Idan Ofer is the founder of Eastern Pacific Shipping reportedly worth over $14billion. His wife Batia. She specifically cited President Claudine Gay's response to 31 Harvard organizationsAn Israeli billionaire says he and his wife are quitting the board of Harvard University's famous Kennedy School of Business over the school's president's response to the surprise Hamas attacks in Israel.
'We write to you today heartbroken by the death and destruction unleashed by the attack by Hamas that targeted citizens in Israel this weekend, and by the war in Israel and Gaza now underway,' Harvard administrators wrote in the statement from Monday, credited to Gay. For the Ofers - one of the wealthiest families in Israel, with Idan a majority shareloder of the country's largest holding companies and co-owner of soccer powerhouse Atletico Madrid - the statement clearly isn't enough.The organizations released a letter to the public as a 'Joint Statement by Harvard Palestine Solidarity Groups on the Situation in Palestine' on Sunday to condemn Israel in the wake of the violence. Several Kennedy School groups were signatories.
— Hilliard October 10, 2023 'We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence,' the groups wrote. 'From systematized land seizures to routine airstrikes, arbitrary detentions to military checkpoints, and enforced family separations to targeted killings, Palestinians have been forced to live in a state of death, both slow and sudden.'
The groups include the school's African American Resistance Organization, Amnesty International, 'Harvard Act on a Dream,' groups of Muslim and South Asian students from the Kennedy and Chan schools, the Harvard Islamic Society and Harvard Jews for Liberation. Blinken said they showed a baby 'riddled with bullets,' soldiers beheaded and young people burned in their cars.