Google employees arrested following protest over Israel ties at executive’s office
Google employees arrested following protest over Israel ties at executive’s office
The employees were arrested during a sit-in at the office of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian in California, during a day of company-wide protests by Google employees at offices across the US in protest of Google’s Project Nimbus deal with Israel
Google employees were arrested on Tuesday after staging a more than eight hour sit-in at the California office of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian, in protest of the company's ties with Israel. Arrests were also made following a protest at the tech giant’s New York office.
The protest was part of a larger nation-wide initiative by Google employees across the U.S. called “No Tech for Genocide Day of Action,” with protests held at Google offices in Seattle in addition to California and New York. They were organized by Google employees under the banner of “No Tech for Apartheid,” a group which claims to represent over 1000 Google and Amazon employees.
The demands of the protest include that Google drop Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion cloud computing deal between Google and Amazon and the Israeli Ministry of Defense, that “Amazon & Google stop doing business with Israeli apartheid & powering the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza,” to “stop the harassment, intimidation, bullying, silencing, and censorship of Palestinian, Arab and Muslim Googlers" and to “address the health and safety crisis among Google workers,” who they claim have been suffering from “serious mental health consequences working at a company that is using their labor to enable a genocide.”
According to a spokesperson for the protesters, nine employees were arrested at both the Cloud Division offices in New York and California. According to The Washington Post, Google ordered the arrest of the protesters who were told by police who ultimately arrested them after they refused to leave voluntarily.
“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,” said Bailey Tomson, a Google spokesperson. “These employees were put on administrative leave, and their access to our systems was cut. After refusing multiple requests to leave the premises, law enforcement was engaged to remove them to ensure office safety.”
In 2021, about 90 Google employees and 300 Amazon employees launched a petition for the tech giants to withdraw their bid for the Nimbus project contract in Israel, which stated that "Google’s contract with the Israeli military and government will directly harm Palestinians using the technology that Google employees are expected to create."
As part of the project, Google and Amazon committed to establishing significant cloud computing centers in the country within two years. The project enables Israeli government ministries and other entities to transfer servers and services into the cloud data centers provided locally. Prior to the deal, Israel used cloud services provided by Google and AWS data centers in Ireland, Holland, and Frankfurt.
Google previously fired a worker in March who disrupted a speech by Barak Regev, Managing Director of Google Israel, at Calcalist’s Mind the Tech Conference in New York.
