The employees called the $1.4 billion deal an agreement “to sell dangerous technology to the Israeli military and government.”
By Lauren Marcus, World Israel News
An unknown number of employees at tech industry titans Google and Amazon have signed an open letter published in left-wing UK daily The Guardian, calling upon the corporations to renege on a deal which would see the organizations’ technology used in a massive project for the Israeli government.
Claiming that they could not sign their names because of the potential for retaliation, the anonymous employees penned the missive in protest of Project Nimbus, an initiative to migrate the majority of the Israeli government and military’s IT infrastructure to cloud-based servers.
The employees called the $1.4 billion deal an agreement “to sell dangerous technology to the Israeli military and government.”
According to the letter, the contract was signed the same week as May 2021’s Operation Guardian of the Walls. Framing the Jewish State as the aggressor in the clash, the employees wrote that “Israeli military attacked Palestinians in the Gaza Strip – killing nearly 250 people, including more than 60 children.”
The letter did not make the distinction between the deaths of Gazan civilians and combatants.
It also failed to acknowledge that the vast majority of those killed in the Strip were terrorists affiliated with Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, who were actively engaging in firing rockets towards Israeli communities that were not legitimate military targets.
Because Project Nimbus will enable “further surveillance of and unlawful data collection on Palestinians, and facilitates expansion of Israel’s illegal settlements on Palestinian land,” the writers felt compelled to make their disapproval of the project clear.
Employees said they cannot “look the other way, as the products we build are used to deny Palestinians their basic rights, force Palestinians out of their homes and attack Palestinians in the Gaza Strip – actions that have prompted war crime investigations by the international criminal court.”
Amazon and Google’s agreement to take on the project is part of a “disturbing pattern of militarization, lack of transparency and avoidance of oversight.”
The employees said they considered the corporations’ partnerships with the “U.S .Department of Defense, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and state and local police departments” to also be problematic.