STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- In a 310-303 vote, the church decides to pull $21 million in investments
- It is backing out of Caterpillar, Hewlett Packard and Motorola Solutions
- It says Israel uses the corporations' products to suppress the Palestinians
- The church is keeping all other investments in Israel and investing in Palestinian Territories, too
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updated 4:44 AM EDT, Sat June 21, 2014
Many American Protestants have a reputation for supporting Israel
without demur. But a major denomination broke with that convention to
jump to the aid of the Palestinian people.
In a cliffhanger vote
Friday, the general assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) decided
to dump its investments in three corporations it says deliver products
to Israel that help the Jewish state suppress its neighbors.
The decision puts the Palestinians and Israelis on equal footing before God, it said.
"We see both as children
of God," said Heath K. Rada, who moderated this year's general assembly,
the church's biannual leadership meeting.
A day earlier, the church's leadership voted to allow pastors to marry same-sex couples in states where that's legal and to change the definition of marriage in the church constitution from a union between a "man and a woman" to "two persons."
Not weapons makers
After Friday's vote of
310 to 303, the Presbyterian Church will pull about $21 million out of
Caterpillar, Hewlett Packard and Motorola Solutions.
Why these companies, which are not exactly arms dealers?
"Caterpillar provides
bulldozers that destroy Palestinian homes," said spokeswoman Kathy
Francis. HP provides Israel with logistics and technology used in the
naval blockade of Gaza.
"Motorola Solutions provides military communications and surveillance systems in illegal Israeli settlements," she said.
But the church still supports Israel and is not about to join the BDS movement -- which calls for boycotts, divestment and sanctions to punish the Jewish state over the Palestinian issue.
"We have significant investments in Israel," Francis said. And the church is keeping them.
The decision was not
about politics, but about morals, she said. The church wanted to no
longer profit from investing in the destruction of people's homes and
lives.
Instead, it's shifting some of its investing wherewithal into economic development programs in the Palestinian Territories.
Following the Catholic lead?
The denomination's
stance on the tensions between Israelis and Palestinians could be seen
as similar to that Pope Francis, the head of the Catholic Church,
demonstrated when he visited the Middle East in June...READ MORE
Francis, center, leads an open-air Mass in Bethlehem on May 25. |
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