Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
News

Presbyterians Move Toward Israel Divestment

The Presbyterian church is on the brink of approving a long-debated measure to divest church funds from three companies that do business with Israel.

The move, opposed by mainstream Jewish groups, was overwhelmingly approved by a vote of 36 to 11 by a committee of the Presbyterian Church (USA) on July 3. The church’s general assembly could deliver final approval as early as July 5.

“Obviously, it doesn’t bode well,” said Benjamin Suarato, a spokesman for the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, which has been organizing against the PC(USA)’s divestment efforts for years.

If the resolution is passed by the church’s general assembly, one of the nation’s largest mainline Protestant denominations will sell its church holdings in Caterpillar, Motorola, and Hewlett-Packard. Divestment advocates say these firms sell equipment directly or indirectly to Israel that is used by the country’s military to support occupation policies in the West Bank, Gaza, and in East Jerusalem. They say the companies have failed to respond to the denomination’s concerns.

Activists within the PC(USA) have advocated selective divestment from firms doing business with Israel since 2004. At the denomination’s general assembly in 2010, Jewish activists from the JCPA and some members of the Presbyterian church were successful in lobbying the body to tone down the rhetoric of some of its statements on Israel.

This year, Jewish groups are pessimistic about their prospects for convincing the denomination to reject divestment.

According to a report in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Jews, Palestinians, and Presbyterians gave passionate testimony before the committee.

“When Jesus walked into the temple and overthrew the money changers, he overthrew the money changers’ carts,” said Rami Khouri, a Palestinian Christian divestment advocate, according to the Post-Gazette. “He didn’t just tell them to think about it.”

In an emailed statement, Suarato called the moneychangers analogy “inflammatory.”

The success for boycott advocates in the denomination’s committee vote comes on the heels of a decision by financial analysis firm MSCI to remove Caterpillar from its index of socially responsible companies, a decision made in part because of the firm’s sale of bulldozers to Israel via a Pentagon financing program.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.