This article is from the newsletter of United Church Funds, UCFocus.

In 2006, United Church Funds helped to create the Ecumenical Action Group for a Just Peace in Israel-Palestine — a task force comprising over 20 denominational executives and lay leaders who collaborate in engaging US and multi-national corporations, seeking to end profit-making from the Israeli Occupation of the Palestinian Territories. Over the last several years, the group has met with Caterpillar, Motorola, Hewlett-Packard, United Technologies and related corporations, encouraging positive change in their business practices in Israel and Palestine and sponsoring shareholder resolutions when discussions bear little fruit.

In February 2010, a group of 13 people representing five mainline denominations and one Roman Catholic order traveled to the region seeking a range of on-the-ground dialogues with US corporations and members of their supply chains. The goal: to ensure corporate executives — many of whom fly in only to attend business meetings in Tel Aviv — gain a deeper understanding of the impact of their activities and practices on the people who live in the West Bank.

Despite early expressions of willingness to meet the group in Jerusalem and environs, Caterpillar and Motorola executives ultimately declined the group’s invitation to meet. Proctor & Gamble, however, facilitated a meeting with Avgol, a P&G supplier whose manufacturing facility lies in the Barkan Industrial Zone — essentially an industrial settlement on land well within the West Bank and near the Israeli Ariel settlement (a highly developed planned community of about 20,000). Despite hosting his guests well, the CEO of Avgol indicated the cost to move his facility into Israel proper would be prohibitive. Israeli industrial zones, built on occupied land, offer significant incentives to business owners and enjoy easy access to workers from nearby settlements. Although many Israeli industrial zone business owners hire Palestinian workers, most of these workers are employed in low-level jobs (often in janitorial or other cleaning work) and many are contract workers rather than employees with the benefits enjoyed by Israeli workers. Because most Palestinians have few employment options, work in settlement and industrial zones remains one of their few means of earning a living.

Hewlett-Packard (HP) also responded to the invitation of the Ecumenical Action Group, sending an Israeli marketing staffer from the Tel Aviv area to meet with the delegation just outside Bethlehem — a suburb of Jerusalem in which the staffer had never traveled. Hewlett-Packard’s EDS subsidiary supplies the Israeli Defense Force with the technology required by checkpoint hand scanners that evaluate each Palestinian worker wishing to leave the West Bank (or sometimes simply leave a walled-in city within the West Bank). Following reasoning used by Caterpillar and other corporations profiting from the Occupation, the HP representative claimed that HP does not determine how its products and services are used by customers. But similar claims made 20 years ago in South Africa are currently being challenged in US courts, posing a threat to shareholders of companies who profited from the apartheid regime.

At both the beginning and end of the trip, the delegation met with representatives from the US State Department, who helped clarify some of the work the US government is doing to assist the Palestinian Authority and people as they seek to build a sustainable economy while under Occupation. But the group was again reminded that State Department staff only pursue the policies of the President and US government — real change in the situation in Israel and Palestine requires ongoing engagement with Congressional representatives, many of whom hear only from well-organized and well-funded lobbyists who play down the life-altering injustices occurring daily and at nearly every turn in Palestinian society. United Church Funds remains engaged in fulfilling its obligation to the United Church of Christ as voted in the General Synod resolution adopted in 2005, using economic leverage to promote peace in the Middle East.