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Three days after Israel concluded its May assault on the Gaza Strip, Amazon and Google signed a $1.2 billion deal with the Israeli government to provide cloud services as part of what Israel calls “Project Nimbus,” which will assist Israeli government agencies, including the military, in migrating their data to Google and Amazon servers. (A “cloud” stores data accessible via an Internet connection, like Google Drive or Dropbox.)
Five months later, some Amazon and Google workers are calling on their bosses to back out of the deal because of fears the technology will make the Israeli government’s “systematic discrimination and displacement” of Palestinians “even crueler and deadlier,” as about 400 tech workers wrote in a letter published last week in The Guardian. (Organizers now say that about 1,000 workers at Amazon and Google have signed on to the letter.)
The tech workers agitating against the contract with Israel are the newest participants in the surge in labor organizing for Palestinian rights kicked off by Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza, which killed 260 Palestinians. An unprecedented number of teachers’ unions passed resolutions endorsing the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, while activists convinced port workers in the Bay Area to honor their “community picket line” and refused to unload an Israeli cargo ship. But unlike those efforts, the “No Tech for Apartheid” campaign is coming from workers employed at corporations that directly service the Israeli government.
“We’re standing up together and insisting that our companies live their publicly stated values and the values they continue to affirm to their workers,” said Ariel Koren, a Jewish Google employee who is one of the few workers to go on the record in support of the campaign. (The majority of backers remain anonymous because of retaliation fears.) “There’s a crisis of conscience. As workers, we are worried about their products having a pernicious impact on the ground.”
The tech workers speaking against the contract have zeroed in on two Israeli agencies “Project Nimbus” will provide services for: the Israeli army and the Israel Land Authority, the latter of which Human Rights Watch singled out in a 2020 report as an entity that helps “box in” Palestinian communities by “restricting Palestinians’ access to land for housing.” Koren, the Google worker, added that she fears the contract will increase Israel’s capacity for facial recognition technology that is used to track Palestinians in the West Bank.
The tech workers see their campaign as the latest in a string of initiatives to curb Amazon and Google’s involvement with military projects. In 2018, Google announced it would not seek to renew a Pentagon contract for artificial intelligence work that Google workers feared could be used to help the US military conduct drone strikes.
So far, Amazon and Google bosses haven’t publicly reacted to their workers’ demands to cancel the contract with Israel. Some critical workers admit it’s unlikely the tech giants will walk away from such a lucrative contract.
“It’s an uphill battle,” a Palestinian Amazon employee who requested anonymity because of concerns for the safety of their family in Palestine, told Jewish Currents. “At least we’re standing on the right side of history. If we don’t say something, then who will? Nobody. This will get worse, and more corporations will sign on to [similar contracts].”
