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Google employee quits, slamming company’s ‘complicity in Israeli apartheid’

Ariel Koren denounced Google’s “culture of silencing anti-Zionist Jews” in her resignation letter.

By Adina Katz, World Israel News

A Jewish Google employee who led a campaign attempting to force the tech titan to pull out of a $1 billion project for the Israeli government quit on Tuesday, releasing a dramatic resignation letter in which she claimed Google’s “complicity in Israeli apartheid” as the reason for her departure.

Ariel Koren, who worked in the organization’s educational division, had previously claimed that Google retaliated against her for her anti-Zionist activism.

“Google has consistently sustained a culture of silencing anti-Zionist Jews and creating toxic and unjust conditions for Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim workers at Google, all while ignoring the widespread internal and public dissent against the company’s complicity in Israel’s apartheid violence via Project Nimbus,” Koren charged in her resignation letter, which she published on Medium.

“Israel is an apartheid state. Even in the wake of the growing mainstream acknowledgement of Israeli apartheid, Google has stood by its contracts with the Israeli government and military. The world’s largest search engine is contracting with a military actively carrying out war crimes and upholding apartheid, while workers have no say in how the technology we provide them is used.”

She named statements of support for Israeli civilians made by senior executives during the May 2021 Israel-Gaza clash as an example of Google’s alleged pro-Israel bias.

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“Leaders like Sundar Pichai and Susan Wijcicki [sic] sent emails explicitly expressing concern for Israelis, but there was no such communication to or about Palestinians, who are targeted by Israel’s daily violence and oppression,” she wrote.

Other grievances listed by Koren included being excluded from an internal Google Jewish discussion group, after moderators explained that her repeated accusations of Israeli war crimes and apartheid were disruptive to the space, and an allegation that her opposition to the Israeli government project had led to retaliation.

After speaking to multiple media outlets about Project Nimbus and alleging that Google was complicit in genocide and child murder, Koren said that her boss informed her that she was being relocated to Sao Paolo, Brazil, on extremely short notice.

Koren was one of two Jewish Google employees who penned a letter slamming the company for agreeing to a cloud infrastructure project for various branches of the Israeli government and the IDF.

The letter, which was signed by some 90 anonymous Google employees, was published in the UK daily The Guardian in October 2021.