"Google backed Israel’s military. Now its workers are in revolt"

[...]

For the last three years … activists [have been] calling for Google to drop Project Nimbus, a partnership Google and Amazon have with the Israeli government reportedly worth $1.2bn.

[...]

Google, which has not responded to questions sent by MEE prior to publication of this article, has insisted in previous statements that Nimbus "is not directed at highly sensitive, classified, or military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services".

[…]

... Some employees have staged physical and virtual protests against the deal over fears that Google is enabling Israel to use their work, particularly involving artificial intelligence technologies, to further what many see as an unfolding genocide.

But some employees say they have been met with an intense crackdown from Google …[including] censoring them, firing them, and threatening some of them by turning the company into a "hostile work environment"...

[...]

Google did not respond to Middle East Eye's repeated requests for comment.

[...]

...[Employees] said they experienced internal censorship from Google's team of moderators who oversaw [internal] message boards.

"It was so common to see message boards be shut down," explained Hasan, who is Syrian by descent and a former software developer for Google in New York.

Despite assurances from Pichai that the company would take issues of Islamophobia seriously, when pro-Palestine Googlers faced intimidation from pro-Israel colleagues, the company, according to them, would ignore their concerns and not take any action.

[...]

…. Israeli bombs killed a Palestinian software engineer, Mai Ubeid, and her whole family in Gaza in late October 2023. Ubeid graduated from a Google-funded coding boot camp in Gaza called Sky Geeks and later interned at a firm that was part of the Google for Startups accelerator in 2020.

Googlers organised vigils outside its offices in New York, Seattle and London for Ubeid, who was disabled and wheelchair-bound.

These vigils were met with hostility from Google and colleagues …

Some were issued warnings by their managers for handing out leaflets related to Ubeid and reminded of the company's policies against leafleting on company property. They believe Google used CCTV and pictures taken by pro-Israel colleagues who sent them to human resources to identify them.

[...]

The company called in the police and fired 28 workers on the spot and 22 others after an investigation that involved analysing CCTV footage.

The day after, Chris Rackow, Google's head of security and a former US Navy Seal, sent a memo warning employees to "think again" if they planned to protest in its offices.

[…]

Google did not respond to questions on why it fired the employees but told the Guardian at the time: "We continued our investigation into the physical disruption inside our buildings on April 16, looking at additional details provided by co-workers who were physically disrupted, as well as those employees who took longer to identify because their identity was partly concealed – like by wearing a mask without their badge – while engaged in the disruption.

"Our investigation into these events is now concluded, and we have terminated the employment of additional employees who were found to have been directly involved in disruptive activity.”

In August, more than 200 workers inside Google DeepMind signed a petition urging the company to drop Project Nimbus and pledging to never work on military contracts.

Oscar, who declined to give his surname ... acknowledged his activism would "limit" his career progression within DeepMind.

[But] "We believe, as the IDF claims, that Google's cloud tech is giving Israel a significant technical military edge, and we don't want to be involved in that..."