Google staffers are locked in an escalating office squabble over the search giant’s business ties with Israel, which include a $1.2 billion agreement to supply cloud services to the Israeli government called “Project Nimbus.”
On Wednesday, a bunch of Muslim, Palestinian, Arab and “anti-Zionist Jewish” Google staffers published an open letter that demanded the tech behemoth nix the Nimbus contract — at the same time as it accused Israel of committing “genocide” under an “apartheid government and military.”
“We demand that Google stop providing material support to this genocide by canceling its Project Nimbus contract and immediately stop doing business with the Israeli apartheid government and military,” the group said, calling out CEO Sundar Pichai and Google Cloud boss Thomas Kurian.
Critics and activists working at Google have bashed Nimbus because the contract was signed in 2021, claiming it gives Israel tools to covertly monitor Palestine.
Googlers who support Israel meanwhile, have interpreted resistance to Nimbus as hostile, adding that when coworkers bash Israel’s actions in Gaza as “genocide,” it’s “deeply offensive,” in response to accounts from staffers reported by The Recent York Times.
Three insiders told the Times that a employee was fired after writing on an internal Google message board that Israelis living near Gaza “deserved to be impacted.”
In a press release, Google spokesperson Courtenay Mencini dismissed resistance to Nimbus as “a part of a longstanding campaign by a bunch of organizations and folks who largely don’t work at Google.”
“We’ve been very clear that the Nimbus contract is for workloads running on our industrial platform by Israeli government ministries equivalent to finance, healthcare, transportation and education,” Mencini added. “Our work will not be directed at highly sensitive or classified military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services.”
Meanwhile, Wednesday’s open letter griped that “Palestinians have been publicly called ‘animals’ on official Google work platforms” with none disciplinary motion from leadership, and “Muslims have endured accusations of supporting terrorism as a part of their religion.”
In other instances, employees who showed “empathy towards the besieged residents of Gaza” were dubbed “sick” and “a lost cause,” by managers, per the letter.
Software engineer Sarmad Gilani, who joined Google in 2012, was one among a handful of employees that confirmed publicly they’d signed off on the open letter.
Gilani told the outlet that as a Google staffer, “you need to be very, very, very careful, because any kind of criticism toward the Israeli state may be easily taken as antisemitism.”
He claimed that although Google’s culture purports to have a good time all racial identities and sexual orientations, there’s a double standard that permits for “freedom of expression for Israeli Googlers versus Arab, Muslim and Palestinian Googlers.”
“I don’t feel protected saying what I need to say,” Gilani said.
Within the wake of Hamas’ Oct. 7 ambush attack on Israel, Google released a press release condemning Hamas, and days later vowed to Jewish employees that its internal platforms can be monitored for antisemitism — and that the corporate was prepared to fireplace offenders if need be, per the Times.
The next week, Pichai said in an internal email obtained by The Post that Jewish Google staffers were “experiencing an increase in antisemitic incidents.”
In that very same message he acknowledged that Palestinian, Arab and Muslim employees were “deeply affected by a concerning rise in Islamophobia and are watching with dread as Palestinian civilians in Gaza have suffered significant loss and fear for his or her lives amid the escalating war and humanitarian crisis.”
The staffers behind Wednesday’s open letter weren’t satisfied.
“We demand that Sundar Pichai, Thomas Kurian and other Google leadership issue a public condemnation of the continuing genocide within the strongest possible terms,” they wrote.
Google spokesperson Courtenay Mencini noted that the Israel-Hamas war “is a highly sensitive time and topic in every company and workplace, and we now have many employees who’re personally affected.”
“The overwhelming majority of those employees usually are not engaged in internal discussions or debate, and lots of have said they’ve appreciated our fast response and our deal with the protection of our employees,” Mencini added.
Google’s experience isn’t unique: Its tech rival Apple scrapped worker Natasha Dach from its staff directory after her antisemitic social media post was unearthed by pro-Israel watchdog StopAntisemitism.
A screenshot of Dach’s social media posts indicates that she wrote: “You sneak into countries, steal peoples lives, jobs, homes, streets, push them, bully them, torture them.”
Dach wrote that “when people act on it, you call it terrorism” — an apparent reference to the Oct. 7 surprise assault by Hamas which left at the least 1,400 Israeli soldiers and civilians dead.
Just days prior, Apple reportedly shut down internal Slack channels utilized by Muslim and Jewish employees after employees posted verses of the Koran and arranged protests in response to the continuing Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.
In the times and weeks after Hamas’ surprise terrorist assault on Israeli towns on Oct. 7, Microsoft shut down an internal discussion board after one worker wrote a couple of “strong sense of disillusionment with our work and the corporate” in light of “one-sided statements” by management in support of Israel.