We Exposed ESG’s Israel Divestment Push—and We’re Seeing Big Results
Sunlight is the best disinfectant for the anti-Israel radicalism of the ESG movement.
Divestment from Israel isn’t a new phenomenon. The push to withdraw corporate support for the state of Israel in ‘solidarity’ with the people of Palestine has existed for decades in various forms, from the BDS movement to the demands of modern anti-Israel protestors on college campuses. Yet, current attempts to defund Israel in its war against Hamas aren’t limited to vocal minorities at Yale or Columbia—they’ve stealthily been making their way onto the agendas of America’s biggest companies.
To read some of these proposals, you might think you were actually reading from a sign at an anti-Israel protest. Activists are targeting companies like Amazon, deeming them complicit in “segregation” and an ‘apartheid state’ of surveillance for doing business with the Israel Defense Forces. They’re going after major weapons manufacturers like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, alleging that they’re abetting war crimes for selling weapons used to protect Israeli civilians. They claim that these are ‘human rights’ demands and that depriving Israel of weapons and surveillance technology will somehow make the crisis in Gaza better.
Such activists do so subtly, hoping to avoid close scrutiny of these proposals and quietly lay the groundwork for divestment. Yet, because you allow us to represent your values in the corporate space, we had the opportunity to catch these proposals and shine a light on them. We passed this along to Charles Gasparino, who published an expose on these proposals in the New York Post in March. “Israeli business dealings are described using woke euphemisms, such as material risks for investors,” writes Gasparino. “All in all, more proof that ESG’s demise couldn’t come fast enough.”
You can read his full piece here—it’s much-needed light on yet another radical facet of the modern ESG movement. And that demise may be coming faster than activists think. Shareholder support for these proposals is declining at companies from Lockheed to Amazon, especially since we started bringing light to it. At Amazon, for example, shareholder support for divestment proposals dropped from 33.5% to 16.4% in the past year. Increased corporate visibility, driven by the horror of October 7th, is making one thing abundantly clear: divestment is a radical idea that American shareholders do not want.
It’s one thing for activists to attack Starbucks over its oat milk (although that’s telling too). It’s one thing for Ben and Jerry’s to court ESG activists by criticizing Israel. It’s another thing to pretend that weapons and tech companies divesting from Israel will improve the state of human rights in Gaza. These activists seem absolutely convinced that they have a humanitarian solution—nothing could be further from the truth. As I wrote at RealClearMarkets, “Any remotely moral system of corporate engagement doesn’t demand that countries be deprived of their ability to defend civilians to appease pampered activists half a world away. When it does demand such things—has the [ESG] movement become unfit for purpose?”
Here at Bowyer Research, we know it has. And issues like divestment reveal just how deep the rot goes in the ESG movement. Thank you for trusting us to shine a light on these issues, and allowing us to fight for your values to help build a shareholder-first future.
