“It is clear that Israel is paving the ground for an attack on the flotilla. World public opinion needs to mobilize against Israel’s next war crime. Now!”
Evidence posted over the weekend online appears to show that tech giant Google has allowed the government of Israel to purchase sponsored content spots so that online users searching on the Global Sumud Flotilla will be shown inaccurate, propagandized content accusing the flotilla particpants as being allied with violent, terrorist elements.
The Sumud Flotilla—a group of international humanitarians and peace activists sailing toward the coast of Gaza with over 40 vessels in its fleet as a way to break the unlawful blockade of life-saving supplies imposed by Israel and its allies amid an ongoing genocide—has no documented connection to any terrorist organization and has made clear repeatedly that it is a completely nonviolent effort by independent groups and individuals who want to see an end to the suffering, starvation, and death taking place in the besieged Palestinian enclave.
In Arabic, sumud translates as steadfastness and resilience. On its website, the groups says, “We are a coalition of everyday people—organizers, humanitarians, doctors, artists, clergy, lawyers, and seafarers—who believe in human dignity and the power of nonviolent action.”
David Adler, an American economist and co-coordinator general of Progressive International who is traveling as part of the flotilla, posted a screenshot Saturday of search results showing the sponsored content, calling it “very terrifying.” Many others online reported getting the same results, though the appearance of the sponsored content seemed to depend on the user’s location or other variables.
This is really terrifying 🤯.@Google is allowing the State of Israel to “sponsor” top search results with absurd accusations that we are “harboring terror.”
This is pure incitement — and puts the lives of all participants at risk.
Yanis Varoufakis, the former finance minister of Greece and co-founder of Progessive International, posted a similar screenshot earlier in the day, describing the coordinated ad buy as part of an escalating “smear campaign against the flotilla” by the Israeli government.
“First, they called it the Hamas Flotilla, deploying the usual tactic of slapping the Hamas logo on anyone whom they are about to murder, maim or mutilate,” said Varoufakis. “Now, with the full cooperation of Google, they are ensuring that top search results—received by anyone who Googles ‘Global Sumud Flotilla’—identify the brave women and men who are sailing to Gaza to end the blockade and genocide of 2 million people are people ‘harboring terror.’ It is clear that Israel is paving the ground for an attack on the flotilla. World public opinion needs to mobilize against Israel’s next war crime. Now!”
🚨 URGENT MESSAGE FROM THE FLOTILLA: we need your help & attention to keep the flotilla safe.
Israeli propaganda is predictive of Israeli conduct: when they want to ridicule a flotilla, they call it a ‘selfie yacht’.
DropSite Newsnoted on Satuday that a team of its journalists reported earlier this month that Google “was in the middle of a six-month, $45 million contract with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office to run ads and spread online propaganda, including on YouTube.”
“A search for the Global Sumud Flotilla humanitarian convoy carrying aid to break the Gaza siege shows the Israeli government’s incitement as the top result,” the outlet noted on Saturday, pointing to Adler’s post. “The campaign has also promoted content denying the Gaza famine.”
Earlier this week, Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs characterized the flotilla—which has now been targeted at least twice by drone attacks—as a “jihadist initiative,” which led to immediate concerns that Israel was trying to build a case in the arena of public opinion for what would eventually be an Israeli attack on the ships or an interdiction at sea.
On Tuesday, as Common Dreamsreported, the foreign ministers of 16 nations—Bangladesh, Brazil, Colombia, Indonesia, Ireland, Libya, Malaysia, Maldives, Mexico, Pakistan, Qatar, Oman, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, and Türkiye—warned against “any unlawful or violent act against the flotilla” and called on all parties “to respect international law and international humanitarian law.”
The ministers said that “any violation of international law and human rights of the participants in the flotilla, including attacks against the vessels in international waters or illegal detention, will lead to accountability.”
Keir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpAVote Labour for Genocide.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum told an AI conference that data centers should be powered by coal, gas, and nuclear. Ruth Porat said his “comments were fantastic.”
This article is being co-published with The Lever, an investigative newsroom. Click here to get The Lever’s free newsletter.
At a recent artificial intelligence conference in Washington, D.C., Google’s president cheered on Trump’s interior secretary after he slammed Silicon Valley’s support of the so-called “climate extremist agenda” and pushed to expand the use of “incredibly clean” coal plants and other fossil fuels to power data centers, according to a previously unreported recording.
Following the speech by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, Ruth Porat, president and chief investment officer of Google and Alphabet, told conference attendees that “I thought Secretary Burgum’s comments were fantastic… [B]ecause I think it is very clear that to realize the potential of AI, you have to have the power to deliver it. And we have underinvested in this country, and to stay ahead, we need to actually address it head-on.”
Porat was speaking on a panel about how AI is “rewriting America’s future,” alongside Big Tech leaders including venture capitalist Delian Asparouhov and Kevin Weil, the chief product officer for OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT. During the panel, Porat also discussed a Google white paper advocating for U.S. investments in natural gas and nuclear to power the industry’s energy-hungry data centers.
Google and other major tech companies as recently as a few years ago led the corporate world in acknowledging the seriousness of the climate emergency and proposing concrete actions to limit Silicon Valley’s carbon emissions. Porat’s company has for years positioned itself as a climate leader in the tech industry. Among its many promises? An ambitious 2020 pledge to power all its operations with carbon-free energy by 2030.
Yet Porat’s comments at the Hill & Valley Forum, and her subsequent praise in July for the Trump administration’s “energy abundance” agenda — which supports oil, gas, and coal while severely penalizing renewables such as wind and solar — signal that, at a time when climate action is under serious threat from Republicans, the country’s largest tech companies are wavering in their support for the cheapest, cleanest, and lowest-carbon energy sources.
That’s reflected in Google’s carbon emissions, which soared nearly 50 percent between 2019 and 2024, according to a company environmental report. An independent study from the NewClimate Institute, a German nonprofit, warned in August of a “crisis” for the tech giant’s ability to meet its climate targets, stating that “data centre expansion and higher artificial intelligence (AI) usage have rapidly increased Google’s electricity demand and absolute [greenhouse gas] emissions.”
Google didn’t respond to a media request about Porat’s comments.
“Climate Extremist Agenda”
Founded in 2021, the Hill & Valley Forum is an organization that brings together prominent tech executives and venture capitalists with federal policymakers. This year’s event, which took place in late April, featured the likes of Palantir CEO Alex Carp and billionaire venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, alongside politicians including Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson.
The opening remarks were delivered by Burgum, a former North Dakota governor with close ties to the fossil fuel industry. As interior secretary, Burgum oversees management and conservation of federal land. Previous reporting showed that in 2024, months prior to being nominated by Trump for the position, Burgum hosted a private dinner for oil, gas, and coal executives.
Burgum, a Republican, used his speech to criticize Silicon Valley for having supported “the climate extremist agenda,” which he defined as the idea that “a degree of temperature change in the year 2100 is the thing that we should drive every policy in America.” Burgum added: “I’ve always been a little offended by that.”
Echoing common climate-denier talking points about the inability of climate models to predict future temperature rise, Burgum questioned “how a group could take a spreadsheet and extrapolate [climate] data for 90 years, 80 years, now 75 years and say ‘this is absolutely what’s going to happen.’”
He then positioned coal as an energy source that can power Big Tech’s data centers. “Any coal plant running in America today is incredibly clean,” he claimed without evidence.
Burgum concluded by stating that accelerating production of American oil, gas, coal, and potentially some nuclear would be key to realizing Silicon Valley’s AI agenda.
“That’s the Trump plan, and that’s what we’re doing right now,” he said.
Google Leader On Burgum’s Vision for AI: “Fantastic”
Porat, the Google president, expressed no qualms with Burgum’s speech when she was asked about it on a panel later that day, instead stating that his “comments were fantastic.” Porat then elaborated that Google and the Trump administration were in agreement about needing to scale up nuclear production and modernize the electrical grid.
Five years ago, Google CEO Sundar Pichai warned that “we have until 2030 to chart a sustainable cause for our planet or face the worst consequences of climate change.” He outlined a plan to power its data centers by doing “things like pairing wind and solar power sources together, and increasing our use of battery storage.”
But at the Hill & Valley Forum, Porat outlined an energy agenda much more favorable to fossil fuels. During the panel, she touted a recent Google white paper that didn’t once mention wind or solar, even though they generally remain the cheapest form of power generation worldwide. The document instead called for federal investment in “affordable, reliable, and secure energy technologies, including geothermal, advanced nuclear, and natural gas generation with carbon capture (among other sources).”
Others at the conference voiced direct skepticism of renewable energy, including David Friedberg, co-host of the popular pro-Trump tech podcast All-In. “To scale up energy, it’s not about solar, it’s not about wind, those might have been nice from a narrative perspective, but scalable energy production requires these next-gen systems and we have to unlock that,” he claimed during a panel about reindustrializing America.
In reality, last year, nearly 93 percent of new power additions worldwide came from renewable sources.
Trump’s AI Action Plan
When the Trump administration unveiled its AI Action Plan in Washington, D.C., in late July, the event was presented in the form of a live podcast hosted by Friedberg and his other All-In co-hosts, as well as the founders of Hill & Valley.
“We need to build and maintain vast AI infrastructure and the energy to power it,” the plan reads. “To do that, we will continue to reject radical climate dogma and bureaucratic red tape, as the Administration has done since Inauguration Day.”
The plan claims that it will ensure free speech in AI systems by eliminating “references to misinformation, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and climate change.” It further constricts federal spending to developers of the type of AI models, such as ChatGPT or Elon Musk’s Grok, “who ensure that their systems are objective and free from top-down ideological bias.”
Some climate groups were quick to condemn the proposal. “This U.S. AI Action Plan doesn’t just open the door for Big Tech and Big Oil to team up, it unhinges and removes any and all doors,” KD Chavez, executive director of the national advocacy group Climate Justice Alliance, said in a statement.
But if Google has any concerns about the anti-climate AI policies being pursued by the White House, the company isn’t showing it. At a mid-July AI event in Pennsylvania, Porat heaped more praise on the Trump administration.
“Mr. President, thank you for your leadership and for your clear and urgent direction that our nation invest in AI infrastructure, technology and the energy to unlock its benefits so that America can continue to lead,” she said.
Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him. He says that Reform UK has received millions and millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
Activists with the group Geef Tegengas (Push Back) lock themselves to a pole near the entrance to Microsoft’s data center near Middenmeer, Netherlands on August 10, 2025 (Photo: Geef Tegengas/Instagram)
“Microsoft stores thousands of terabytes of surveillance data from the Israeli intelligence service Unit 8200—data that is used to oppress, imprison, and murder innocent Palestinians.”
Protesters staged a demonstration Sunday at a Microsoft data center in the Netherlands following last week’s revelation that the facility is being used by the Israel Defense Forces to plan genocidal airstrikes in Gaza and to store massive amounts of intelligence on Palestinians in the illegally occupied territories.
Members of the direct action group Geef Tegengas (Push Back) led the demonstration at Microsoft’s data center near the northwestern city of Middenmeer. Some activists scaled the roof of a building and lit flares, while others locked themselves to poles and blocked an entrance to the facility.
On its Instagram page, Geef Tegengas said it was targeting “genocide in our backyard.”
“Microsoft stores thousands of terabytes of surveillance data from the Israeli intelligence service Unit 8200—data that is used to oppress, imprison, and murder innocent Palestinians,” the group said. “Thanks to its Azure cloud service, Microsoft plays a direct role in the genocide of the people of Gaza.”
Geef Tegengas demanded that Microsoft “remove all Israeli intelligence data” and urged employees at the facility to “lay down your work.”
The group also called on people to boycott Microsoft and support the global Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel.
“We will continue to take action until this genocidal collaboration stops,” Geef Tegengas vowed.
These folks of ‘Geef Tegengas’ need a world stage. They are there in Middenmeer for an important reason: highlighting Microsoft’s complicity on Dutch soil in war crimes.
Sunday’s demonstration followed the publication last week of a joint investigation by The Guardian, +972 Magazine, and Local Call revealing that Unit 8200, the largest unit in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), is storing 11,500 terabytes of data containing roughly 200 million hours of Palestinians’ phone call recordings on the Azure servers in the Netherlands.
According to the investigation—which involved interviews with 11 Microsoft and Israeli intelligence sources and a cache of leaked company documents—former Unit 8200 head Yossi Sariel traveled to Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington in the United States in 2021 to meet CEO Satya Nadella.
Sniffing a lucrative opportunity, Nadella agreed to grant the cyberwarfare unit access to a special area of the Azure cloud platform. The project’s goal was storing “a million calls per hour.”
An intelligence source said that some of the Microsoft employees involved in the undertaking were Unit 8200 veterans, making collaboration “much easier.”
One leaked Microsoft document showed that company leaders embraced the IDF partnership as “an incredibly powerful brand moment.”
Microsoft responded to the investigation by claiming that Nadella was unaware of exactly what kind of data Unit 8200 was storing on the company’s servers.
Three Unit 8200 sources told The Guardian that Azure has facilitated IDF airstrikes on Gaza, where 674 days of U.S.-backed IDF bombing, invasion, and siege have left at least 229,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing amid a worsening famine and the specter of ethnic cleansing and full Israeli occupation.
Israel’s conduct in the war is the subject of an ongoing genocide case at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands. The International Criminal Court, also located in the Dutch city, last year issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza.
Microsoft said Monday that it has launched an investigation into how Unit 8200 is using Azure. This, after the company said in May that an internal review “found no evidence to date that Microsoft’s Azure and [artificial intelligence] technologies have been used to target or harm people in the conflict in Gaza.”
A Microsoft spokesperson said Monday that the company “takes these allegations seriously, as shown by our previous independent investigation.”
“As we receive new information, we’re committed to making sure we have a chance to validate any new data and take any needed action,” the spokesperson added.
The Guardianreported Monday that the news outlets’ investigation prompted debate last week in the Staten-Generaal, the Dutch Parliament, where Christine Teunissen of the left-wing Party for the Animals pressed the government on what it is doing to prevent data stored in the Netherlands from “being used to commit genocide” in Gaza.
Dutch Foreign Minister Caspar Veldkamp replied that he would “request further investigation.”
“If there are serious indications of criminal offenses in that information, legal proceedings can of course be initiated, and that is then up to the public prosecution service,” he said.
The Guardian/+972 Magazine/Local Call investigation follows last month’s revelation by the latter two outlets that the IDF has undertaken a “dramatic increase in the purchase of services from Google Cloud, Amazon’s AWS, and Microsoft Azure.”
Big Tech’s profiteering from Israel’s annihilation of Gaza and occupation, settler colonization, and apartheid in the West Bank has sparked numerous protests, including by employees of complicit companies. At least dozens of workers at companies including Google, Meta, and Microsoft have been fired for Palestine advocacy. Others have resigned in protest.
Hossam Nasr, a former Microsoft software engineer, was fired after organizing an October 2024 “No Azure for Apartheid” vigil for Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in Gaza.
Nasr told The Guardian after his termination that he was fired “simply because we were daring to humanize Palestinians, and simply because we were daring to say that Microsoft should not be complicit with an army that is plausibly accused of genocide.”
Original article by Alan Macleod republished from MPN under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License.
Google recently announced it would acquire Israeli-American cloud security firm Wiz for $32 billion. The price tag — 65 times Wiz’s annual revenue — has raised eyebrows and further solidified the close relationship between Google and the Israeli military.
In its press release, the Silicon Valley giant claimed that the purchase will “vastly improve how security is designed, operated and automated—providing an end-to-end security platform for customers, of all types and sizes, in the AI era.”
Yet it has also raised fears about the security of user data, particularly of those who oppose Israeli actions against its neighbors, given Unit 8200’s long history of using tech to spy on opponents, gather intelligence, and use that knowledge for extortion and blackmail.
Israel’s Global Spy Network
Wiz was established only five years ago, and all four co-founders — Yinon Costica, Assaf Rappaport, Ami Luttwak, and Roy Reznik — were leaders in Israel’s elite military intelligence unit, Unit 8200. Like many Israeli tech companies, Wiz is a direct outgrowth of the military intelligence outfit. A recent study found that almost fifty of its current employees are Unit 8200 veterans.
“That experience showed me the impact you can make when you combine great talent with amazing technology,” Rappaport said of his time in the military.
Former Unit 8200 agents, working hand-in-glove with the Israeli national security state, have gone on to produce many of the world’s most infamous malware and hacking tools.
Perhaps the most well-known of these is Pegasus, spyware used by governments around the world to surveil and harass political opponents. These include India, Kazakhstan, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia, the latter of which used the tool to spy on Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi before he was assassinated by Saudi agents in Türkiye.
In total, more than 50,000 journalists, human rights defenders, diplomats, business leaders and politicians are known to have been secretly surveilled. That includes heads of state such as French President Emmanuel Macron, Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan and Iraqi President Barham Salih. All Pegasus sales had to be approved by the Israeli government, which reportedly had access to the data Pegasus’ foreign customers were accruing.
Unit 8200 also spies on Americans. Whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that the National Security Agency regularly shared the data and communications of U.S. citizens with the Israeli intelligence group. “I think that’s amazing…It’s one of the biggest abuses we’ve seen,” he said.
For the Israeli government, the utility of these private spying firms filled with former IDF intelligence figures is that it allows it some measure of plausible deniability when confronted with spying attacks. As Haaretz explained: “Who owns [these spying companies] isn’t clear, but their employees aren’t soldiers. Consequently, they may solve the army’s problem, even if the solution they provide is imperfect.”
Today, former Unit 8200 agents not only create much of the world’s spyware, but also the security features that claim to protect against unwanted surveillance. A MintPress investigation found that three of the six largest VPN companies in the world are owned and controlled by an Israeli company co-founded by a Unit 8200 veteran.
It is in Palestine, however, that Unit 8200 has been most active. The unit serves as the centerpiece of Israel’s hi-tech repressive state apparatus. Using gigantic amounts of data compiled on Palestinians by tracking their every move through facial recognition cameras, monitoring their calls, messages, emails and personal data, Unit 8200 has created a digital dragnet that it uses to snoop on, harass, and suppress Palestinians.
It compiles dossiers on virtually every Gaza resident, including their medical history, sex lives, and search histories, so that this information can be used for extortion or blackmail later. If, for example, an individual is cheating on their spouse, desperately needs a medical operation, or is secretly homosexual, this can be used as leverage to turn civilians into informants and spies for Israel.
One former Unit 8200 operative said that as part of his training, he was assigned to memorize different Arabic words for “gay” so that he could listen for them in phone conversations he was eavesdropping on.
Unit 8200 is also reportedly behind the even more controversial Project Lavender, a giant, AI-generated kill list of tens of thousands of Gazans that the IDF uses to target the densely populated strip’s civilian population.
Palestanian workers cross the Eyal checkpoint into Israel under the watchful eye of IDF cameras, January 10, 2021. Keren Manor | Activestills
Every Gazan (including children) is assigned a score of 1-100, based on their perceived proximity to Hamas. A wide range of characteristics will increase an individual’s score, including living or working in the same building or being in a WhatsApp group with a known or suspected Hamas member.
If a person’s number reaches a certain threshold, they are automatically added to a Unit 8200 kill list. This, one IDF commander explained, solved Israel’s perennial targeting “human bottleneck,” allowing them to carry out tens of thousands of strikes into Gaza during the first few weeks of the post-October 7 attack alone.
Unit 8200 is also widely reported to have carried out the Lebanon Pager Attack, exploding thousands of electronic devices at the same time, killing dozens and injuring thousands more. The operation was widely described, even by former CIA director Leon Panetta, as an act of terrorism.
This long history of violence, skulduggery, and spying raises troubling questions about whether a corporation founded and staffed by dozens of individuals from such an organization can be trusted with billions of users’ private and personal data.
Google’s Ties to Israeli Intelligence
Google’s purchase of Wiz deepens its already close ties to Unit 8200. In 2013, the tech giant acquired Waze, an online maps service founded by three Unit 8200 veterans, for $1.3 billion. It has also directly hired dozens of former spooks and spies to fill its ranks; a 2022 MintPress News investigation found at least 99 former Unit 8200 agents working at the Silicon Valley behemoth.
Among these figures is Gavriel Goidel, Head of Strategy and Operations for Google Research. Goidel joined Google in 2022 after a six-year career in military intelligence, during which he rose to become Head of Learning at Unit 8200. There, he led a large team of operatives who sifted through intelligence data to “understand patterns of hostile activists,” according to his own account.
Google is far from an outlier when it comes to hiring former Israeli spies to carry out its operations. Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon have all hired a significant number of ex-Unit 8200 agents. Even TikTok, supposedly a hotbed of anti-Semitism, employs a considerable number of ex-spooks. Perhaps most surprisingly, a number of top U.S. media outlets, including CNN and Axios, have recruited former Unit 8200 spies and analysts to write and produce America’s news about the Middle East.
Google has invested heavily in Israel, first opening offices there in 2006. Longtime CEO Eric Schmidt is known to be a vocal supporter of the controversial state. In a 2012 meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he declared that “the decision to invest in Israel was one of the best that Google has ever made.”
But the Wiz deal is undoubtedly the company’s biggest Israeli investment yet. The all-cash acquisition represents a massive injection of money into Israel’s flailing and war-weary economy, equivalent to 0.6% of the country’s GDP. The money, the Israeli press excitedly reports, will allow the government to continue without enacting major austerity measures, reduce the nation’s deficit, and enable Israel to continue on a wartime footing for longer. As such, it represents a move critics say amounts to a financial intervention on behalf of Israel. Moreover, it also sends a message to the rest of the business world to invest in the country, boosting investor sentiment at a time when it is most needed.
The size of the deal also surprised many. The price is similar to that of the sale of JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo in 2008, Visa Europe in 2017, and Twitter in 2022. Yet Wiz is a new and relatively unknown company, raising questions about its valuation.
Ultimately, though, these considerations are secondary to the main issue that such a group will now be charged with providing security for the data of billions of users worldwide. Given Unit 8200’s role in monitoring and targeting the Palestinian population, many will be wondering if, going forward, Google products are at all safe to use.
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Thousands of people carrying Palestinian flags and banners march as they protest Israel’s attacks on Gaza and Germany’s arms support to Israel in Unter den Linden Street, Berlin, Germany on April 13, 2024 [Halil Sagirkaya/Anadolu via Getty Images]
The German federal ministry has dismissed a lawyer in Berlin due to her opposition to the Israeli assault on Gaza, the Palestinian Information Centre reported.
On Saturday lawyer Melanie Schweizer posted a video on X stating: “Yesterday I got fired as a civil servant working at the Federal Ministry in Germany. Why? In a nutshell because I was speaking out against the genocide in Palestine committed by Israel, against the German support thereof, against the violence and crimes happening there.” Highlighting the German government and police’s efforts to silence pro-Palestine voices, she added: “This is where we’re at in Germany. This is a blatant attack on our constitutional rights to freedom.”
She called on supporters of Gaza to make their stance clear and “keep speaking up, keep using your voice, losing your job is not the worst that can happen to you, losing your life is. Losing your freedom right is.”
Yesterday I got fired as a civil servant in Germany. Why? In a nutshell because I was criticizing Israel for its ongoing genocide in Palestine and Germany‘s complicity. pic.twitter.com/z3mYVabBtn
— Melanie Schweizer | MERA25 🇩🇪 (@Melaniebelizi) March 1, 2025
Many European and American companies have previously dismissed employees over their stance on the war on Gaza and their opposition to genocide.
In October 2024, Microsoft dismissed two employees after they organised a sit-in at its headquarters in Washington, D.C., in solidarity with the victims of the Israeli assault on Gaza.
On 22 January, the Washington Post reported that Google had dismissed more than 50 employees last year after they protested against the “Nimbus” contract, citing concerns that the technology could support military and intelligence programmes used by the Israeli occupation army in its war on Palestinians in Gaza.
In September 2024, the Noguchi Museum in New York announced the dismissal of three employees for allegedly violating the dress code by wearing keffiyehs, which have become a symbol of solidarity with the Palestinian cause.
