Hundreds protest business deal with Israel at Google conference
Demonstrators chain themselves together, accuse search giant and Israel of using Project Nimbus to commit genocide in Gaza
Hundreds of pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel protesters demonstrated against Google’s ties to Israel and the IDF at the tech company’s annual developer conference in Mountain View on Tuesday.
The protesters chained themselves together near the entrance to the conference, forcing attendees to be redirected to a different entrance, and carried a large banner reading “Google stop fueling genocide.”
A particular point of contention for the demonstrators was Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion deal between the Israeli government and Amazon and Google to provide AI and cloud services that are also used by the IDF.
The project enables Israeli cabinet ministries and other entities to transfer servers and services into cloud data centers provided locally.
“What you will not be hearing from today’s speakers is that right now, as I stand here before you, the state of Israel is using Google technology to execute history’s first AI-powered genocide,” one of the protesters was quoted as saying by The Guardian.
The protesters, among whom were former and current Google employees, contended that the system is being lethally deployed in the Gaza war — an allegation Google refutes and which the protesters have provided no evidence for.
“We are here to say that we cannot stand by while this company fuels this genocide and profits off of it,” former Google employee Ariel Koren told The Guardian at the protest.
“[Google] not only creates the infrastructure for the Israeli military to scale out their crimes against humanity, but these tools are being tested and trained in Palestine to be exported out to militaries around the world, who can then commit the same types of violence,” she said.
Koren claimed she was fired from Google for opposing Project Nimbus.
Last month, Google announced that it had fired 28 employees for staging “disruptive” sit-in protests at the company’s offices in New York and California to demonstrate against Project Nimbus.
The No Tech For Apartheid protests group claimed over 20 more employees were fired a week later but did not give a specific number.
The ongoing war in Gaza broke out on October 7 when Hamas launched an unprecedented attack on Israel, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and kidnapping 253.
The Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza claims that Israel has killed more than 35,000 Palestinians in the war, but the number cannot be independently verified as it is believed to include both Hamas terrorists and civilians, some of whom were killed as a consequence of the terror group’s own rocket misfires.
The IDF says it has killed over 15,000 terrorists in Gaza, in addition to some 1,000 who were killed inside Israel on and immediately following October 7. According to the army’s tally, the IDF has lost 272 soldiers during its ground invasion of Gaza.
