A letter claimed to be from a group of Google and Amazon employees demands that the tech giants “cut all ties” with the Israeli military.
The anonymous authors say they “cannot look the other way” after Palestinian deaths during the Gaza conflict in May. They make no mention of the Hamas missile attacks on civilians against which Israel was defending itself.
The article published in The Guardian on Tuesday urges the companies to end their $1.2 billion contract with Israel for “Project Nimbus”, providing cloud computing to the Israeli public sector, including the military.
The letter describes it as technology “that is used to harm Palestinians”. The authors say they are “employees of conscience”, and are writing anonymously “because we fear retaliation”.
They say that more than 90 Google employees and 300-plus Amazon workers have signed the letter circulating internally.
The authors write: “This contract was signed the same week that the Israeli military attacked Palestinians in the Gaza Strip – killing nearly 250 people, including more than 60 children.
“The technology our companies have contracted to build will make the systematic discrimination and displacement carried out by the Israeli military and government even crueler and deadlier for Palestinians.”
The letter makes no reference to multiple attacks from Gaza on Israel during the conflict. Hamas launched several thousand rockets on Israeli civilian areas, killing 12 people.
It concludes: “We condemn Amazon and Google’s decision to sign the Project Nimbus contract with the Israeli military and government, and ask them to reject this contract and future contracts that will harm our users.”
The Nimbus contract with Google and Amazon is set to run for at least seven years, at the end of which the Israeli government has the option of extending it to last for 23 years altogether, or to add on or switch to other contractors.
