Project Nimbus

Big tech and the architecture of the Israeli genocide against Palestinians: From execution to media whitewashing

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This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Visitors stand next to a model of the Blue Spear land-to-sea missile system, developed by Proteus Advanced Systems Pte. Ltd., a joint venture company of Israel Aerospace Industries Ltd. (IAI) and ST Engineering Land Systems Ltd., at the Singapore Airshow held at the Changi Exhibition Centre in Singapore, on Tuesday, Feb. 15, 2022. [SeongJoon Cho/Bloomberg via Getty Images]

History is filled with examples of corporations fueling war machines and global colonisation. IBM supplied technology used in Nazi death camps; shipping and trading companies played central roles in the Transatlantic trafficking of Africans; and multinational firms helped bankroll South Africa’s apartheid regime. The companies that once profited from South Africa’s pass laws, today empower Israel’s biometric checkpoints. Silicon Valley giants are repeating that history by providing the digital tools and propaganda that enable and whitewash Israel’s genocide in Gaza. 

The collaboration between Israel and Silicon Valley goes far beyond hardware and algorithms, encompassing narrative control. According to Drop Site News, Google signed a six-month, $45 million contract with the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to promote government disinformation and downplay the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Signed in late June, the agreement made Google a “key entity” in Netanyahu’s PR strategy.

The PR campaign was launched in response to international outrage after Israel violated the ceasefire on 2 March and blocked food, medicine, and fuel from entering Gaza. The Google contract was part of Israel’s digital disinformation effort claiming “there is no hunger” in Gaza. In other words, while Palestinian babies were starving to death, Google was fattening its checkbook, serving as Netanyahu’s pernicious digital PR machine to obscure the crime.

In 2021, Microsoft (MS) signed a $133 million contract that made the Israeli military its second-largest defence customer after the United States, describing the Israeli army as a “top priority” client. The deal includes more than 600 separate Azure subscriptions linked to military units such as Mamram, its central tech hub, and Unit 8200, its elite cyber-intelligence wing.

READ: Hamas warns against attempts to ‘re-engineer’ Gaza Strip, displace Palestinians

According to the Associated Press, MS’s support team fielded 130 direct requests from the military in the first ten months of the Gaza genocide. Its data centers outside Tel Aviv store more than 13.6 petabytes of data, or 350 times the size of the Library of Congress. At least nine MS employees, including some ex-unit 8200 Israeli officers, coordinated MS AI genocide with the Israeli army. 

MS centers supplied raw data for Israel’s AI kill lists. Since 2021, these facilities were used to deploy “Gospel” and “Lavender,” algorithms that ranked Palestinians by the likelihood of being militants. Lavender, for example, assigns scores from 0 to 100 based on criteria as family history, friends or intercepted phone calls and messages.

Known as “AI hallucination,” these systems often generate information that appears convincing but is, in fact, fabricated. “Hallucinating” AI models can extrapolate from incomplete or misleading inputs, such as intercepted phone data, mistranslated language, ambiguous signals, or distorted realities, and combine them with unscientific assumptions about family history to produce what appear to be credible “kill” targets. 

AI doesn’t make war cleaner. It is a resourceful utility to murder, efficiently. Inside the tech companies, workers who did not sign to murder, protested. In response, MS fired the staff who organised a vigil for Palestinian refugees. One, Hossam Nasr, leading the campaign: No Azure for Apartheid, said, “cloud and AI are the bombs and bullets of the 21st century.” The digital targeting has taken war to a new barbaric level fusing US corporate power and Israeli malevolent occupation. 

Google is also deeply enmeshed in Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion joint venture with Amazon to supply Israel’s government and military with cloud computing, artificial intelligence services, and data centers. This is not an abstract “infrastructure;” cloud storage and AI have become the backbone of modern warfare, powering surveillance systems, analysing targeting data, and sustaining Israel’s military operations from the “River to the Sea.” 

READ: Microsoft faces legal action over role in Israel’s genocide in Gaza

Like MS, when workers raised alarms and protested against the Nimbus contract, instead of engaging the employees, Google summoned the police and fired 28 of its staff. A company engineer described Google’s contract to build a “sovereign cloud” exclusively for the Israeli government whereby they can use it with no regards to international law.   

Instead of investigating ways to ensure, AI products are not used to murder and starve children, AI companies formalised the ethical violations. OpenAI, for instance, changed its policies to allow military use of its models. Google removed language that barred using AI to weapons or surveillance. Palantir’s CEO, Alex Karp, a Zionist by all means, urged Silicon Valley to build the “drone swarms and robots that will dominate the coming battlefield.”

Over a year ago, Col. Racheli Dembinsky, head of the army’s computing unit, stood before a giant screen displaying the logos of Israeli genocide partners: Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Palantir, and Amazon Web Services. She hailed the “very significant operational effectiveness” of this partnership in the Gaza genocide.

The challenge is whether the world will hold accountable not only the state dropping the bombs but also the companies engineering the algorithms to deliver murder and the PR machines that conceal it. Israel is not the only party guilty of genocide; but the corporations reaping blood profit from synthesising and enabling its war crimes.

Big Tech does more than make war “efficient.” It creates the digital fog that enables mainstream media to wash massacres into sanitised narratives. Algorithms are weaponised not just on the battlefield, but across social media. In a clear example of this insidious subversion of the truth, META hired an ex-Israeli embassy staff as “Israel & the Jewish Diaspora policy chief,” Jordana Cutler, who spoke proudly before the Jewish National Fund of her role to silence pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli activities across META’s platforms. 

META, owner of the major social media outlets: Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, Threads … etc., is one of Netanyahu’s new weapons, suppressing images of Israeli atrocities while amplifying Zionist disinformation. In doing so, Big Tech firms are playing a dual role in the architecture of the Israeli genocide against Palestinians: facilitating its execution on the ground, and whitewashing it in the media.

OPINION: Ceasefire is “holding”: So long as only non-Israeli-Jews are murdered

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Experiencing issues with this image not appearing. I suspect because it's so critical of Zionist Keir Starmer's support of and complicity in Israel's genocides.
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/O74hZCKKdpA
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.
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.
Orcas discuss Genocide-supporting and complicit Zionists. Donald Trump, Keith Starmer, David Lammy, Rachel Reeves, Angela Rayner and Wes Streeting are acknowledged as evil genocide-complicit and supporting cnuts.
Orcas discuss Genocide-supporting and complicit Zionists. Donald Trump, Keith Starmer, David Lammy, Rachel Reeves, Angela Rayner and Wes Streeting are acknowledged as evil genocide-complicit and supporting cnuts.

Continue ReadingBig tech and the architecture of the Israeli genocide against Palestinians: From execution to media whitewashing

Probes Reveal Depth of Big Tech Complicity in Israel’s AI-Driven Gaza Slaughter

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Original article by Brett Wilkins republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

An aerial view shows Palestinians walking through the ruins of destroyed buildings in the Jabalia refugee camp, northern Gaza Strip, on February 5, 2025.
 (Photo: Khalil Ramzi Alkahlut/Anadolu via Getty Images

“Many nations are looking to Israel and its use of AI in Gaza with admiration and jealousy,” said one expert. “Expect to see a form of Google, Microsoft, and Amazon-backed AI in other war zones soon.”

Several recent journalistic investigations—including one published Tuesday by The Associated Press—have deepened the understanding of how Israeli forces are using artificial intelligence and cloud computing systems sold by U.S. tech titans for the mass surveillance and killing of Palestinians in Gaza.

The AP‘s Michael Biesecker, Sam Mednick, and Garance Burke found that Israel’s use of Microsoft and OpenAI technology “skyrocketed” following Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack on Israel.

“This is the first confirmation we have gotten that commercial AI models are directly being used in warfare,” Heidy Khlaaf, chief artificial intelligence scientist at the AI Now Institute and a former senior safety engineer at OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT, told the AP. “The implications are enormous for the role of tech in enabling this type of unethical and unlawful warfare going forward.”

As Biesecker, Mednick, and Burke noted:

Israel’s goal after the attack that killed about 1,200 people and took over 250 hostages was to eradicate Hamas, and its military has called AI a “game changer” in yielding targets more swiftly. Since the war started, more than 50,000 people have died in Gaza and Lebanon and nearly 70% of the buildings in Gaza have been devastated, according to health ministries in Gaza and Lebanon.

According to the AP report, Israel buys advanced AI models from OpenAI and Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform. While OpenAI said it has no partnership with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), in early 2024 the company quietly removed language from its usage policy that prohibited military use of its technology.

The AP reporters also found that Google and Amazon provide cloud computing and AI services to the IDF via Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract signed in 2021. Furthermore, the IDF uses Cisco and Dell server farms or data centers. Red Hat, an independent IBM subsidiary, sells cloud computing services to the IDF. Microsoft partner Palantir Technologies also has a “strategic partnership” with Israel’s military.

Google told the AP that the company is committed to creating AI “that protects people, promotes global growth, and supports national security.”

However, Google recently removed from its Responsible AI principles a commitment to not use AI for the development of technology that could cause “overall harm,” including weapons and surveillance.

The AP investigation follows a Washington Post probe published last month detailing how Google has been “directly assisting” the IDF and Israel’s Ministry of Defense “despite the company’s efforts to publicly distance itself from the country’s national security apparatus after employee protests against a cloud computing contract with Israel’s government.”

Google fired dozens of workers following their participation in “No Tech for Apartheid” protests against the use of the company’s products and services by forces accused of genocide in Gaza.

“A Google employee warned in one document that if the company didn’t quickly provide more access, the military would turn instead to Google’s cloud rival Amazon, which also works with Israel’s government under the Nimbus contract,” wrote Gerrit De Vynck, author of the Post report.

“As recently as November 2024, by which time a year of Israeli airstrikes had turned much of Gaza to rubble, documents show Israel’s military was still tapping Google for its latest AI technology,” De Vynck added. “Late that month, an employee requested access to the company’s Gemini AI technology for the IDF, which wanted to develop its own AI assistant to process documents and audio, according to the documents.”

Previous investigations have detailed how the IDF also uses Habsora, an Israeli AI system that can automatically select airstrike targets at an exponentially faster rate than ever before.

“In the past, there were times in Gaza when we would create 50 targets per year. And here the machine produced 100 targets in one day,” former IDF Chief of Staff Aviv Kochavi told Yuval Abraham of +972 Magazine, a joint Israeli-Palestinian publication, in 2023. Another intelligence source said that Habsora has transformed the IDF into a “mass assassination factory” in which the “emphasis is on quantity and not quality” of kills.

https://twitter.com/ajplus/status/1856019059537785285?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1856019059537785285%7Ctwgr%5Eed6a56f67053d1de7d6942e13f4f4e92c2b067f1%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.commondreams.org%2Fnews%2Fbig-tech-gaza-genocide

Compounding the crisis, in the heated hours following the October 7 attack, mid-ranking IDF officers were empowered to order attacks on not only senior Hamas commanders but any fighter in the resistance group, no matter how junior. What’s more, the officers were allowed to risk up to 20 civilian lives in each strike, and up to 500 noncombatant lives per day. Days later, that limit was lifted. Officers could order any number of strikes as they believed were legal, with no limits on civilian harm.

Senior IDF commanders sometimes approved strikes they knew could kill more than 100 civilians if the target was deemed important enough. In one AI-aided airstrike targeting one senior Hamas commander, the IDF dropped multiple U.S.-supplied 2,000-pound bombs, which can level an entire city block, on the Jabalia refugee camp in October 2023. According to the U.K.-based airstrike monitor Airwars, the bombing killed at least 126 people, 68 of them children, and wounded 280 others. Hamas’ Qassam Brigades said four Israeli and three international hostages were also killed in the attack.

Then there’s the mass surveillance element. Independent journalist Antony Loewenstein recently wrote for Middle East Eye that “corporate behemoths are storing massive amounts of information about every aspect of Palestinian life in Gaza, the occupied West Bank, and elsewhere.”

https://twitter.com/MiddleEastEye/status/1889669620476383603?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1889669620476383603%7Ctwgr%5Eed6a56f67053d1de7d6942e13f4f4e92c2b067f1%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.commondreams.org%2Fnews%2Fbig-tech-gaza-genocide

“How this data will be used, in a time of war and mass surveillance, is obvious,” Loewenstein continued. “Israel is building a huge database, Chinese-state style, on every Palestinian under occupation: what they do, where they go, who they see, what they like, what they want, what they fear, and what they post online.”

“Palestinians are guinea pigs—but this ideology and work doesn’t stay in Palestine,” he said. “Silicon Valley has taken note, and the new Trump era is heralding an ever-tighter alliance among Big Tech, Israel, and the defense sector. There’s money to be made, as AI currently operates in a regulation-free zone globally.”

“Think about how many other states, both democratic and dictatorial, would love to have such extensive information about every citizen, making it far easier to target critics, dissidents, and opponents,” Loewenstein added. “With the far right on the march globally—from Austria to Sweden, France to Germany, and the U.S. to Britain—Israel’s ethno-nationalist model is seen as attractive and worth mimicking.

Original article by Brett Wilkins republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Continue ReadingProbes Reveal Depth of Big Tech Complicity in Israel’s AI-Driven Gaza Slaughter

Big Tech’s complicity in genocide: The unforgivable silence of online platforms

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Original article by Ziyad Motala republished from Middle East Monitor under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

A view of Google Headquarters in Mountain View, California, United States on March 23, 2024 [Tayfun Coşkun – Anadolu Agency]

A damning report, “Palestinian Digital Rights, Genocide, and Big Tech Accountability”, by 7amleh, a Palestinian-led non-profit organisation that is focused on protecting the human rights of Palestinians, has laid bare the disturbing and active role that major online platforms and big tech companies play in perpetuating human rights abuses against Palestinians. While the world watches the horrors unfold in Gaza, the role of these digital accomplices cannot be ignored. The report highlights that platforms like Meta, X, YouTube and tech giants Google and Amazon have enabled, facilitated and even profited from these atrocities, effectively shielding war crimes under a digital smokescreen.

The findings are a harrowing indictment of how big tech companies, under the guise of neutrality, have become active participants in censorship, disinformation and incitement to violence. They have provided crucial infrastructure that underpins Israel’s military actions, allowing their platforms to be weaponised, silencing Palestinian voices while amplifying hate speech and calls for genocide. The complicity of these platforms is not a mere oversight; it is an entrenched system of deliberate decision-making that prioritises profits over human rights.

Systematic censorship of Palestinian voices

At the heart of the report’s findings is a shocking pattern of systematic censorship targeting Palestinian voices. Between October 2023 and July 2024, over 1,350 instances of censorship were documented on major platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, X and TikTok. These platforms disproportionately targeted Palestinian journalists, activists and human rights defenders, with Meta’s platforms being among the worst offenders. The censorship took many forms: accounts were suspended, content takedowns became routine and distribution of pro-Palestinian narratives was heavily restricted.

READ: Israel accused of using Google ads to undermine UN body

Meta’s manipulative algorithm changes played a key role in this censorship. The report reveals that during the ongoing war in Gaza, Meta altered its content moderation policies to lower the threshold for flagging Palestinian content, reducing the accuracy of its filters and triggering unnecessary takedowns. For Palestinian content, Meta’s filters operated with a mere 25 per cent certainty of a violation, compared to the usual 80 per cent applied elsewhere. These so-called “temporary risk response measures” were never lifted, allowing for an outsized level of scrutiny on Palestinian content creators. This is not an isolated incident – it’s a calculated, discriminatory policy that silences marginalised voices and hinders the free flow of information at a time when it’s needed the most.

As 7amleh’s report highlights, Meta’s broken promises to safeguard free speech, coupled with its biased content moderation, exacerbated the situation for Palestinians. Human Rights Watch had already condemned Meta for its systemic censorship of Palestinian voices during the war, with over 1,050 instances of content removal on Facebook and Instagram. In nearly all cases, this censorship targeted peaceful, pro-Palestinian content while allowing violent, anti-Palestinian content to flourish unchecked. Comments like “Free Palestine”, “Stop the Genocide” and “Ceasefire Now” were removed under Meta’s spam guidelines, reflecting a dangerous double standard that stifles legitimate political discourse.

Platforms as instruments of genocide

The report makes clear that online platforms are not simply neutral forums but have become instruments of incitement to genocide. Between October 2023 and July 2024, over 3,300 instances of harmful content – including incitement to genocide – were documented, the majority on X and Facebook. These platforms allowed high-level Israeli officials and other users to openly call for the extermination of Palestinians, dehumanising them as “sub-humans”, “animals” and worse. This genocidal rhetoric wasn’t limited to obscure corners of the internet. It was promoted, amplified and left unchallenged by the very platforms that claim to be committed to community standards and human rights.

For instance, on X, a December 2023 post by the deputy mayor of Jerusalem described blindfolded Palestinian detainees as “ants” and called for burying them alive. Although this specific post was eventually removed, countless others like it remain, fuelling a climate of violence and dehumanisation against Palestinians. This failure to combat hate speech directly contravenes international law, particularly in light of the International Court of Justice’s January 2024 order, which directed Israel to prevent and punish incitement to genocide.

These platforms are not just failing in their duty to protect free speech; they are actively facilitating the spread of genocidal propaganda. In the case of Meta, the report details how over 9,500 takedown requests from the Israeli government were sent to Meta between October and November 2023, with a shocking 94 per cent compliance rate. This high level of cooperation with a state actively committing war crimes raises serious concerns about the ethical boundaries of these companies. Meta’s decision to comply with such requests without transparency or accountability reveals a deeper issue: these platforms are willing to become tools of state oppression when the price is right.

READ: Israel using Meta’s WhatsApp to kill Palestinians in Gaza through AI system

The role of Big Tech: Project Nimbus and the automation of killing

Beyond the sphere of social media, Google and Amazon’s collaboration with the Israeli military under Project Nimbus casts an even darker shadow over the tech industry’s role in this conflict. The $1.2 billion cloud computing contract, as the report highlights, provides critical infrastructure to power Israel’s AI-driven Lavender and Gospel targeting systems – systems that are directly linked to the mass civilian casualties in Gaza.

The Lavender system, in particular, functions as a tool for automated killings, identifying targets based on massive data inputs and feeding them into the Israeli military’s bombing campaigns. The report describes how Lavender alone identified over 37,000 potential targets, contributing to the deaths of thousands of civilians, including women and children. By providing cloud services to facilitate this mass-scale targeting, Google and Amazon are directly implicated in these violations of international law. Despite mounting global pressure, both companies continue to support Israel’s military operations under Project Nimbus, even as the civilian death toll in Gaza rises.

Hate speech and disinformation: A coordinated assault on truth

The report goes on to document a deluge of hate speech and disinformation campaigns, often spearheaded by Israeli officials and amplified by online platforms. These campaigns, which include the systematic dissemination of dehumanising content on Telegram, X and YouTube, have targeted Palestinians both inside Gaza and across the diaspora. The report cites three million instances of violent content in Hebrew aimed at Palestinians on X alone, much of it coordinated by Israeli state actors.

Perhaps most troubling is the Israeli government’s influence operation known as STOIC, which ran a disinformation campaign targeting US and Canadian lawmakers to undermine the work of The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). This campaign, orchestrated with the help of AI, spread false narratives that led to the defunding of UNRWA, cutting off critical humanitarian aid to Palestinians. This is not merely a failure of moderation but an example of how platforms can be weaponised for state-driven disinformation, with devastating consequences for innocent civilians.

Profiting from genocide: Advertising amidst war crimes

As if censorship and disinformation weren’t enough, the report also exposes how platforms like Facebook have profited from harmful advertisements promoting violence against Palestinians. The investigation found that Facebook ran ads calling for the assassination of pro-Palestinian activists and the forced expulsion of Palestinians from the West Bank. Meta profited from these campaigns, further entrenching its complicity in the human rights violations unfolding in Gaza.

READ: Google, Amazon workers protest billion-dollar contract with Israel

Meanwhile, YouTube ran ads from the Israeli government that used graphic imagery to sway public opinion in favour of its military actions in Gaza. Despite YouTube’s policies against violent content, these ads flooded social media with incendiary narratives, particularly in Europe and the US, contributing to the normalisation of war crimes under the guise of counter-terrorism.

Time for accountability

The findings of this report should compel the international community to act. It is no longer acceptable for tech companies to hide behind vague policies and empty commitments to free speech while facilitating the mass killing and silencing of a besieged population. The complicity of Meta, X, YouTube, Google and Amazon in these atrocities must be brought into the spotlight and held accountable for their role in enabling these crimes.

These platforms are not neutral arbiters of truth – they are corporations driven by profit, willing to accommodate genocidal regimes and turn a blind eye to the suffering of millions if it serves their bottom line. As the report makes clear, it is time for the world to demand that these companies stop profiting from the destruction of Palestinian lives. The silence and complicity of big tech are unforgivable, and they must not be allowed to escape responsibility any longer.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.

Original article by Ziyad Motala republished from Middle East Monitor under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Continue ReadingBig Tech’s complicity in genocide: The unforgivable silence of online platforms

‘McCarthyism Is Alive and Well’: Google Fires 28 for Protesting Israel Contract

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Original article by JULIA CONLEY republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Google employees demand the company terminate its contract with the Israeli government at a protest on April 16, 2024. 
(Photo: No Tech for Apartheid/Medium)

“These mass, illegal firings will not stop us,” said organizers. “Make no mistake, we will continue organizing until the company drops Project Nimbus and stops powering this genocide.”

The peace coalition No Tech for Apartheid accused Google of a “flagrant act of retaliation” late Wednesday night as the Silicon Valley giant announced it had fired 28 workers over protests against its cloud services contract with the Israeli government.

The firings came after Google organizers held two 10-hour sit-ins at the company’s offices in Sunnyvale, California and New York City, demanding the termination of Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract under which Google and Amazon provide cloud infrastructure and data services for Israel—without any oversight regarding whether the Israel Defense Forces uses the services in its occupation of Palestinian territories and bombardment of Gaza.

Workers have denounced Project Nimbus since it was announced in 2021, but Israel’s killing of at least 33,970 Palestinians in Gaza since October and its intentional starvation of civilians led employees to escalate their protests.

No Tech for Apartheid said in a statement that Google officials called the police to both offices to arrest nine protesters—dubbed the Nimbus Nine—on Tuesday morning, before utilizing “a dragnet of in-office surveillance” to fire nearly two dozen other employees on Wednesday.

“They punished all of the workers they could associate with this action in wholesale firings,” said the coalition, which includes Jewish Voice for Peace and MPower Change, a Muslim-led anti-war group.

Google accused the workers of “bullying,” “harassment,” defacing property, and physically impeding other employees—allegations No Tech for Apartheid rejected as it noted organizers “have yet to hear from a single executive about” their concerns over Google’s collaboration with Israel.

“This excuse to avoid confronting us and our concerns directly, and attempt to justify its illegal, retaliatory firings, is a lie,” said the workers. “Even the workers who were participating in a peaceful sit-in and refusing to leave did not damage property or threaten other workers. Instead they received an overwhelmingly positive response and shows of support.”

The organizers staged the sit-ins on the heels of reporting in Time magazine about new negotiations between Google and the Israeli government regarding further potential tech contracts.

Kate J. Sim, a child safety policy adviser at Google who said she was among those fired this week, said the terminations show “how terrified [executives] are of worker power.”

Google employees have a history of harnessing worker power to change policies at the company. In 2018, Google terminated a deal with the U.S. Defense Department to develop drone and artificial intelligence (AI) technology through a contract called Project Maven. The decision followed the resignations of several employees and the condemnation of thousands of workers.

Calling Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian “genocide profiteers,” No Tech for Apartheid said Wednesday that they will not stop demonstrating against Project Nimbus until they get a similar result.

“The truth is clear: Google is terrified of us,” said the group. “They are terrified of workers coming together and calling for accountability and transparency from our bosses… The corporation is trying to downplay and discredit our power.

“These mass, illegal firings will not stop us,” No Tech for Apartheid added. “On the contrary, they only serve as further fuel for the growth of this movement. Make no mistake, we will continue organizing until the company drops Project Nimbus and stops powering this genocide.”

Original article by JULIA CONLEY republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Continue Reading‘McCarthyism Is Alive and Well’: Google Fires 28 for Protesting Israel Contract

Google employees lead sit-ins protesting company’s complicity in genocide

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Original article republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.

Google workers stage sit-in to end Project Nimbus (Photo: No Tech for Apartheid)

Tech workers are joining the Palestine solidarity movement in leading coast-to-coast sit ins at Google offices across the country

On April 16, Google workers led sit-ins at the office of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian in Sunnyvale, California, and Google’s New York City headquarters in protest against Google’s complicity in the Israeli genocide of the Gaza Strip, through Project Nimbus, the tech giant’s contract with the Israeli government and military.

Tech workers at both Amazon and Google have been organizing for years to end Project Nimbus, which is Google and Amazon’s USD 1.2 million contract with the Israeli government and military. Despite retaliation from Google including the firing of workers, the movement against Project Nimbus has only grown. 

“Google is enabling and profiting from Israel’s AI-powered genocide through Project Nimbus, their USD 1 billion cloud contract with Israel. The Israeli military is also using Google Photos as part of a facial recognition dragnet across Gaza, which has led to the arrest, imprisonment, and torture of thousands of Palestinians with little to no evidence. It’s clear that the Israeli military will use any technology available to them for genocidal means,” say the Amazon and Google workers, organized in the group No Tech for Apartheid, in a recent statement. “Google workers do not want their labor to power Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.”

This action comes days after Time Magazine reporting confirmed that Google is providing direct cloud computing services to the Israeli occupation forces, despite the company stating the contrary. 

“We have been very clear that the Nimbus contract is for workloads running on our commercial platform by Israeli government ministries such as finance, healthcare, transportation, and education,” a Google spokesperson previously told Time Magazine. “Our work is not directed at highly sensitive or classified military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services.” Time reporting revealed that the Israeli Ministry of Defense has its own secure entry point into the Google Cloud.

Tech workers staging the sit-ins in California and New York are demanding that the company end Project Nimbus, stop “the harassment, intimidation, bullying, silencing, and censorship of Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim Googlers,” and address health and safety issues in the workplace, which arise from the “mental health consequences of working at a company that is using their labor to enable a genocide,” workers say.

Original article republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.

Continue ReadingGoogle employees lead sit-ins protesting company’s complicity in genocide