Silicon Valley protests in New York: Google and Amazon workers protest No Tech for Apartheid vs. the Israeli Defence Forces
Google and Amazon workers protested outside company offices in 2022 after The Intercept published documents showing the contract includes AI technology such as video analysis. The protesting tech workers say such capabilities could be used by Israel’s security apparatus to harm Palestinians.
The deal could help to cause the killing of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, according to workers at both companies. The Intercept and Time have reported that Project Nimbus provides services that can be tapped by the Israel Defence Forces.
Workers from both Amazon and Google have protested Project Nimbus for a long time. A campaign group called No Tech for Apartheid—which combines tech workers from the two the Muslim and Jewish-led activist groups MPower Change and Jewish Voice for Peace—formed in 2021 after details about the cloud contract became public.
Software engineers Hasan Ibraheem and Zelda Montes are being held in New York. They also include two workers who identified themselves by their first names as Jesús and Mohammed on a speaker-phone call with protesters outside Google’s New York office Tuesday.
Tuesday night’s police action came after “dozens” of employees were placed on administrative leave after participating in the day’s sit-in protests but leaving peacefully, the person involved says. Protests were staged outside of the New York office and in the other cities.
“We will not be leaving,” a protesting worker replies. A man in uniform then introduces the officers as NYPD and delivers a final ultimatum, saying the workers have a last chance to walk out freely. He says you can be arrested for violating the law. Police arrested the protesters when they wouldn’t go.
Google fired workers protesting against Project Nimbus: a counterexample against Israeli-Israeli hacking in the early 2000s
At the end of the year,Alphabet had more than 180,000 employees, with the vast majority of them being at internet giant Google. Protesters at the New York office of the search engine said they had the support of the rest of the company.
Jane Chung, a spokesperson for No Tech for Apartheid—the coalition of tech workers and Muslim- and Jewish-led activist groups MPower Change and Jewish Voice for Peace that organized the protests—says that some workers who were fired were involved in much less provocative action than those who occupied offices.
Some, she said, had simply attended an outdoor protest and taken a t-shirt handed out by organizers. They were standing near the protesters for safety.
After occupying the New York office of Google for more than ten hours, the software engineer who worked for the site has accused the company of breaching US legal protections.
Google fired twenty-eight employees Wednesday after they participated in protests against Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion cloud contract with Israel’s government that also includes Amazon.