MRTI Not to Be Hurried into Israel Divestment

MINNEAPOLIS—When the committee on Mission Responsibility Through Investment (MRTI) meets, people wonder what it will decide on the Middle East–divestment question. Some would like it to recommend immediate divestment to General Assembly; others would be outraged if it did recommend divestment, wanting to halt the process altogether. Both will be disappointed.

Photo of the church reflected: Westminster Presbyterian Church in Minneapolis, reflected here in the Wells Fargo Banking Center, was the site for the April 17-18 Missions Responsibility Through Investment committee meeting.

MRTI met in Minneapolis for its April 17–18 meeting in preparation for General Assembly in late June. Much of its business involved hearing from various church and corporation leaders, such as Target, General Foods, and Best Buy executives, as well as liaisons to various other activist groups. However, it took only part of a day before MRTI zeroed in on the major subject of its last four years: divestment from corporations doing business in Israel.

In 2004, the General Assembly commissioners held a brief and insufficiently informed discussion on a resolution “to initiate a process of phased selective divestment in multinational corporations operating in Israel….” The harshly biased resolution passed, and two years of tremendous outcry and acrimony ensued. At the 2006 General Assembly, far more information and awareness produced a replacement resolution “to urge that financial investments of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), as they pertain to Israel, Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the West Bank, be invested in only peaceful pursuits, and affirm that the customary corporate engagement process of the Committee on Mission Responsibility Through Investment of our denomination is the proper vehicle for achieving this goal.” The idea was to make socially responsible investment a general matter of peace, not a political means for setting apart Israel alone for punishment.

Since 2004, MRTI has chosen a painstaking, deliberate approach to possible divestment, the method it seeks to apply to every area of social responsibility that intersects church investments. After determining corporations that it considers potentially troublesome, it begins a progressive engagement through letters and other contacts. If that doesn’t work, MRTI works on shareholder resolutions. If those don’t produce the expected results, then MRTI may return to General Assembly with a recommendation of divestment. The actual divestment, however, is intended to be a point never reached, because intermediate steps have made it unnecessary.

Through this process, MRTI is not prepared to suggest to the 218th General Assembly in June any corporate divestment concerning the Middle East. The process is not to that point yet, although in another couple of years, it could still get there. Currently, however, according to chair Carol Hylkema, MRTI is seeing “significant progress with Caterpillar” Corporation, long the most likely divestment target. MRTI would like to follow that progress where it may lead.

MRTI Casual about General Assembly Business
The subject of Israel arrived in the meeting during a segment on business coming to the General Assembly. A number of presbyteries have submitted overtures regarding Israel (for example, 11-01, 11-02, 11-03, 11-05) that maintain a blame-Israel slant. For the most part, MRTI members seemed either compatible with or complacent about the overtures as a whole. Oddly enough, some felt the proposed overtures support the gracious 2006 General Assembly statement that replaced the harsh divestment statement from 2004. But in truth, most of the overtures are intended to return Presbyterian policy to a rigidly pro-Palestinian framework. Few MRTI members showed signs of much knowledge or energy concerning the overtures, although Brian Ellison of Kansas City noticed that a couple of the overtures favored MRTI work—even while bashing Israel.

Eventually, however, someone pointed out Overture 099 (see sidebar) from the Presbytery of San Francisco. This overture boils down to a swipe at MRTI for dragging its feet on Israel divestment and a mechanism for General Assembly Council to hurry up and approve divestment even though General Assembly won’t.

The overture’s six-page rationale vilifies Israel, resurrecting from a discarded 2004 General Assembly resolution, for instance, prejudiced language about Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories being at the “root” of violence by either Palestinians or Israelis. The rationale glosses over Palestinian terrorism and corruption but slanders Israel, abandoning judiciousness and reason by the wayside. A paraphrase of the overture’s message might be: “Israel alone is evil. Divestment is necessary, but MRTI has dithered and dallied. Forget MRTI. Let’s get it on anyway!”

MRTI Concerned about a Truncated Process
The San Francisco overture’s harshly biased message about Israel apparently caused MRTI not a moment’s concern, but the implied criticism of MRTI and the abrupt end run around its process got the committee’s attention. The room livened up for this topic.

“They [the San Francisco overture writers] say we’re not getting anywhere with our engagement,” Ellison observed, “and this [overture] would ensure that we do get nowhere!”

Gary Skinner, a retired synod executive from Seattle and a General Assembly Council (GAC) liaison, agreed. “If the GAC would say, ‘Let’s do this [divestment],’” he warned, “I think we would be back into damage-control again.” That troublesome experience, following an intense public outcry upon the divestment resolution’s approval in 2004, continues to haunt MRTI members and other Presbyterian leaders. It was a mess that took two years to be cleaned up by a far more reasonable and just replacement resolution approved by the 2006 General Assembly.

The liaison from the Advocacy Committee for Racial Ethnic Concerns, Jacquelin Lyman, of Hemet, California, likes the current engagement process. “It’s a more positive approach,” she explained. By abandoning it, she warned, “I’m afraid we’d stir up a hornets’ nest again.”

“The impact of this [San Francisco overture] passing would be very detrimental to our work,” concluded Brian Ellison, and no one disagreed.

So what can MRTI do to help defeat the overture? Not much, it turns out, because MRTI is not in a position to advise the General Assembly on the business before it. MRTI members at first considered writing advisory comments that the GAC could send to the General Assembly commissioners to read. However, Sara Lisherness, who serves as Director of Compassion, Peace, and Justice Ministry, wisely reminded MRTI that even the “GAC does not make recommendations to pass or decline to pass overtures. It shares information to further commissioners’ knowledge on making good decisions or to say how a decision would impact the program.” Lisherness’s reminder shot down the idea of directly writing advice for the General Assembly.

The MRTI Plan for General Assembly
MRTI actually feels reasonably sanguine about what will happen at General Assembly. “If I thought [the San Francisco overture] would pass, I’d suggest we comment,” noted Bernice McIntyre, an attorney from Washington, D.C. and an at-large MRTI member. “But it’s not going to pass.” There is also a back-up plan: MRTI members will be on hand at General Assembly as resource persons to respond pointedly if asked the effect the overture would have. In addition, MRTI decided on the suggestion of its staff advisor, Bill Somplatsky-Jarman, to rework its report to GAC, which is meeting in a week, to better explain the engagement that is happening with Motorola and Caterpillar, and the reason for exonerating Citigroup by dropping it from the divestment-engagement list.

Chair Carol Hylkema, no friend of Israel but nonetheless a trenchant commentator, gave an additional talking point in opposition to the San Francisco overture. She receives e-mail traffic from a web discussion group operated by the Israel-Palestine Mission Network (I-PMN), an ad hoc group of anti-Israel activists that operates with official Presbyterian standing. The San Francisco overture “was sent out and asked to be passed,” according to Hylkema. “Those responding [on the web] from I-PMN were thrilled with this overture,” Hylkema noted. “They would probably be the ones most disappointed by trying to slow things down a little bit.”

And here’s the excellent insight on Hylkema’s part: She notes, rather ironically, that after the 2006 General Assembly, people like the San Francisco overture supporters “were the ones most supportive of continuing the process” MRTI was pursuing toward possible divestment. So when faced with the possibility of the 2006 General Assembly’s more benevolent stance toward Israel, the overture supporters were big fans of the MRTI engagement process, because it felt more punitive. But when the same engagement process didn’t immediately thump Israel, the overture supporters changed their tune and want to skip the process and move directly to punishment. Apparently it is punitive measures these overture supporters from San Francisco truly want, and the MRTI process can be either heralded or declaimed, according to how swift is its sword. Hylkema keenly observed this inconsistency.

A Less-Than-Best Situation
MRTI seems incapable of standing above a persistent and rather prejudicial bias toward a one-sided Palestinian narrative about a tremendously complicated situation. In general, MRTI returns instinctively to the conclusion that for justice to be served, Israel must be found keenly at fault and somehow censured.

MRTI members meet in a classroom at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Minneapolis.

At the same time, however, MRTI appears to believe strongly in its phased, selective engagement process and in the progress it is making to achieve its purposes. Undeterred as it is about the single-minded end of admonishing Israel to desist from many of its practices, MRTI yet remains steadfast in wanting to see the process of engagement through to the end, without hot-headed interference by the “divest immediately” crowd.

It appears that the contest at General Assembly could be between those who want to nudge Israel seriously and those who champion pushing Israel precipitously. What seems to be forgotten is that wise and statesmanlike commissioners in 2006 decided that there is a third way to operate: to seek the common welfare of both Palestinians and Israelis through positive means, not by waving a big Presbyterian stick only at Israel.

In her bluntness, Carol Hylkema perhaps demonstrates the problem best. As she warns her fellow MRTI members, one detects her assumption that there are basically two kinds of people: There are good Presbyterians who want to censure Israel and there are bad outsiders who want to cause trouble.

Hylkema thinks she understands her opposition. “From the perspective of those who reject the whole idea of corporate engagement,” she speculates, “I see this as an opportunity for them to malign GAC.” Notice how she thinks fairness or a reasonable position has nothing to do with the others’ motivation. Those who come to prudential judgments different than hers must want only to cause disruption or harm. “I also see this group of folks—including the Jewish community, who were all over the [2006] assembly in Birmingham and who knew our process better than many [Presbyterians]—they will be all over this [San Francisco overture] too, very, very quickly.”

So, look out! Supposedly the clever Jews and naughty outsiders are coming to malign good Presbyerians! Such bald prejudice sullies Presbyterian deliberations. Surely we are broader thinking and more charitable than this! Surely the answer to Presbyterian relations with Israel and Palestine lies in a more even-handed, less prejudicial, more classically liberal stance that neither takes sides nor assigns arbitrary blame.

Arguably, the charitable and diplomatic course for General Assembly to take would involve allowing the 2006 resolution to stand unmolested, neither obliterated by the San Francisco overture nor observed only in part by an MRTI steadfastly convinced that Israel is solely culpable. But such a benevolent course apparently will not be championed at General Assembly by MRTI. Other more generous and perceptive voices will be needed to ennoble—not malign—the work of the General Assembly.