Police arrested nine Google employees in New York City and Sunnyvale, California, after several hours of sit-ins protesting Google’s recent multibillion-dollar deal with the Israeli regime.
Protesters entered the office on Tuesday and demanded that Google cancel a $1.2 billion contract known as “Project Nimbus” to provide cloud and machine learning services to Israel.
Employees participating in the sit-in wore shirts that read “Abolish Project Nimbus” and held banners that read “Genocide requires no technology.”
According to the group No Tech for Apartheid, which organized the protest, protesters sat in the office of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian in Sunnyvale and remained there for about 10 hours. It is said that
Protesters in New York occupied the 10th floor common area of Google’s Chelsea store.
A video taken by one of the demonstrators and shared with The Washington Post shows that the demonstrators were given the opportunity to voluntarily leave, but they refused and were arrested by police. It is shown.
“Physically interfering with the work of other employees or preventing access to our facilities is a clear violation of our policies, and we will investigate and take action,” Google spokeswoman Bailey Thomson said in a statement. We will take measures.”
“These employees were placed on administrative leave and their access to our systems was cut off. After refusing multiple requests to leave, law enforcement removed them to ensure the safety of our offices. “I worked on it,” she added.
Google employees have previously held rallies outside the company’s offices in various cities, demanding an end to cooperation with the Israeli regime.
Back in March, Google fired employees who protested the tech giant’s cooperation with Israel in its war with Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
The employee, who identified himself as a cloud software engineer, stood up during an event in New York City and interrupted a speech by Barak Regev, managing director of Google Israel.
He accused Google of complicity in the apartheid regime’s months-long war against Palestinians in Gaza.
Google (Google Cloud Platform) and Amazon (Amazon Web Services) have been selected to provide Israeli government agencies with cloud computing services, including artificial intelligence tools and machine learning, under the $1.2 billion Nimbus contract.
Google employees have expressed concerns that the company’s AI and cloud computing tools could be used for surveillance, military targeting, and weaponization.
No Tech for Apartheid accused Google and Amazon of partnering with Israel in a billion-dollar deal to commit genocidal attacks on the Gaza Strip. The group demands that “companies immediately cancel Project Nimbus and cease complicity in Israel’s war crimes.”
Current and former Google employees also say they are afraid to speak out against Project Nimbus or support the Palestinians within the company due to fear of retaliation.
This is because Google and Amazon reportedly have contractual provisions that prohibit them from blocking specific groups, such as the Israeli military, from using their services, or from terminating contracts in response to public pressure. .
But the movement appears to be gaining momentum amid international calls to end all aid to Israel that could be used against the Palestinian people.
Israel’s military offensive on Gaza, which began after the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas carried out Operation Al-Aqsa Storm against the usurpers in retaliation for the regime’s escalating atrocities against the Palestinian people, has renewed domestic opposition to the Nimbus plan. anointed with oil.
