Google Lays Off 28 Pro-Palestinian Workers Over Protesting $1.2 Billion Contract with Israel
You can say this much about Google: At least it’ll boot out radical anti-Semites. You know, after they’re allowed to make their point by occupying the company’s buildings and everything.
According to the New York Post, 28 Google employees are now ex-Google employees after they engaged in a coordinated sit-in at the company’s offices in New York City, Seattle and Sunnyvale, California on Tuesday.
The reason? The company has a contract with the Israeli government called Project Nimbus, which Axios described as “a $1.2 billion artificial intelligence and computing services agreement among Google, Amazon Web Services and the Israeli government and military.”
However, the employees made it clear they weren’t just against working with Israel, but that they supported those fighting it.
The Post noted the staffers who engaged in the sit-in “had donned traditional Arab headscarves as they stormed and occupied the office of a top executive in California on Tuesday.”
It was called “No Tech for Genocide Day of Action” — as if these individuals had forgotten who was committing the genocide over in Israel, which was perfectly apparent to anyone who bothered to look at the events of Oct. 7.
Instant karma: @Google employees held a sit-in protest of the Big Tech company’s business with Israel.
They were arrested and fired.
Life comes at you fast!pic.twitter.com/rJiysqtPsk
— Kyle Becker (@kylenabecker) April 18, 2024
“They took over office spaces, defaced our property, and physically impeded the work of other Googlers,” Chris Rackow, Google vice president of global security, said in a memo distributed companywide.
“Their behavior was unacceptable, extremely disruptive, and made co-workers feel threatened,” he said.
The Washington Post reported that the mob “entered the offices in New York and California around 2 p.m. Eastern time, vowing to stay there until the company met their demand that Google pull out of a $1.2 billion contract it shares with Amazon to provide cloud services and data centers to the Israeli government. Other protesters rallied outside the company’s offices in New York, Sunnyvale and Seattle.”
“The protests were staged a day after pro-Palestinian activists blocked highways, bridges and the entrances to airports across the United States in coordinated demonstrations against Israel’s invasion of Gaza and U.S. military support for the country,” the report noted.
It didn’t exactly work as planned for the employees, who weren’t just dismissed as privileged nuisances — like the pro-Palestinian activists who blocked transportation hubs — but were deemed expendable to the company.
“Physically impeding other employees’ work and preventing them from accessing our facilities is a clear violation of our policies, and we will investigate and take action,” said Bailey Tomson, a Google spokeswoman.
“These employees were put on administrative leave, and their access to our systems was cut. After refusing multiple requests to leave the premises, law enforcement was engaged to remove them to ensure office safety,” she said.
I mean…sanity needs some restoring https://t.co/nGzyCRHH4y
— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) April 18, 2024
Nine arrests were made, and on Wednesday, 28 firings were announced.
Not that this was all of the protesters; the Sunnyvale Department of Public Safety said the California side of the protest “consisted of around 80 participants.”
However, a Google representative said the “protests were part of a longstanding campaign by a group of organizations and people who largely don’t work at Google.”
This isn’t the first time that people involved in Google Cloud have publicly protested Project Nimbus and thus made themselves redundant and unemployable by the company.
In March, a none-too-stable engineer who was (key: now past tense) employed on the Google Cloud project interrupted Barak Regev, the managing director of Google Israel, during his talk at an Israeli-sponsored conference called MindTheTech.
“I refuse to build technology that powers genocide … or surveillance!” the unidentified man could be heard yelling in a video of the event.
“I refuse to build technology that’s going to be used for — stop apartheid!” he continued yelling as he was escorted out by security. “Stop apartheid! Stop apartheid!”
A Google Cloud engineer just interrupted Google Israel managing director Barak Regev at Israeli tech industry conference MindTheTech this morning in NY.
“I refuse to build technology that powers genocide!” he yelled, referring to Google’s Project Nimbus contract pic.twitter.com/vM9mMFlJRS
— Caroline Haskins (@car0linehaskins) March 4, 2024
Sure, Google might have skewed values, but it also knows that those who sympathize with terrorist groups that kill innocent civilians and then protest governments that exercise the legitimate right to strike back aren’t people who should be on the payroll, especially if you work with said governments.
Thankfully, they weren’t just pushed aside to some meaningless sinecure and allowed to stay in the Google family. They were dismissed, angrily and publicly, by a company willing to take a stand (for once) for sanity.
Not that the spokeswoman for No Tech for Apartheid, Jane Chung, felt that way.
“This evening, Google indiscriminately fired 28 workers, including those among us who did not directly participate in yesterday’s historic, bicoastal 10-hour sit-in protests,” she said in a statement, adding that “[Google CEO] Sundar Pichai and [Google Cloud CEO] Thomas Kurian are genocide profiteers.”
“This flagrant act of retaliation is a clear indication that Google values its $1.2 billion contract with the genocidal Israeli government and military more than its own workers — the ones who create real value for executives and shareholders,” Chung said.
Actually, it cares about those who don’t loathe innocent humanity more than those who do.
Perhaps you can find a company that shares your opposing values, Jane Chung — but in a just world, you’d be an outcast until a profuse apology was forthcoming, as it would be with the rest of your cohort.
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