Google Workers Arrested for Protesting Company’s Deal with “Israel”

By Staff, Agencies

Police have arrested nine Google employees at the tech giant’s offices in New York City and Sunnyvale, California, after they staged an hours-long sit-in in protest against the company’s recent billion-dollar deal with the “Israeli” entity.

The protesters entered the offices on Tuesday, demanding that Google drop the $1.2 billion contract that provides “Israel” with cloud and machine learning services, known as Project Nimbus.

The employees who participated in the sit-ins wore shirts that said “Drop Project Nimbus”, as they held a banner reading “No tech for genocide.”

No Tech for Apartheid group which organized the protest said the protesters sat in the office of Google Cloud Chief Executive Thomas Kurian in Sunnyvale and remained there for about 10 hours.

Amid the “Israeli” genocide in Gaza, workers at Google and Amazon have stepped up pressure on their companies to cut ties with the entity, including the controversial Project Nimbus.

The New York protest occupied a common area on the tenth floor of Google's Chelsea location.

A video taken by one of the protesters and shared with The Washington Post showed they were given the opportunity to leave voluntarily, and then arrested by police after refusing to do so.

Bailey Tomson, a Google spokesperson, said, “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.”

“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,” she added.

Google workers had previously staged rallies in front of the company’s offices in various cities, demanding an end to its cooperation with the “Israeli” entity.

The employee, who has identified himself as a cloud software engineer, stood up during an event in New York City, disrupting the speech of the managing director of “Google Israel”, Barak Regev.

He denounced Google for being complicit in the apartheid entity’s months-long war against the Palestinians in Gaza.

Google workers are raising concerns about the misuse of the company's AI and cloud computing tools for surveillance, military targeting, or weaponization.

No Tech for Apartheid has censured Google and Amazon for playing a role in the genocidal attacks on Gaza by partnering with “Israel” in the billion-dollar agreement. The organization demands that “companies immediately cancel Project Nimbus and end their complicity in ‘Israel’s’ war crimes.”

Current and former Google workers also say that they are fearful of speaking up internally against Project Nimbus or in support of Palestinians, due to what some described as fear of retaliation.