A handful of former Google employees are speaking out about their experience protesting the Israel-Palestine conflict at work on April 16, which they say led to an unceremonious, unjust termination from the company.”I could no longer support Google’s role in the AI-powered genocide in Palestine,” Hassan Ibraheem said on a live YouTube Q&A this week. “I decided to participate in the sit-in because I felt we had exhausted all other efforts,” another added former employee who went by BeeBee on the call.
Google protestors share their story on YouTube. (Credit: Haymarket Books YouTube Channel)
The protestors’ central issue is a $1.2 billion contract that Google and Amazon signed with the Israeli government in 2021, dubbed Project Nimbus. They claim this software is fueling Israel’s war efforts in Palestine, in which it has killed an estimated 34,000 people in response to Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israeli civilians, Al Jazeera reports. However, the controversy surrounding Project Nimbus and its role in supporting alleged human rights violations dates back to at least 2022, The Intercept reports.In a statement provided to PCMag, Google confirmed that the Israeli government is a customer of its cloud services but denied that the software is used for “highly sensitive, classified, or military workloads related to weapons or intelligence services.” Instead, the Nimbus contract is on the “commercial cloud” and used by government ministries “who agree to comply with our Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy.”The protestors say Google has no way of enforcing its terms of service and ensuring its software is not being used for harm. They also believe Project Nimbus deals with the Israel Ministry of Defense, said another former Googler, Mohammad Khatami. “The bills are going to the Defense Ministry. It’s clear as day. It proves how effective they’ve been at deception.”Though Google says the April 16 protests were disruptive and destroyed company property, BeeBee says, “This couldn’t be further from the truth. We were sitting in a small office by ourselves.” Multiple protesters took issue with security guards preventing them from using the bathroom or going to the kitchen.Over the course of the day, Google began with simple warnings, but it ultimately brought in the New York Police Department to arrest the remaining employees. Soon thereafter, the former employees say they were notified of their termination through an “automated email.” One also said their friend was fired after visiting but not participating in the protest.”Every single one of those whose employment was terminated was personally and definitively involved in disruptive activity inside our buildings,” Google says. “We carefully confirmed and reconfirmed this.”
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After initially firing 28 people, Google terminated an additional 20 protestors yesterday, bringing the total to around 50. The investigation was made more complex due to “employees who took longer to identify because their identity was partly concealed–like by wearing a mask without their badge–while engaged in the disruption,” Google says. “Our investigation into these events is now concluded, and we have terminated the employment of additional employees who were found to have been directly involved in disruptive activity.”Referencing Google’s “Don’t Be Evil” slogan, one protestor called the company’s actions “textbook evil.” Another called out Google for “eclipsing the open culture it once bragged about,” instead of “being Googley,” referring to internal jargon that loosely means being passionate, intellectually curious, or willing to go outside the norm. “They tell us to bring our whole selves to work,” one protestor added, noting that they felt comfortable voicing their opinion after seeing CEO Sundar Pichai speak out against Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel.On April 18, Pichai responded to the protests in a blog post on AI strategy: “This is a business, and not a place to act in a way that disrupts coworkers or makes them feel unsafe, to attempt to use the company as a personal platform, or to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics.”
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