‘Google Profits From Apartheid’, Google Workers & Bay Area Community Protest Company Conference Celebrating Google Cloud’s First Profitable Year

Protest Escalates Years of Community Opposition to Company’s $1.2 Billion ‘Project Nimbus’ Contract With Israel

For Immediate Release

Press Contact: Jane Chung, (201) 686-5901, jane@justicespeaks.us 

Alt Local Contact: Wassim Hage, (832) 704-7660 Wassim@araborganizing.org 

(San Francisco, CA) – This evening at the Google Cloud Next conference, over 20 community activists locked arms and chained themselves to fixtures in the central plaza of the Moscone Center in downtown San Francisco. The activists did so in protest against Google and Amazon's $1.2 billion contract with the Israeli military and government.

Joined by Google workers and hundreds of additional community members rallying in the central courtyard, chained protestors took over a main conference thoroughfare and bridge walkway and unfurled a giant banner reading "Google: Project Nimbus Fuels Israeli Apartheid." Private security and San Francisco police were called to the scene, as thousands of conference participants transitioned to the event's inaugural happy hour. 

"Palestinians are subjected to Israel's technological warfare every day. The tech promised by Project Nimbus will be used to murder, jail, surveil, and ethnically cleanse Palestinians," says Romi Abdelkarim, an organizer with the Palestinian Youth Movement, who was also one of the activists to chain themselves to other activists on a conference center walkway in an act of protest. "The automated technology used on Palestinians is something out of a dystopian movie: AI guided machine guns, facial recognition and location trafficking, AI manned armed-drones, and high-tech civilian registration programs. We will not allow Google to build more of this racist, genocidal technology for Israel."

Part of a campaign called #NoTechforApartheid organized by tech workers, civil society, and community members, these protests represent the rapidly growing movement of tech workers taking public action against these contracts. This protest also takes place during the 75th anniversary of the Nakba, or the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.

"Google has continuously silenced and intimidated workers who speak out against Project Nimbus,” says Ariel Koren, a former Jewish Google worker who faced retaliation for her opposition to the contract, and who also joined 20+ activists in civil disobedience. "Google initially withheld information about the contract to the public and its own workers, actively insisting the project is a mundane civilian contract. But over the past two years our concerns about the contract’s nefarious military use have proven to be completely correct. Amidst the company’s threats and retaliation, workers have only grown more emboldened to fight against building tech for apartheid."

This action follows almost two years of activism by Amazon and Google workers to pressure their respective companies to cancel their cloud contracts with Israel. Last September, on the heels of Google worker Ariel Koren’s forced resignation, Amazon and Google tech workers led protests with hundreds in attendance in front of their offices in New York City, San Francisco, Durham, and Seattle.

Citing the well-documented human rights abuses and violations of international law committed by the Israeli government and military against Palestinians, thousands of workers at Amazon and Google have called on their companies to stop working on Project Nimbus, based on the potential for this technology to be used to surveil, oppress, or commit other forms of violence against Palestinians. Tens of thousands of others have joined those workers’ calls.

"We are being forced to escalate to demand action and answers from Google. Years of due diligence, appealing to management, and taking to the media have only gotten us small gestures at transparency," says Josh Marxen, a Google Cloud worker participating in the action by flyering and having conversations about Project Nimbus with conference-goers and fellow Google workers. "Google Cloud leadership has sacrificed ethics and worker wellbeing in pursuit of this contract with an apartheid state. We want Google Cloud to grow and prosper, but we cannot accept that Cloud's profitability has come on the back of genocidal use of our technology."

To date, Amazon and Google executives have ignored their workers’ demands. Workers describe the contract as “part of a disturbing pattern of militarization, lack of transparency and avoidance of oversight.”

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