The Presbyterian Church (USA), the largest Presbyterian denomination in America, has voted to divest its funds from Israel bonds and begin a process to encourage companies contributing to human rights abuses against Palestinians to change their practices. Alongside the financial decision, the church also passed a resolution condemning Christian Zionism, and thus rejecting the messianic ideology that views the takeover of Palestine to be part of a Biblical promise.
Votes were cast during the church’s General Assembly in Salt Lake City, Utah. The assembly, comprising 422 delegate commissioners and 82 advisory delegates, passed the resolutions as part of a broader package of legislation governing church activities.
The resolution to divest from Israel calls on the Presbyterian Foundation and Board of Pensions to divest from governmental debt held by countries maintaining prolonged military occupations and subject to UN resolutions. While this includes Turkey and Morocco, the focus has primarily been on Israel. The church, which has approximately 8,800 churches and 1 million members, has been sharply critical of Israel’s policies towards Palestinians for decades.
In addition to divestment, the church voted to begin a dialogue with General Electric and Palantir Technologies, encouraging them to end practices that harm Palestinians. The church contends that General Electric sells fighter jet engines used by Israel’s air force, while Palantir Technologies provides Israel with artificial intelligence technology for surveillance of Palestinians.
SEE HOW EASY IT IS, <insert university here>!!!
It may not actually be that easy. Many endowment funds are managed by third parties and the university itself has no direct control.
You’ll note it took the church this long to do it, too
No but I mean it didn’t take a fucking protest to convince them. They did what was right.
This only may have been easy because they didn’t actually have that much invested in Israel
Edit: I don’t know this for certain (can’t find the info anywhere), I’m just saying
If you aren’t giving them much, there’s no harm done in stopping. If you are giving them much, people have a right to condemn you for it. If you want to keep giving them much as leverage, this is the perfect time to exercise that leverage.
There are no excuses.
A step in the right direction, but why the hell would a church invest in Palentir and other defence companies in the first place?
Moral or ethical concerns aside, the military-industrial sector is a solid investment. They’re reliable companies that are “vital” to their respective countries’ “national security”; and will always be propped up.
Yeah, but if you’re a church you’d think moral and ethical concerns would be at the forefront of how you invest. But of course, we’re in an age where everything is basically a hedge fund: banks, car companies, governments, universities, churches, etc.
Most churches invest into some sort of hedgefund, or some other kind of investment firm- You don’t want Pastor Joe running the investments. the market is basically a zero sum game, so, any time you make a profit, somebody else loses profit and it’s arguably inherently unethical to invest in the market.
which means anyone whose good at investing isn’t going to be nearly as concerned with ethics or morals.
There’s ethical funds you can invest in and still make a profit. Stuff like renewables, worker -owned companies etc are all options, and will typically actually outperform index funds.
What are you talking about? Why would you think the market is a zero sum game?
Because it (basically) is. In order for a pair of trades to be profitable, somebody has to give up that value.
Even if you’re literally just holding for dividends, that dividend’s value is coming from the company. (And it’s also reflected in the share price basically immediately. A $1 dividend per share would see the share price drop by a dollar.)
When you make money on the stock market, somebody lost that money. It might be another investor, it might be a day trader, it’s probably a market maker.
Stocks don’t magically grow. The market doesn’t magically make value. It all comes from somewhere.
The argument against it being a zero sum game is basically that everyone has their own objectives and might consider it a win, regardless if they didn’t time their trades perfectly and left money on the table.
But that doesn’t change the basic reality that they gave up value for some one else to (hopefully) profit.
I tried to find out how much they actually had in Israeli government bonds, but that information is not available.
Their total investment portfolio is around $500M (including ALL stocks and bonds, corporate and government) so unless they were strangely focused on investing in Israeli government bonds they likely had only tens of thousands of dollars. In fact, I’d be surprised if they had any meaningful government bond holdings outside the US government bonds.
With 1 million members that would be $500 for each member. They’re not wall street but it’s not insignificant.
$500M is their total investment, not the amount in Israeli bonds. In a proper portfolio bonds should likely be less than 30% of the total, sometimes even as low as 10%. Most of those bonds are going to be US Treasuries and corporate bonds. Of the maximum $60 million they keep in bonds, I’d be surprised if they had even $20 million in total foreign government bonds, and much of those are going to be in large and mostly stable government bonds like the Eurozone, China, Japan, UK, etc.
Like I said it’s probably tens of thousands total, even if we were generous and said it was $100,000 in Israeli bonds it would only be $0.10 per person. It likely closer to pennies though. I wouldn’t even be surprised if it’s $0, and this policy vote is just a PR piece rather than an actual change in holdings.
Israeli bonds have showed up at other places they don’t belong.
Florida Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis announced last week that the Florida Treasury will invest an additional $25 million in Israeli bonds to raise the state’s total current investment to $80 million, which Patronis identified as the largest total held at one time by Florida
They sometimes get recommended in a package too. Lobbying does wonders.
The church is also divesting from companies heavily invested in israel and even trying to use their investment as leverage against companies to divest from israel. Which is nice.
The most important point is the church divesting openly. Universities also don’t have much connection to israel either, yet they adamantly refuse to divest. Jesus 1 - Science 0.
The encampment group at my local university posted a report on what exactly they wanted divested, none of it was direct Israeli stocks or bonds, it was like $1 million in a massive defence company that had worked with Israel in the past, and another $200,000 in a hedge fund that itself had a portion invested in random military companies associated with Israel.
Hardly “invested in Israel”
