"Holy Land Principles Calls for Fair Employment in Palestine", 09 September 2015

There are 545 US-based companies doing business in Israel and Palestine, several of which are prominent corporations; Cisco Systems, Hewlett Packard, and Intel are but three of them. Given the well-documented human rights abuses inflicted upon the Palestinian population in the region, companies doing business there face substantial reputational risks if they are perceived as assisting Israel in its occupation of Palestinian lands. Some US corporations have already experienced shareowner and nongovernmental organization (NGO) pressure for the human rights impacts of their activities in the region. Members of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR) have, for several years, filed shareowner resolutions with the heavy equipment manufacturer Caterpillar, requesting that it amend its current human rights policy to include references to existing international human rights codes. And the Tel Aviv-based research organization Who Profits reported last year on the extent to which Caterpillar is involved in Israeli military activities in the occupied territories...The goals of the Holy Land Principles may be more modest than the shareowner resolutions from ICCR, in that the organization focuses on fair employment rather than the broader issue of human rights. Describing itself as “pro-Jewish, pro-Palestinian and pro-company,” the organization avoids aligning itself with “quotas, reverse discrimination, divestment or disinvestment,” but models itself on the MacBride Principles, which contributed to a decrease in anti-Catholic discrimination in Northern Ireland...