NEW YORK, July 12, 2012 (WAFA) – The Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and other human rights groups urged the College Retirement Equities Fund (TIAA-CREF) to stop investing in companies that profit from Israel’s occupation and colonization of Palestinian lands, according to a statement published Thursday.
The groups plan to rally at the pension fund annual meeting in New York City next week to express their view.
“TIAA-CREF pro-divestment shareholders will be present at the meeting to ask questions, while human rights advocates will demonstrate their support for divestment on the street outside, and at TIAA-CREF offices across the country, including in Chicago,” said the press release.
“Divestment supporters will remind TIAA-CREF trustees that they are profiting from companies whose products are used to destroy Palestinian schools, make Palestinian families homeless, and to deny millions of Palestinians basic human rights like freedom of movement,” it said.
“Palestinians deserve the same civil and democratic rights that Jewish Israelis do,” said Rebecca Vilkomerson, executive director of Jewish Voice for Peace. “We believe divestment, as called for by Palestinian civil society, is the best tool we have to move toward a just peace based on freedom, security, and equal rights for all the people of Israel and Palestine.”
JVP is encouraged by last month’s news that TIAA-CREF has dropped $72 million in Caterpillar shares from its Social Choice fund, following Caterpillar’s downgrading by influential ethical investment ratings agency MSCI earlier in the year.
In late June, MSCI issued a statement citing the “on-going controversy associated with use of [Caterpillar’s] equipment in the occupied Palestinian territories” as a “key factor” in its decision.
Jewish Voice for Peace is the founding member of the We Divest Campaign, a coalition effort started in 2010 to urge TIAA-CREF to drop Caterpillar and other companies that profit from and facilitate Israel’s 45-year-old military occupation and colonization of the Palestinian West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip.
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