Caterpillar stock targeted
He said Caterpillar does not weaponize the bulldozers. The company’s $69 million distribution center off Hoke Road in Clayton stores parts for Caterpillar equipment in a facility that is expected to employ 600 people when fully operational.
Divestment efforts targeting Caterpillar and other suppliers to Israel have intensified in recent years as peace talks stalled.
At a conference beginning later this month, the Presbyterian Church (USA) will be the latest Christian denomination to vote on whether to divest its stock holdings in Caterpillar and two other companies — Motorola Solutions and Hewlett-Packard — “until they have ceased profiting from nonpeaceful activities in Israel-Palestine,” according to the church’s Mission Council, which recommended divestment in February. Other denominations have voted on the matter in recent years, with mixed results.
In a separate matter, a human rights resolution is on the agenda for Caterpillar’s annual meeting June 13. One of a series of such resolutions introduced since 2004 and opposed by the board of directors, it would require Caterpillar to review its human rights policies. The same proposal was defeated last year after garnering 25 percent of the vote.
Supporters of divestment say it raises awareness of human rights issues in the Middle East and applies pressure on the parties to resolve the long violent conflict. On a more basic level, they say their churches shouldn’t financially support acts or products they find morally objectionable.
“(Caterpillar) provides products that help sustain the occupation of the West Bank. This is an activity we don’t support. We don’t want to profit on the suffering of others,” said the Rev. John Wagner, pastor of Aldersgate United Methodist Church in Huber Heights. Wagner led an unsuccessful effort to get his national denomination to divest in May, and a campaign that led the west Ohio Methodists to divest in 2011.
Wagner said the Jewish settlements are derailing the peace process and “making a two-state solution really impossible. This is a targeted, limited divestment not aimed at Israel or undermining Israel’s security.”
Opponents say divestment unfairly targets only one party to the conflict and strains ties between American Jews and Christians.
“We definitely want to support peace, a twostate solution, and programs and actions of reconciliation are what’s needed,” said Beth Adelman, director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of the Jewish Federation of Dayton. “We don’t support stances of division. We don’t think divestment will affect the parties or change Caterpillar policy.”
Israel sales small, company says
Caterpillar, based in Peoria, Ill., sells the 49ton bulldozers to the U.S. Defense Department, which provides them to Israel through its foreign military sales program. The sales are reviewed by Congress, as well as the Defense and the State departments, Dugan said.
He declined to reveal the amount Caterpillar makes from the sales, but said it’s “a fraction of a percent” of the company’s $63 billion in revenues. “It’s not material to the company by any stretch of the imagination,” he said.
The bulldozers are fitted with armor and sometimes weapons such as machine guns after their arrival in Israel, according to Dugan.
Religious leaders have said they tried in vain to get Caterpillar, Motorola and Hewlett-Packard to change their policies before considering divestment.
The United Nations in January reported that nearly 1,100 Palestinians, more than half of them children, “were displaced due to home demolitions by Israeli forces in 2011,” which represented an 80 percent increase over 2010. Israeli forces destroyed 622 structures owned by Palestinians in 2011, the UN reported, including “222 homes, 170 animal shelters, two classrooms and two mosques (one twice).”
In March, New Internationalist magazine quoted U.N. sources as saying Israelis have destroyed more than 26,000 Palestinian homes in the occupied territories since the 1967 Arab-Israeli War.
In 2003, American peace activist Rachel Corrie was killed by an Israeli Defense Forces D9 bulldozer as she tried to stop a demolition on the Gaza Strip.
“Thousands of families have had their homes and possessions destroyed under the blades of the Israeli army’s U.S.-made Caterpillar bulldozers,” Amnesty International said in a 2004 report.
“The United Methodist Church has long opposed the occupation and (the building of ) more settlements in the West Bank,” Wagner said. “Settlements” may seem innocuous, he said, but “these are really cities being built in the West Bank, displacing the local residents.”
But the United Methodist Church voted 2-to-1 against divestment May 2 after lobbying from both sides of the issue, including a letter signed by some 1,100 American rabbis opposing “counterproductive” divestment proposals.
“Such a one-sided approach damages the relationship between Jews and Christians that has been nurtured for decades,” the rabbis wrote. “It promotes a lopsided assessment of the causes of and solutions to the conflict, disregarding the complex history and geopolitics. Furthermore, it shamefully paints Israel as a pariah nation, solely responsible for frustrating peace.”
One of the signers of the letter was Rabbi Karen Bodney-Halasz, rabbi educator at Dayton’s Temple Israel. “Anything that starts to divide us — the Jewish, the Christian, the Muslim communities — is going to be counterproductive to our ultimate goal of a sustaining and lasting peace in the nation of Israel,” she said. “It’s not going to begin by pointing fingers one way or another.”
Not all Jews oppose divestment. Russ Greenleaf, a Caterpillar shareholder with the pro-divestment Jewish Voice for Peace, spoke at last year’s Caterpillar shareholder meeting.
“Fellow shareholders, our product has become Israel’s weapon of choice for ethnic cleansing and potentially even war crimes,” he said. “Caterpillar makes very little money from selling these military D9s to Israel, and the cost to Caterpillar’s reputation is enormous and escalating. It’s time to call a halt.”
Tutu a divestment supporter
In 2009, Palestinian Christians issued a plea for help that has spurred the upsurge in divestment campaigns. An open letter condemned anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. “At the same time, we call on you to say a word of truth and to take a position of truth with regard to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land,” the document said, adding, “we see boycott and disinvestment as tools of nonviolence for justice, peace and security for all.”
Joining the divestment movement is Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who in April said the Palestinians are “being oppressed more than the apartheid ideologues could ever dream about in South Africa.”
“The human community cannot be silent in the face of the gross injustice being meted out to the people of Palestine,” Tutu wrote in a letter supporting the failed campaign to convince national Methodist delegates to approve divestment last month. “If international courts and governments refuse to deal with this matter, we in the churches and in the rest of civil society really have no choice but to act in small ways and big ways.”
The Presbyterian Church USA has been moving toward divestment with several votes since 2004. Leaders recommended divestment in February, saying the company “has cut off all communication with the religious shareholders” and has become “even more intransient” on the issue. Presbyterian leaders noted that Caterpillar in 2010 told its dealers not to sell any products that might be bound for Iran, which they said contradicted its position that it could not shut off deliveries to Israel.
The Presbyterian vote will come at a general assembly June 30-July 7.
Various regional church organizations have voted to divest from Caterpillar, along with the Quakers, the Church of the Brethren and the Methodist Church of England. Large Lutheran and Episcopal organizations are among those who have voted down divestment initiatives.
Dugan said investors have rejected shareholder resolutions since 2004, and in each case the voting results “have been quite clear.”
But Wagner said the controversy won’t end anytime soon, and predicted the matter will eventually come back before the United Methodist Church.
“We have liberals and conservatives who support us and liberals and conservatives who oppose us. It doesn’t follow traditional (political) lines,” Wagner said. “It’s just a basic justice issue, and it’s something that won’t go away.”