Protesters at Google’s Sunnyvale, California offices entered the office of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Koren on Tuesday morning and vowed to remain there until the company met their demands. That Google pulls out of a $1.2 billion deal with Amazon to provide cloud services. and Israeli government data centers. Another group of protesters sat in a common area at the company’s New York City offices, according to Zelda Montes, one of the workers participating in the protest. Police were on their way to Sunnyvale’s office in California around 10:45 a.m., a spokesman for the protesters said.
Some activists and outsiders have opposed the deal, known as Nimbus, since it was signed in 2021. on Israel. Activists circulated internal emails, protested outside company offices and staged a “die-in” outside one of Google’s buildings in San Francisco in December, blocking traffic on a busy downtown street. went
The demonstrations came a day after pro-Palestinian activists blocked highways, bridges and airport entrances across the United States in a coordinated series of protests against Israel’s invasion of Gaza and US military support for the country. Done later.
In early March, Google fired a worker who protested by standing up during a speech by Google’s top executive in Israel at a conference in New York. Montes, who works as a software engineer at Google-owned YouTube, acknowledged that he too could be fired.
“We often have the privilege of looking the other way and not having to think about the impact of our work on the world,” Montes said. “I’ve been waiting for months for people to be in the same position as me and be willing to put their jobs on the line.”
The agreement the workers are protesting was signed with the Israeli government as a whole. But when it was initially signed, Israeli officials told reporters that the terms of the agreement prohibited Google and Amazon from denying services to certain parts of the government, raising concerns among some tech employees that Their work can be used for military purposes.
Last week, Time magazine reported that Google had been in talks with the Israeli Defense Ministry in recent weeks.
“It’s sad that Google is selling this technology to the Israeli government and military and lying to its employees about it,” Montes said, citing a Time magazine report.
A Google spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Amazon employees involved in anti-nimbus organizing also participated in Tuesday’s rallies, organizers said. The Washington Post previously reported that employees who oppose the deal with Israel have been feuding with their Tel Aviv-based co-workers since the dispute began in October.
At Amazon’s shareholders meeting in May, anti-Numbus Amazon employees said they would support a resolution requesting a third-party investigative report into whether “customer monitoring of its products and services , computer vision, or use with cloud storage capabilities that affect human rights or violate international humanitarian law.
An Amazon spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.