Google said it has placed a “small number” of employees on leave after a few dozen people staged hourslong sit-ins at company offices on both coasts Tuesday in protest of Google’s relationship with Israel.
Nine people who participated in the sit-ins in Sunnyvale and New York City were arrested in total, according to tech website the Verge.
The protest was organized by a group called “No Tech For Apartheid,” which predates the current Israel-Hamas war, but the protesters focused on Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, using the slogan “No Tech For Genocide.” According to the group’s website, the demonstrations were facilitated with help from the anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace and Muslim activist group MPower Change.
For years, a group of Google and Amazon employees in collaboration with outside activists has vocally opposed Project Nimbus, a massive contract to provide cloud-based storage to the Israeli government.
Google said Wednesday in a statement to J. that the technology is used “for workloads running on our commercial cloud by Israeli government ministries” as well as by “numerous” other governments.
“This work is not directed at highly sensitive, classified, or military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services,” said the statement, emailed from Google spokesperson Bailey Tomson.
However, the Israeli Finance Ministry said that Nimbus, a major technological undertaking by the country costing over $1 billion, would provide an “all-encompassing cloud solution” to the government including to the “defense establishment,” Haaretz reported three years ago.
The protesters who staged the sit-ins on Tuesday called on their employer to “stop doing business with Israel” by terminating its Project Nimbus contract. They said in a statement that the project has become a “major health and safety” and “workplace conditions” issue for some employees, and that “multiple workers have quit citing the serious mental health consequences of working at a company that is using their labor to enable a genocide.”
The claim that Israel is engaged in genocide is fiercely rejected by the country, which is waging a war against Hamas in Gaza after the terrorist group orchestrated the Oct. 7 attack that killed 1,200 people in Israel. An estimated 253 people were taken hostage into Gaza. Of them,133 hostages remain there, though fewer than 100 are believed to be alive.
A number of scenes from Tuesday’s protests circulated in images and video on social media.
In one video from Google’s Sunnyvale offices, a handful of protesters were arrested by police after being asked to leave by a man who is not in uniform. At that point, the protesters had been sitting for about 10 hours in the office of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian, according to a social media post from No Tech For Apartheid.
Protesters also demonstrated in a Google office’s 10th floor common area in New York City, chanting “Google, Google, you can’t hide. We charge you with genocide!”
In its statement, Google said a “small number of employee protesters” involved in the demonstration were “put on administrative leave” and “were cut” from their access to Google systems for allegedly violating company policies.
“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,” the statement said.
Google said the protests were “part of a longstanding campaign by a group of organizations and people who largely don’t work at Google.”
Among the organizers of the “Drop Project Nimbus” campaign, which was widely covered by news outlets in 2021, is Ariel Koren, a former Google employee who is Jewish. Koren told J. in a 2021 interview that “for me as a Jewish employee of Google, I feel a deep sense of intense moral responsibility … for the way that [my] labor is actually being used.”