the fact that there are many partiers that should be brought to the table on this discussion,” said Wayne Rhodes, director of communications for the UMC’s General Board of Church and Society, which is bringing the petition before the General Conference.
But opponents of the divestment say it unfairly targets Israel.
“These kinds of initiatives do nothing to promote the cause of peace and instead attract unfair and unwanted criticism of Israel at a time when it faces unrelenting attacks on its citizens,” said Alan Ronkin, deputy director of the JCRC in Boston.
And although the initiative is part of an effort to engage in socially responsible investing, the UMC’s pension fund holdings include several companies tied to human rights abuse issues in nations like Sudan, Iran and Syria, according to Jon Haber, a local writer and contributor to the Jerusalem Post.
“[The UMC’s] current investment portfolio is a who’s who o companies supporting terror and oppressive regimes,” Haber said.
He cited reports by the Sudan Divestment Task Force and The Center for Security and Human Policy, which named several corporations in which the UMC has invested tens of millions of dollars. India Oil & Natural Gas ($1.6 million in holdings), for instance, has reportedly been involved in purchasing assets in Sudan that were abandoned by other funds because of ties to the brutal Sudanese regime. And the French Bank BNP ($4.7 million in holdings) has financed billions of dollars in Iranian projects that were investigated for misusing funds from the UN Oil-for-Food program.
But evidence of an incongruous approach to socially responsible investing is even more apparent at the New England Conference of the United Methodist Church (NEUMC). In 2005, the NEUMC passed resolution 204, which called for the formation of a divestment task force to focus exclusively on companies with ties to human rights abuses in the Palestinian territories. A non-binding list of 20 companies was released in June 2007, as a resource for investors in the Methodist community.
“The purpose of the list was to not have Methodist money being generated by something we consider illegal by international law,” said William Aldrich, chairperson for the NEUMC Divestment Task Force.
Both Aldridge and Rhodes emphasized that the divestment initiatives do not reflect an anti-Israel sentiment on the part of the UMC. The church is targeting companies, they said, not countries. But Haber disagreed.
“The New England Conference in particular is looking pretty myopic on this single issue, and frankly a little crazed on the whole matter,” he said. “Here they are scrutinizing their portfolio for questionable investments and they find Blockbuster Video? The gap between the moral posturing and reality is pretty huge.”
But concern over Methodist Church’s divestment initiatives is not just coming from the Jewish community. JoAnn Magnuson, a Minneapolis, Minn.-based freelance consultant in Jewish-Christian relations, said Israel divestment initiatives can significantly damage interfaith relations and the image of the church itself.
“Certainly divestment is not going to finish off the state of Israel, but it sends a bad message,” she said.
Magnuson was a leading activist in the fight to defeat an Israel divestment initiative in the Presbyterian Church (PCUSA) in 2006. The original divestment resolution drawn up by PCUSA’s leadership in 2004 was handily voted down by delegates at the organization’s 2006 conference.
But regardless of whether the UMC’s petition is approved at next week’s conference, it has already driven activists to redouble their efforts to educate the public about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“Strong Jewish-Christian relations are critical in developing support for Israel,” said Ronkin. “This [national UMC initiative] underscores the need to continue to work at a local level for greater understanding.”
