Benjamin Netanyahu’s elder son Yair compromised Tuesday and agreed to apologize and remove his tweets that mentioned both graduates of a Harvard University program and “a cult of pedophiles.”
The plaintiffs in the court case had all received grants from the Ohio-based Wexner Foundation and taken part in a leadership program it runs at Harvard. The graduates accused Yair Netanyahu of libel.
Netanyahu, 29, received a week to remove his tweets and apologize.
In exchange, a compensation demand of 1 million shekels ($303,000) was dropped.
In the apology, Netanyahu will admit that the tweets in question, made between March and June 2020, were false and offensive. He will call on others not to publish similar remarks and will ask them to remove any copy of the tweets.
Sources told Haaretz that a minority of the plaintiffs were against the compromise and wanted to push for the compensation.
One of the tweets the suit cited read, “A bill that would solve 97% of Israel’s existential problems: An alumnus of the pedophile’s Wexner Foundation can’t get a job as a civil servant, whose salary is paid by the taxpayer.”
Another, posted two weeks later, said, “Wexner Foundation alumni! This cult of pedophiles has taken over the country and has been perpetrating a governmental coup over the last four years.”
A third tweet cited in the suit was posted in July but was later taken down. Netanyahu wrote after removing it, “I want to clarify that when I wrote that the Western Foundation was a cult of pedophiles, I was referring only to Jeffrey Epstein, who was responsible for the foundation in the early 2000s, and not anyone else.”
The plaintiffs included journalist Alon Ben-David, former State Prosecutor Moshe Lador, Maj. Gen. (res.) Amos Yadlin, Maj. Gen. (res.) Noam Tibon and Uri Carmel, a former head of the Justice Ministry department that investigates police misconduct.