Don’t mention Palestine: divestment as a legitimacy problem Les Levidow

 

Don’t mention Palestine: divestment as a legitimacy problem  Les Levidow

The BDS campaign has been demanding that organisations divest from companies complicit in the Israeli occupation and deny contracts to such companies. Given its strong alliance with Israel, the British state has been trying to deter such actions. This pressure is less about the companies than about legitimacy problems of UK support for Israel. Hence the strong pressure on relevant organisations to stay silent about Palestine as a reason for their financial or contractual decisions, as this article shows. Let’s look at some examples from different arenas.

Public procurement:  For many years the BDS campaign has sought to dissuade local authorities from signing or renewing contracts with complicit companies, especially G4S for ‘security’ services and Veolia for waste management.  Some local authorities have acted accordingly.  But they have rarely (if ever) mentioned Palestine as the reason, thus avoiding any political dispute or retaliation.  In each case the decision had other plausible reasons.

 

Sports sponsorship:  The global BDS campaign has been targeting Puma for its role in the Israeli Occupation.  In particular Luton Town Football Club has been targeted for its kits sponsored by Puma.   Eventually in July 2020 it substituted a different sponsor, with the following disclaimer:  Luton Town FC ‘does not make commercial decisions based upon politics or religious matters’.  Rather, the new sponsor has shared values on sustainability and ecological issues.  Indeed, don’t mention Palestine.

 

University examples: Leeds and Manchester

 

After the Palestine Solidarity Group (PSG) waged a campaign for the University of Leeds to divest from specific complicit companies, the university made a strange announcement about them:

“The University Council agreed to adopt a climate active strategy on 31 May 2018 and the University has been implementing this over the last four months. Core funds which included indirect investments in Airbus, United Technologies, and Keyence Corporation were sold on the 15 October 2018.”. 

 

When the campus PSG claimed victory, the university denied that its reason was any Palestine connection of the companies. This denial lacked credibility because a truly ‘climate-active strategy’ would have divested from several other companies too. Nevertheless the university achieved its apparent aim:  to minimise conflict internally and externally.  The UK government made no comment.  Neither did the local Labour MP comment, though he later denounced Israel Apartheid Week at the university.

 

A similar story recently arose at the University of Manchester.  For several years the Palestine Society had campaigned for divestment from complicit companies such as Caterpillar and the parent company of travel site Booking.com.  After a Freedom of Information request to the university, its 23 July 2020 email message updated the university’s list of investments. The list no longer included those two complicit companies, revealing a low-key divestment decision.  When the BDS campaign claimed victory, the university denied that the divestment had any such connection: ‘The decisions taken on our specific equity holdings are made by our investment managers with the aim of delivering our overall investment goals’, said the spokesperson.  Indeed, don’t mention Palestine.

 

Methodists’ divestment: financial reasons?

Another example comes from the Methodists.  For several years UK churches have had activists campaigning internally for a Morally Responsible Investment policy, supported by Sabeel-Kairos.  This encompasses activities in Palestine, among other irresponsible investments.  The policy was adopted by the Quakers in 2018.  But it proved more difficult to engage other UK denominations.

http://www.sabeel-kairos.org.uk/investing-for-peace-campaign-postcard/#more-7271

Prior to the above campaign, and under internal pressure from a different members’ campaign, the Methodists agreed a 2010 guidance document on divestment.  According to their later confirmation document, the Israeli government ‘must understand that failure to respond to international concerns over compliance with international law with respect to the occupied territories will come at a cost’.  Pro-Israel forces denounced this decision as ‘harmful and divisive’, i.e.  as dividing Christians from Jews (see below the alleged threat to ‘community cohesion’). 

Despite the Methodists' policy, the leadership retained several complicit investments.  For example, HeidelbergCement had been quarrying land in the Occupied Palestine for Israel’s profit, and to provide cement for Israeli settlements in the West Bank.  As its rationale for delay, the Methodist leadership was seeking ‘constructive engagement’ to persuade the company to withdraw from Palestine.  To close such gaps, in 2019 the Methodists’ pro-divestment network put forward stronger proposals, but the conference agenda committee declined these, stating that the investment policy was working as it should. Hence the conference agenda excluded Palestine as grounds for divestment.  

 

https://www.whoprofits.org/company/heidelbergcement/

 

In 2019 the Methodists finally divested from HeidelbergCement but stated only financial reasons.  Thus it avoided negative publicity for Israel and attacks from the Israel lobby.  As this case illustrates, Churches have undergone a conflict between internal ethical pressures versus external attacks implying inter-faith conflict.  Churches face a dilemma: how to carry out divestments quietly or by mentioning a reason other than Israel-Palestine.  Unless, of course, they denounce the racist agenda of their pro-Israel accusers.

 

Public-sector pension funds: court dispute

 

For a long time the BDS campaign has targeted pension funds for complicit companies.  In 2015 UNISON declared, ‘Through our collective strength as UNISON members, we can make sure that our pension funds are exerting pressure through their investments and telling companies to end their involvement with the Occupation.’ 

 

In response, in 2016 the government imposed a new rule which prohibited Local Government Pension Funds (LGPS) from ‘using pension policies to pursue boycotts, divestment and sanctions [BDS] against foreign nations and UK defence industries … other than where formal legal sanctions, embargoes and restrictions have been put in place by the Government’. Likewise it prohibited them from ‘pursuing policies that are contrary to UK foreign policy or UK defence policy’. 

 

At that time the relevant Minister was Matt Hancock.  (Since then he has become infamous for trying to justify the government policy that caused thousands of Covid-19 deaths here).  In 2016 he declared, ‘The new guidance on procurement, combined with changes we are making to how pension pots can be invested, will help prevent damaging and counter-productive local foreign policies undermining our national security.’  Although the guidance did not mention any country, the rationale was clearly the UK’s support for Israel. 

 

To protect the rights of pension-fund holders, a legal challenge was brought by several organisations including PSC and War on Want.  Eventually in April 2020 the Supreme Court invalidated the government guidance on narrow legal grounds (see Rob Wintemute in the BRICUP Newsletter 135).  Nevertheless the government’s political intimidation may deter LGPS from publicising divestments or from mentioning Palestine as the reason.

Beyond divestment: legitimacy at stake

Pension funds have an ethical choice:  They can act in complicity with human rights violations and the UK’s immoral foreign policy. Or else they can act as responsible citizen-investors and so cause political embarrassment for the government. 

This choice matters for legitimacy, as can be seen in the government’s 2016 argument.  It warned that any divestment contradicting UK foreign policy would undermine it.  To deter such action, it has promoted a neoliberal model whereby pension-fund contributors can be legitimately concerned only about funds maximising the financial return. They likewise must accept a version of ‘national security’ which supports Israel’s colonisation project as somehow protecting us. 

Matt Hancock’s 2016 speech also invoked the spectre of antisemitism:  ‘Town hall boycotts undermine good community relations, poisoning and polarising debate, weakening integration and fuelling anti-Semitism.’  Indeed, for several decades the British state has constructed a racist stereotype of ‘the Jewish community’ as a homogeneous group supporting Israel as integral to their religious identity.  The British state hides its own racist policy behind this stereotype in the name of protecting Jews.  Likewise pro-Israel groups who criticised the Methodists’ divestment policy as ‘harmful and divisive’.

 

Those two official pretexts –   national security and social cohesion –  have legitimacy stakes beyond divestment issues.  The British state encourages Jewish paranoia towards pro-Palestine forces as if they were an existential threat.  As a carrot, the Home Office equates ‘community cohesion’ with Muslim groups participating in ‘inter-faith’ events with pro-Israel ones, thus silencing Palestine as an issue.  As a stick, the Home Office accuses Muslim groups of antisemitism if they refuse such complicity.  Likewise if they reject the so-called IHRA definition of antisemitism, which denies the Palestinians’ national narrative of racist dispossession. 

 

As the Jewish writer Barnaby Raine has noted:

“A certain projected fantasy, an idea of ‘the Jews’, has come to signify something powerful to the Right and to liberals. Once they saw us as dangerous Semites infesting European society. Now instead we are their favourite pets: heroic colonists in the Middle East and successful citizens in the West.” 

Indeed, Jews are stereotyped as citizens who embrace the state’s pro-Israel version of ‘national security’, consequently face antisemitic persecution (especially from Muslims and the BDS campaign), and so need state protection.   

Jews as homogeneous victims of the Labour Party’s alleged antisemitism

(inverting its election slogan based on Shelley’s epic poem)

 Through the dominant narrative, the Palestinians’ racist oppression is silenced and displaced onto a domestic antisemitism problem.  The BDS campaign should try to delegitimise the British state for its doubly racist policy.  Let’s continue mentioning Palestine as a state racism issue.

Note:   This article was published by the British Committee for the Universities of Palestine (BRICUP), Newsletter no.136, July-August 2020, www.bricup.org.uk