On April 1, a World Central Kitchen convoy of three cars drove on a route pre-approved and coordinated with the Israeli military in central Gaza. One car after another was targeted with missiles from a Hermes 450 drone and all seven WCK workers and volunteers were killed.
The Hermes drone is produced by the Israeli company Elbit. Connecticut has $1 million invested in Elbit as part of its $95 million invested in Israeli companies. This isn’t the first time that an Elbit drone was connected to a human rights abuse. In 2014 a Hermes drone attack killed four children playing on a Gaza beach in front of dozens of journalists.
In February of this year a quadcopter flew into Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza. Dr. Khaled Alserr said that it carried an “AR” rifle and “they shot all over the building. And they shot my colleague, Dr. Karam. He has a shrapnel inside his head.” It could well have been an Elbit drone. Elbit makes 85% of Israeli drones. Military drones have become ever smaller. In 2020 Forbes talked about Elbit’s Lanius drone quadcopter. It’s small enough to go into a building, fly around and kill.
The value of Connecticut investment of Treasury funds in Elbit was precisely $963,736.72. That’s the number from a January 2024 Treasury report. Treasury money is mostly pension money for which teachers, and state and local employees pay for each month via deductions. It’s worker money assisting in genocide.
Yes, the International Court of Justice has only made “provisional” decisions in the years-long process to declare Israeli action genocide, but the facts are well-known and damning, an Israeli government which last October declared its goal to cut off all the necessities of life from the whole population in Gaza, with a U.N. official declaring in May that northern Gaza is undergoing “full-blown famine”, with the UN Secretary General saying on June 11 that “over 50,000 children require treatment for acute malnutrition.”
Activists have met with Connecticut Treasurer Erick Russell and called on him to sell off the investments in Israel. He says his fiduciary responsibility is to make as much money as he can for the Treasury subject only to limitations imposed by U.S. or Connecticut law. That didn’t prevent a former Connecticut treasurer from selling off investments in Russia after its 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
By Connecticut law, the treasurer must consider “the implications of any particular investment in relation to the foreign policy and national interests of the United States.” Well, the prevention of genocide is absolutely aligned with official U.S. foreign policy. The U.S. is a signer of the international genocide convention. As the U.S. Holocaust Museum has explained, the U.S. government rigorously looks at situations around the world to see if they amount to genocide. To comply with U.S. foreign policy, Treasurer Russell should divest from State of Israel Bonds, Israeli stocks and Israeli currency.
To make that clear, the governor should add divestment to the agenda for the June 27 special session or arrange for another special session to deal with Connecticut’s assistance to Israel and our degree of responsibility for the grave situation in Gaza. The Connecticut legislature should come up with the language similar to wording it has used in the past to bar investments in countries like apartheid-era South Africa and Sudan.
To aid in the process here’s language that would do the job:
The state treasurer shall review the invested assets of all state funds to ensure that no such assets are invested in: (1) Any financial institution making loans to the State of Israel, a national corporation of the State of Israel or a subsidiary or affiliate of a United States company operating in the State of Israel or (2) any stock or obligations of any company doing business in or with the State of Israel or (3) any bonds issued by the State of Israel.
On or after the effective date of this act no such assets shall be invested in any such institution or any such stock or obligations or any such bonds and any such assets so invested on said date shall be disinvested within a reasonable period as determined by the state treasurer.
This is an emergency. Summer is starting and instead of living in houses that can deal with the oppressive heat, a million Palestinians are subsisting in tents.
On June 17 James Elder, spokesman for the UNICEF, said he had been inside a tent in Gaza where the temperature read 55 degrees Celsius. That’s 131 degrees Fahrenheit. Connecticut worker money should not be helping finance that horror.
Stanley Heller is Administrator of Promoting Enduring Peace which was founded in New Haven in 1952. He’s also a member of Jewish Voice for Peace.
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