Ami Dror

Ami Dror (born March 5, 1973) is an Israeli businessman, educator, activist, and a leader of the ongoing protests against the judicial reform being promoted by the thirty-seventh government of Israel headed by Benjamin Netanyahu.
==Biography==
Ami Dror was born and raised in Ashkelon to Aviva (née Laskov) and Aryeh Dror. His father was a Holocaust survivor from Romania, and his mother was born in Israel. As a member of a national religious family, he was educated at the Sinai School in Ashkelon and was active in the Bnei Akiva movement.
He served as a tank commander in the Armored Corps.
After his release from the IDF, he attended an aircraft security course and the day after the assassination Yitzhak Rabin, he joined the state unit for the security of personnel and delegations, in which he was in charge of securing Shimon Peres and was the commander of the security squad for Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak. After completing his service in the unit in 2000, he joined the Foreign Ministry and served in Dublin and Marseille, until 2003.
Dror graduated with a degree in computer science from the Open University.
Dror is a divorced father of three children and lives in Tel Aviv.
===Business activity===
In 2005, Dror founded the XpanD 3D company with Maria Kostira, which developed technology for showing 3D movies, and served as its strategic manager. Film director James Cameron presented the film Avatar using the company's technology in 2009. As part of the company, Dror in collaboration with Panasonic, Samsung and Sony led the development of a unified standard for 3D televisions.
In 2014, Dror founded the investment company Zeyton Ventures with Porsan Hossein. The company supported high-tech companies and required them to reach within three years a situation where at least 30% of their employees belong to one of the populations suffering from underrepresentation in the labor market. That same year, Dror served as a judge in the innovation category of the Cannes Advertising Festival.
In 2016, Dror moved with his family to Shanghai to found the company LeapLearner with his Chinese partners Aaron Tien and Lao Zho. LeapLearner developed programming-learning software for children. In 2018, Dror was selected as one of the ten most brilliant entrepreneurs in China and won an award on behalf of Shanghai Media Group, the largest media corporation in China.
In 2022, Dror founded the BriBooks company, which allows children to write, publish, and sell books. The idea to establish the company arose when Dror published a children's book and realized how complicated and expensive the process of publishing and selling a book is, and dedicated himself to making it accessible to every child. The company won the Red Herring Award as one of the 100 most promising technology companies in the world.
===Leadership and education development throughout the world===
In 2014, Dror was accepted as a fellow in the Henry Crown Fellowship, the flagship program of the Aspen Institute. In 2018, Dror became a facilitator in the program and since then he has been conducting leadership programs in Aspen and Harvard University. He also gives lectures and other leadership workshops around the world.
In 2019, Dror published a book in partnership with Jordan Huang, an expert in Chinese education, which deals with successful practices for educating children for innovation, based on the Jewish and Chinese cultures. The book was published in an English edition and a Chinese edition. That same year, as part of his work at LeapLearner, he initiated and was a partner in promoting technological education in African countries. In part, he helped establish programming schools for youth in Sierra Leone, Nigeria, and Kenya. He also served as an advisor to the King of Bhutan in the process of modernizing the education system in the kingdom.
In March 2020, with the outbreak of the Corona epidemic, Dror initiated a crowdfunding campaign for N95 masks for doctors, due to the lack of these masks in the hospitals.
Dror is a board member of the American philanthropic organization Space for Humanity, which flies social entrepreneurs into space on private flights.
As part of an activity to promote equality in education in the world, Dror cooperated with Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus as part of the Hong Kong Conference for Social Justice.
===Protest activity against the judicial reform===
In January 2023, after Justice Minister Yariv Levin announced the planned legislative measures, Dror joined the protest activity as part of the "high-tech protest". In an interview with him he said that he left the management of the BriBooks company to his partner in the company while he devotes his time to activities within the protest.
Dror is a central field activist in the protest, leading update groups of activists, often being interviewed on protest issues in the media and speaking at demonstrations across the country.
On July 18, 2023, together with other protest leaders (Shikma Bressler, Moshe Radman and Ran Harnevo), he initiated a mass foot march from Kaplan Street in Tel Aviv to Jerusalem as an act of protest against the coalition's intentions to approve in the second and third reading the law to reduce the reasonableness clause.
On June 6, Knesset member Zvi Sukkot threatened Dror that he would sue him for sharing truncated parts of his interview. On August 3, Dror together with other protest leaders filed a lawsuit against Likud activist Ronit Levy claiming that she published their phone numbers and called for harassment.
On August 1, 2023, Dror was detained by the police in a demonstration in front of the Salme police in Tel Aviv, due to the use of a stun gun.
==Books==
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Category:1973 births
Category:People from Ashkelon
Category:Israeli people
Category:Businesspeople
Category:Educators
Category:Activists