Google fires 28 staff after protest against firm’s contract with Israeli government

Google said on Thursday it had terminated 28 employees after some staff participated in protests against the company’s cloud contract with the Israeli government. Employees staged sit-ins at their offices, some for more than eight hours.

The Alphabet unit said a small number of pro-Palestine employees entered and disrupted work at a few unspecified office locations. They occupied the office of the chief technology officer of Google Cloud and held posters reading “No cloud apartheid”, “Googlers against genocide” and “Don’t be evil, stop retaliation”, a reference to Google’s former corporate slogan.

New York police made four trespassing arrests in response to the protest while police in Sunnyvale, California made five, according to the New York Post. Roughly 50 protesters occupied Google’s New York office; about 80 protested in Sunnyvale.

“Physically impeding other employees’ work and preventing them from accessing our facilities is a clear violation of our policies, and completely unacceptable behavior,” the company said in a statement.

Chris Rackow, Google’s vice-president of global security, was more blunt in an email to employees, per CNBC: “If you’re one of the few who are tempted to think we’re going to overlook conduct that violates our policies, think again.”

Google said it had concluded individual investigations, resulting in the termination of 28 employees, and would continue to investigate and take action as needed.

In a statement, Google workers affiliated with the No Tech for Apartheid campaign called it a “flagrant act of retaliation” and said that some employees who did not directly participate in Tuesday’s protests were also among those Google fired.

“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. This is a clear indication that Google values its $1.2bn contract with the genocidal Israeli government and military more than its own workers,” the statement reads.

The protesting faction says that Project Nimbus, a $1.2bn contract awarded to Google and Amazon.com in 2021 to supply the Israeli government with cloud services, supports the development of military tools by the Israeli government.

In its statement, Google maintained that the Nimbus contract “is not directed at highly sensitive, classified, or military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services”.

In a press briefing on Wednesday, Gabriel Schubiner – a software engineer who quit his job at Google over the company’s contracts with Israel – said: “Google has for years, lied about the specific complicity with the military. However, we know from internal organizing that this is not true. We know that Google is deeply complicit with the Israeli military.”

Schubiner said internal conversations with fellow workers who found themselves giving trainings on how to use Google Cloud directly to the Mossad, Israel’s national intelligence agency, revealed the Israeli military is a primary owner of the contract – and that the contracts were not primarily targeted at civil services and civil society, as Google had claimed.

When rumblings of who Google was truly engaged in business with grew louder, Schubiner said he and other employees began applying pressure on their company.

“We’ve done petitions, both internal and public, with thousands of signatures across Amazon and Google. We have done press and staged pressure campaigns, as well as protests. We have escalated through leadership chains. We have opened this conversation in company forums,” Schubiner said.

“We have really done everything that we can internally to try to get our voices heard. And leadership has consistently lied to workers and they’ve consistently not only lied, but repressed, silenced and harassed workers.”

Schubiner said his Muslim and Palestinian colleagues in particular were subjected to “the most intense retaliation bias” for speaking out against the contracts.

Protests at Google are not new. In 2018, workers successfully pushed the company to shelve a contract with the US military, Project Maven, meant to analyze aerial drone imagery with potential application in warfare. Also in 2018, the company saw a major walkout in response to its handling of sexual harassment by executives.