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No Tech For Apartheid

SAN FRANCISCO — Several Google employees were arrested Tuesday evening at the company’s offices in New York City and Sunnyvale, Calif., after staging sit-ins to protest the tech giant’s work with the Israeli government, escalating the conflict inside tech companies over the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/israel-hamas-war/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">war in Gaza</a> and whether U.S. companies should sell<b> </b>their technology to Israel.

Nine employees were arrested across both offices, according to Jane Chung, a spokesperson for the protesters. A video taken by one of the protesters and shared with The Washington Post shows New York Police Department officers walk into the Google office and calmly tell protesters that they will be arrested if they don’t leave. When the workers refuse, the police ask them to turn around and put their hands behind their backs.

“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.”

Protesters entered the offices in New York and California around 2 p.m. Eastern time, vowing to stay there until the company met their demand that Google pull out of a $1.2 billion contract it shares with Amazon to provide cloud services and data centers to the Israeli government. Other protesters rallied outside the company’s offices in New York, Sunnyvale and Seattle.

Some workers and outside activists have opposed the contract, known as Nimbus, since it was signed in 2021. But protests have ramped up over the past seven months as Israeli forces continue to bombard the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/10/09/gaza-strip-israel-hamas-explained/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">Gaza Strip</a>, following Hamas’s Oct. 7 cross-border attack on Israel. Workers have circulated internal emails, protested outside company offices and staged a <a href="https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/protestors-demanding-end-google-s-work-israel-18552368.php" target="_blank">“die-in”</a> outside one of Google’s buildings in San Francisco in December, blocking traffic on a busy downtown street.

The protests were staged a day after pro-Palestinian activists <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/04/15/gaza-israel-war-protests-bridges/" target=_blank>blocked highways, bridges</a> and the entrances to airports across the United States in coordinated demonstrations against Israel’s invasion of Gaza and U.S. military support for the country.

In early March, Google fired a worker who stood up and protested during a speech by Google’s top executive in Israel at a conference in New York. Zelda Montes, a software engineer at Google-owned YouTube who was one of the workers participating in the sit-in, acknowledged in an interview before the protest that they may be fired, too.

“We often have the privilege of looking the other way and not to have to think about the impact of our work on the world,” Montes said. “I have been waiting for months for people to be in the same position as me and be ready to put their job on the line.” Montes did not respond to text messages requesting comment after the arrests.

The contract that the workers are protesting was signed with the Israeli government as a whole. But when it was initially signed, Israeli officials <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-signs-deal-for-cloud-services-with-google-amazon/" target=_blank>told reporters</a> that the terms of the deal prohibit Google and Amazon from denying services to specific parts of the government, raising concerns among some tech employees that their work could be used for military purposes.

Last week, Time Magazine <a href="https://time.com/6966102/google-contract-israel-defense-ministry-gaza-war/" target=_blank>reported</a> that Google has been negotiating with Israel’s Defense Ministry in recent weeks.

“It’s deplorable that Google has been selling this technology to the Israeli government and military and lying to its employees about it,” Montes said, referring to the Time Magazine report.

Amazon employees involved in anti-Nimbus organizing also attended rallies on Tuesday, organizers said. Employees who oppose the contract with Israel have been clashing with their Tel Aviv-based co-workers since the conflict began in October, The Washington Post <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/12/02/amazon-israel-gaza-war/" target=_blank>has previously reported</a>.

At an Amazon shareholder meeting in May, anti-Nimbus Amazon employees said they will support a resolution requesting a third-party investigative report on whether “customers’ use of its products and services with surveillance, computer vision, or cloud storage capabilities contributes to human rights violations or violates international humanitarian law.”

An Amazon spokesperson did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

Carleton University, BA in Journalism and Global Politics

Gerrit De Vynck is a tech reporter for The Washington Post. He writes about Google, artificial intelligence and the algorithms that increasingly shape society. He previously covered tech for seven years at Bloomberg News.

Gerrit De Vynck

University of Chicago, BA in Political Science and English 

Caroline O'Donovan covers Amazon for the tech team. Before joining The Washington Post, she covered tech and labor for BuzzFeed News. 

Caroline O'Donovan

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Google workers stage sit-ins to protest company’s work with Israel

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