I would give protesters on US college campuses exploding pagers: Bennett, the former prime minister of Israel

During an address at Harvard Business School (HBS), Naftali Bennett, the former prime minister of Israel, said that he would give “a pager” to anyone who protested his tour of colleges in the United States. He was referring to the terrorist pager explosions in Lebanon in September 2024. Bennett was on a recent university tour of the United States, and on Thursday he spoke at the HBS.

Six people who were there say that HBS professor Paul A. Gompers started the event by talking about Harvard’s rules on disruption. He said that people in the crowd who spoke up would be removed if they did so. Bennett spoke up and said, “I believe we should just give them a pager.”

The deadly pager blasts on September 17–18 were aimed at members of the Lebanese Hezbollah resistance movement and groups that worked with them.

Lebanon has officially complained to the UN about the attacks, which have never happened before.

Bennett is a tech millionaire who says he is “more right-wing” than Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He was the regime’s 13th prime minister from 2021 to 2022 and is now trying to get back into politics.

Several people who went to his Harvard speech, which was called “From the Boardroom to the World Stage” and was put on by the Israel Business Club, said that it was mostly about his business past. He also talked briefly about Israel’s plan to kill all Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

Bennett has refused to answer several requests for feedback. His host, the Harvard Israel Business Club, said in an email that Bennett made it clear to them that his comment about pagers was just a “joke.”

“It was given in the same way that he thanked everyone in the room directly for being there in his first words.”

The fact that Bennett was at Harvard was met with opposition from more than 100 protesters. There was a march from John F. Kennedy Park to Klarman Hall at the HBS, where the event took place.

Bennett went to a number of other US universities before giving his speech at HBS.

Bennett spoke at an event to which only invited guests were invited at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and two Jewish student centers two days before his HBS talk.

Unlike the talk at HBS, Bennett’s talk at Columbia was mostly about politics and tried to hide Israel’s sins. In his speech at Columbia, he said that if he were to win again as prime minister of Israel, he would put the “Zionists” in charge.

Israeli news outlets say Bennett said in a speech in 2012, “I will do everything I can, forever, to stop a Palestinian state from being founded in the land of Israel.”

Bennett also said in 2013: “I’ve killed a lot of Arabs in my life, and that’s okay.”

At first, the Israeli government didn’t say that it was behind the pager attacks, but in November 2024, a spokesman for Netanyahu admitted to the crime.

After that, Netanyahu gave US President Donald Trump a golden pager as a thank you for his unwavering support for Zionism. This gesture sparked outrage among various human rights organizations, which condemned the act as a blatant disregard for international law and the rights of Palestinians. Critics argued that such actions only deepened the divide between Israelis and Palestinians, making any prospect for peace increasingly elusive.