I was reading up on disinvestment on Wikipedia the other day and saw the following passage:
"Some hold that divestment campaigns are based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how stock markets work. John Silber, former president of Boston University, observed that while boycotting a company's products would actually affect their business, "once a stock issue has been made, the corporation doesn't care whether you sell it, burn it, or anything else, because they've already got all the money they're ever going to get from that stock. So they don't care.
Regarding the more specific case of South Africa, John Silber recalled:
"...when the students were protesting the South African situation, I met with them, and they said BU must divest in General Motors and IBM. And I said, "Why should we do that? Is it immoral to own that stock?" Absolutely immoral to own it. And I said, "So then, we're supposed to sell it to somebody? We can't divest unless we sell it to somebody. And if we burn the stock, that just helps General Motors, because it reduces the amount of stock outstanding, so that can't be right. If we sell it to somebody we have just gotten rid of our guilt in order to impose guilt on somebody else.""
However, I recall hearing that some orgs have in fact disinvested from Israel. I presume that these investments are primarily in the form of stocks. How did they actually disinvest?