Hesta super fund members the losers from Israel investments call

Hesta chief executive Debby Blakey. Picture: NewsWire / Ian Currie

Regardless of whether they intended to or not, industry super fund Hesta ended its investment in Israeli banks and bonds very recently and thereby handed a tremendous victory to the BDS movement.

We revealed this development on Tuesday. Hesta confirmed it, too, but a spokesman was careful to say the decision to dump the Jewish State was commercial in nature, unrelated to the war in Gaza or the persistent lobbying of the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network, led by Nasser Mashni.

Which surprised us because APAN has for months been battering the Nicola Roxon-led Hesta and its chief executive Debby Blakey with calls for the fund to cut ties with Israel. And no one is more proficient at battering a person than Nasser Mashni, who years ago used a wooden axe handle to beat the crap out of a kid and shove him into the boot of a car during a kidnapping plot, and then cart him out to a field and threaten to break his legs. For that crime, Mashni received a suspended jail sentence, and we list it here now because permanent records exist for a good reason.

But claim the Hesta win he did, of course. On Wednesday, Mashni posted a video to Instagram thanking the fund for reducing to zero its Israel-based investments and calling on fellow agitators to “redouble our efforts” against more super funds to do the same.

Someone then asked what super funds were “Palestinian friendly” and Mashni replied: “None are great. That’s why we need to pressure the ones we are in.”

But pressure them to do what, exactly? Keep their working-class membership insecure in retirement?

Australia Palestine Advocacy Network president Nasser Mashni. Picture: NewsWire / Tony Gough

That’s what Mashni’s basically asking for when he tells Hesta to embrace PR over IRR and stop investing in Expedia, whose share price has doubled over the last five years, and in Motorola and Booking.com, whose shares have tripled.

Mashni was almost levitating at Hesta’s dumping of Israel’s Discount Bank, Bank Hapoalim, Bank Leumi and Mizrahi Tefahot, except each of their share prices have risen three-fold. Hesta tossed them out citing “heightened risk” and to “protect member returns”, yet the charts belonging to these banks keep stubbornly going up and to the right. Mashni’s got no money on the table, so he doesn’t care. He’s an ideologue who thinks a French company that helped build a light rail track in Jerusalem is complicit in an “occupation”.

Meanwhile, the Tel Aviv stock exchange is booming harder than the fictional enterprise run by Lt. Aldo Rainefor a period in WWII.

So here we were, preparing to end on a wisecrack about Mashni knowing nothing about capital investment and wanting healthcare workers to retire broke, miserable, and warming themselves not with bales of cash to pay for central heating during the harshening winters we read about in that climate report released this week, but instead with only the fires of resistance crackling in their hearts as they shiver by candlelight in a holey jumper somewhere.

But we can’t make that joke anymore, because while Mashni is a nuff-nuff, it turns out the biggest nut jobs of all are those who sit on the investment committee at Hesta. And the biggest losers are either them, too, or the Hesta membership itself.