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.
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.
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”