The debate over Alameda County’s investment policies has been raging since December, when Alameda County Treasurer Henry Levy sold the county’s holdings in Caterpillar Inc. as the company faced accusations of supporting illegal Israeli settlements amid the political firestorm over Israel’s war in Gaza.
The Board of Supervisors directed Levy to create an ethical investment policy for its $10 billion investment portfolio. Alameda County, which previously boycotted apartheid in South Africa in the 1990s, has not been shy about stepping into the political fray. Meanwhile, supporters of the policy have lobbied hard for it, and opponents have just as vehemently claimed that it is not actually about avoiding companies that do business with human-rights violators around the globe, but specifically a tool to punish Israel for its ongoing military assault on Gaza.
That’s why it was a strange scene when the Board of Supervisors voted 4-1 to adopt the policy, with silence from the scores of pro-Palestinian activists in the room who had demanded it. Their ambivalence stemmed from the supervisors’ motion to seek a peer review of the policy that would delay its implementation for months.
Ultimately, for both the policy’s supporters and opponents, the results of the Oct. 3 meeting were a mixed bag. Israel supporters like Oakland resident Ofra Pleban, a representative of the Oakland Jewish Alliance, had argued the policy would foment antisemitism in the community, unfairly single out Israel and harm future yields from the county’s portfolio.
“It’s driven by anti-Israel activists and could lead to blacklisting companies simply for doing business with Israel,” Pleban said at the meeting. “Policies like that only make things worse, legitimizing efforts to demonize Israel and creating a more hostile environment for Jews.”
But Palestinian supporters, many of whom identified as Jewish, said the county had a moral responsibility to approve the policy. Supporters said it did not single out any one country, but offered a universal standard for the county. Berkeley resident Cynthia Papermaster, who said she had lost family members in the Holocaust, encouraged the supervisors to adopt it.
“I do not speak for all Jews, and I very much resent the Jewish people in this room who are turning this issue into one about antisemitism. It has nothing to do with antisemitism. It has only to do with ethical investing,” Cynthia said. “I urge you to vote yes on this policy to make us proud and take a historical step in favor of justice.”
Levy said he was proud to have started what he considered a necessary discussion on the county’s principles when investing, despite the polarizing effect of the proposal.
“People took what they wanted to mean from that, that I’m part of (the Boycott, Divest, Sanction movement against Israel), and I did it for personal reasons,” Levy told the Board of Supervisors. “I’m proud – I’m glad I did it. I feel like this discussion about ethical investment policy wasn’t going to happen unless I got rid of the one sort of sore point.”
Supervisor David Haubert pushed Levy on the impacts of the ethical investment policy on the county’s coffers and its relevance to Israel’s war in Gaza. He brought up examples of human rights violations in China against Uyghers, a Muslim ethnic group subjected to mass surveillance, detainment and religious persecution by the Chinese government.
“Essentially, slave and imprisoned labor in China doesn’t rise to the level of wanting to get out of an investment? All the other genocides that happened there? None of that seemed to matter?” Haubert said. “It just seems again and again and again like (the ethical investment policy) was made for this particular situation and not another.”
Levy defended the policy, arguing it wasn’t about the Gaza conflict, but to provide a new standard for the county’s investments. But Haubert and Supervisor Nate Miley remained skeptical and said they worried that the ethical investment policy could lead down a slippery slope, inhibiting the county from achieving its financial benchmarks.
Miley then made a motion to approve the policy, subject to independent peer review. Supervisor Nikki Fortunato Bas voted against the peer review, calling it “disheartening and disappointing” to delay the policy’s implementation. The Board passed the vote 4-1, with Bas voting against the measure.
Though Levy questioned the validity of the peer review, he said the policy carries on the county’s long tradition of standing for human rights which goes back to boycotting the apartheid regime of South Africa in the 1980s and divesting from Burma in the 1990s.
“This is not about a single issue we face today, but a long-term commitment to Alameda County stakeholders to incorporate their values into decisions made about how their money is invested,” Levy said.