The conflict in Gaza is coming to Google. The American giant fired 28 of its employees who took part in a demonstration on Tuesday demanding that the company abandon a contract with the Israeli army and government, accusing them of having prevented their colleagues from going to their workplace.
Several dozen people gathered in front of Google offices in Sunnyvale (California), and took over offices in Seattle (Washington State) and New York. Some occupied the Sunnyvale office of the general director of Google Cloud (a subsidiary dedicated to remote computing), Thomas Kurian, for several hours. They demanded the cancellation of a $1.2 billion contract, called Project Nimbus, for remote computing services (cloud) provided by Google and Amazon to the Israeli army and government.
Some of the demonstrators held up signs using the font and colors of the famous Google logo, substituting the word “genocide”, in reference to the Palestinian civilian victims of Israel’s offensive in Gaza.
In October 2021, the British daily The Guardian had published an op-ed from Amazon and Google employees demanding the withdrawal of the two companies from the Nimbus project. They claimed to have nearly 400 signatories and justified their anonymity by “fear of reprisals”.
“A clear violation of our rules”
The dismissed employees, “shocked and angry”, expressed their dissatisfaction. “It’s a totally disproportionate response against employees who defend a moral position,” one of them told the Washington Post.
“These protests are part of a long-running campaign by a group of organizations and individuals who, for the most part, do not work within Google,” a spokesperson for the group told AFP.
Regarding the “small number” of employees who entered the premises, “the fact of physically obstructing the work of other employees and preventing them from accessing our spaces constitutes a clear violation of our rules”, continued the spokesperson, who confirmed that 28 protesting employees had been fired. The spokesperson reiterated that Project Nimbus was “not intended for highly sensitive, classified or military tasks related to weapons or intelligence services.”