While a majority of the world’s financial firms have taken a public stance in solidarity with Israel following the heinous terrorist attack of October 7, 2023 and the ensuing Israel-Hamas War, A wealth manager of Edelweiss Capital decided to buck the trend. David Favre, a Relationship Manager at $5 billion Swiss asset manager Edelweiss Capital Group, made a post on LinkedIn on 13 June, seemingly exasperated by the rush to label those who do not support Israel’s war as “anti-Semitic”.
In his post, Favre referred to the “brutal and merciless genocide of innocent Palestinians”, and decried the fact that those who bring up the suffering of the Palestinians are quick to be “falsely labeled as ‘anti-Semitic'”.
He then attempted to draw parallels with atrocities committed by notorious African warlord Joseph Kony as well as alleged human rights abuses in Xinjiang, China concerning the forcible incarceration of Uighurs in internment camps, saying that when critics called these out, they weren’t labelled as being racist against either Black people or Chinese people, respectively.
Suggestions of Employment Discrimination
Favre ended his rant by hinting at internal policies either within his firm or his industry as a whole – questioning why anyone should be suspended or fired from their jobs due to their political views (concerning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict), and calling this “employment discrimination”. While he did not point to any particular incident involving any financial firm or employee, it is widely know that employers, particularly those in the finance industry, have threatened reprisals against their staff for voicing support for Palestine.
Favre’s post ended up going viral, attracting more than 10,000 likes and 1,500 comments from the LinkedIn community within 48 hours – with a vast majority of users agreeing with his views.
Things Get Uglier
Then came an unexpected twist: two days later, on 15 June, a user named Paul Reiniger, who also works at Edelweiss as a financial analyst, responded to his colleague’s post by calling him a “disgrace”. He accused Favre of drawing a “moral equivalence” between a “legitimate and righteous war” and a “terrorist act of slaughtering thousands of innocent men, women and children”, before ending his message by suggesting that Favre might harbour anti-Semitic views – the very label that Favre dreaded in his original post. Reiniger’s post ended up attracting substantial attention in its own right, with many hundreds of comments which were almost evenly divided between supporting and opposing his viewpoint.
But that would not be the end of it. Later that day, yet another Edelweiss employee, Bilal Sharawy, decided to chime in on the firm’s brewing civil war. He quoted Reiniger’s reference to the “terrorist act of slaughtering thousands of innocent men, women and children” and suggested that this description of terrorism equally applied to the Israeli government as it did to Hamas.
Sharawy’s post also went viral, attracting almost a thousand comments from LinkedIn users who were eager to weigh in on the debate.
While social media is often abuzz with impassioned arguments concerning a variety of political topics, it is rare to see several people from the same company engage in heated mudslinging on a platform that is supposed to be for professional networking. It remains to be seen if this feud will continue in the coming days, but for now it has certainly made for entertaining viewing for over-worked and stressed-out folks in finance.