Google fires employee after pro-Palestine protest at tech conference
Google has fired an employee who staged a protest against the tech giant’s cooperation with the Israeli regime in its genocidal war against innocent Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip.
The employee, who has identified himself as a cloud software engineer, stood up during an event in New York City earlier this week, disrupting the speech of the head of Google Israel, Barak Regev. “I refuse to build technology that empowers genocide,” he said in a video posted online that went viral.
He denounced Google for being complicit in the apartheid regime’s months-long war against the innocent Palestinians in Gaza.
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The fired employee specifically hit out at Project Nimbus, a $1.2bn agreement for Google and Amazon to supply Israel and its military with cloud and computing services. “Project Nimbus puts Palestinian community members in danger.”
Google announced that the employee had been fired for “interfering with an official company-sponsored event.”
“This behavior is not okay, regardless of the issue, and the employee was terminated for violating our policies,” the company’s spokesperson said.
Meanwhile, No Tech for Apartheid group released a statement against the move, accusing Google of clamping down on free speech surrounding the genocide of Gazans.
“Google has engaged in a clear-cut act of retaliation against its own worker for speaking up about the terms and conditions of their labor,” the group said in a statement.
Google and Amazon workers stage protests to stop their companies’ joint AI Project Nimbus with Israel.
No Tech for Apartheid, however, added that the ex-employee was proud to be fired. “While terminating this brave worker, Google HR asked how they were feeling. The worker replied: ‘proud to be fired for refusing to be complicit in genocide.’”
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 regime.
Activists say their long-running complaint against the company and its billion-dollar software contract with Israel has taken on new urgency since the beginning of Israel’s bloody war on Gaza, which has killed more than 30,800 Palestinians, mostly children and women.
