Israeli billionaire Idan Ofer and his wife Batia are resigning from their posts on the executive board of Harvard’s Kennedy School in protest at school president Claudine Gay’s belated, lukewarm response to the student letter blaming Israel for the massacre committed by Hamas terrorists on 8 October.
Ofer is a shipping and chemicals magnate whose net worth is valued by Forbes at $14 billion.
Ofer has said they resigned ‘in protest of the shocking and insensitive response by the president of the university, who did not condemn the letter by student organizations who blamed Israel for the massacres’.
Gay has come under fire from school president Larry Summers, who decried the ‘delayed’ statement from her office in response to the student letter.
That the statement did not explicitly condemn Hamas was the reason for Summers’ letter.
‘Why can’t we give reassurance that the University stands squarely against Hamas terror to frightened students when 35 groups of their fellow students appear to be blaming all the violence on Israel?” Summers wrote in his social media post late on Monday.
More than 30 student groups issued the incendiary letter hours after Hamas staged an assault on Saturday morning that left more than 1,200 Israelis dead and thousands more wounded.
In a letter titled “Joint Statement by Harvard Palestine Solidarity Groups on the Situation in Palestine,” 31 student organizations — including the Ivy League’s affiliate of Amnesty International — condemned Israel.
The letter prompted a furious response from business leaders, including hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman, who demanded that Harvard produce a list of names of the students who count as members of the groups that co-signed the letter.
Ackman and at least a dozen business executives vowed to never hire students who are members of the groups that supported the statement.