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After reading the details of Hamas’s attacks on Israel on October 7, Brad Karp, who runs the Paul, Weiss law firm, sat down at his computer and wrote a memo to his approximately 2,000 employees.
He didn’t ask the company spokesperson to draft it; he channeled his grief into a company-wide email and hit send, just as he wanted to do after the overturn of Roe v. Wade and the murder of George Floyd. But as an American business leader who condemned Hamas’ attacks, he said, he felt surprisingly alone.
“I was disappointed that fewer leaders than I expected spoke out emphatically, clearly and with moral clarity on this issue,” Mr. Karp said. “If you asked any of these leaders if they were shocked by the slaughter of innocent civilians by Hamas, they would tell you privately that they were shocked.”
Over the past month, corporate executives have been confronted with a dilemma that they have now come to terms with: whether to deal with a major humanitarian or social problem, in this case the war between Israel and Hamas. This time, many say responding – with a public statement, an internal discussion, a donation or even social media parameters for staff members – involves complexities they have not experienced when wading into other recent social crises.
“If you release a statement about the damage from a hurricane, there’s no one who’s going to say, ‘Actually, that part of the country deserved a hurricane,’” said Iliya Rybchin, a partner at the consulting firm Elixirr, which has consulted dozens of Fortune 500 companies. has advised top executives.
More than 200 U.S. companies have issued statements condemning the Hamas attacks in Israel that killed about 1,400 people, according to a tracker by Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a professor at the Yale School of Management. Some business leaders donated to humanitarian organizations and pointed their employees to company-sponsored mental health resources. A smaller number said they had also communicated with their staff about the rising death toll among civilians in Gaza.
In addition to the complexities executives face, many American companies have financial ties to Israel, but few have business interests to consider in Gaza, Mr. Sonnenfeld noted.
“Not a single company does business in Gaza – unlike, for example, in Russia, where 1,500 major companies do business,” he said, comparing this war to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “It is zero in Gaza.”
Still, there is a clear pressure to speak up, in part because of the precedent set in recent years, as many executives established a pattern of weighing in on social and political unrest. In a Morning Consult poll of more than 2,000 Americans conducted in mid-October, 58 percent said companies should make a statement “condemning violence and loss of life” as a result of Hamas attacks, and 62 percent said that companies should make humanitarian donations.
“It’s unlike any other topic I’ve seen in my 10 years of advising companies on these issues,” said Joelle Emerson, founder of Paradigm, a company that has worked with more than a thousand companies on diversity, equality and inclusivity. “Many companies may not feel like they have the context to intelligently comment on what is happening.”
Even as pressure on companies to comment on social issues increases, the reasons for their reluctance are also becoming clearer. Andrew Ward, a management professor at Lehigh University’s College of Business, noted that top executives who spoke out politically sometimes brought negative attention to their companies, which could have consequences for employees. There are also financial considerations to wade into.
Gabe Zichermann, who conducts workshops for companies on discussing controversial issues, said this year’s protest against Bud Light after it hired a transgender influencer was “a turning point in corporate activism.” He added: “The boycott had a very rapid impact on the company’s revenues. That steers people towards public neutrality.”
A handful of executives who condemned Hamas’ violence did so immediately and strongly. David Solomon, CEO of Goldman Sachs, wrote a letter to his staff in Tel Aviv on October 8, the day after the attack. “The dynamics in the Middle East have always been difficult and complex,” he wrote. “But these attacks are terrorism and violate our most fundamental values.”
At Warner Bros. Discover, David Zaslav, its CEO, told his staff that he was “shocked and saddened” by the attacks, which he called “the deadliest in Jewish history since the Holocaust.” JPMorgan Chase’s statement called the war “a terrible tragedy.”
David Barrett, who runs the software company Expensify, which has about 140 employees, explained that before issuing an internal response to the war, he convened meetings for his HR leaders to discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its historical and geopolitical review its context. .
“We’re not historians,” Mr. Barrett said. “A lot of us didn’t really understand the issue, didn’t understand the history, didn’t understand the impact it had on people.”
