A number of Google and Amazon employees have spoken out against their firms’ contracts with the Israeli government. The workers have stated that their firms had inked a $1.2 billion deal known as Project Nimbus, a venture that ‘would supply cloud services to the Israeli government, especially involving the military’. According to the workers, the services include both storage and processing capacity, as well as capabilities that allow customers to effortlessly develop powerful artificial intelligence. According to NBC News, the workers have requested Amazon and Google in a combined letter to stop Project Nimbus and defend Palestinian human rights. The employees stated that they work with tech titans because they have a tremendous influence on people all over the world, but they are not naive about the evil that technology allows.
‘The technology our firms have contracted to create would make the Israeli military and government’s systemic discrimination and displacement which could be even deadlier for Palestinians,’ Google and Amazon employees wrote in an article published by The Guardian. This letter has been signed internally by more than 90 Google employees and more than 300 Amazon employees. ‘As employees who keep these businesses going, we have a moral obligation to speak up when these basic principles are violated. As a result, we feel obligated to urge Amazon and Google executives to withdraw from Project Nimbus and sever all relations with the Israeli military. We’re keeping our identities hidden because we’re afraid of retaliation. We are anonymous because we fear retaliation’, the letter said.
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Earlier this year, a group of Jewish Google employees urged the firm to do more to help Palestinians. The workers criticised the attacks in a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, asking for ‘clear acknowledgment of the suffering done to Palestinians by the Israeli military and gang brutality’. According to The Verge, the organization demanded that Google listens to its Palestinian employees, pay aid for Palestinians harmed by military brutality, safeguard free expression, and recognize the agony. They also demanded that Google cancel any commercial relationships that promote ‘Israeli abuses of Palestinian human rights, such as the Israeli Defense Forces’.
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