Police arrested several Google employees who staged sit-in protests on Tuesday to oppose the company’s ties to Israel.
Protesters occupied offices in New York, California, and Washington to demand that the company cancel Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract with Israel. The cloud-computing project is shared by Amazon. Google employees started an internal “No Tech for Apartheid” group with over 200 members, which has been active since October, to protest the venture — employees also staged a “die-in” outside of a Google building in San Francisco in December.
Tuesday’s California sit-in lasted hours and was held in the office of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian. Protesters wore T-shirts that read “Googler against Genocide” and plastered a poster outside of Kurian’s office that said “Drop Nimbus.” A man confronted the protesters, notified them that they had been placed on administrative leave, then asked them to leave voluntarily before calling law enforcement. Police then detained the demonstrators and charged them with criminal trespassing, according to a local Fox affiliate.
“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,” Google spokeswoman Bailey Tomson said. “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.”
An employee with a history of anti-Israel sentiment in the workplace participated in Tuesday’s protest and accused Google of creating a culture of “fear and retaliation against workers, in general.”
“Rather than, you know, consider the demands that we’ve been raising for years now, and listening to workers, and considering the things we’ve been raising, Thomas Kurian and Google execs basically chose to arrest workers for speaking out against the use of our technology to power the first AI-powered genocide,” Google software engineer Mohammad Khatami said. “We were willing to get arrested for that because at this point, we aren’t willing to be lied to by our higher-ups anymore, we aren’t willing to be disrespected by our higher-ups anymore, and we wanted to take that to the offices and make sure it was understood by them.”
“We want workers to feel like we have the power to choose where our technology is going and who we’re contributing to,” he added.
Khatami internally circulated an anonymous open letter to Google staffers on October 18, mere days after Hamas attacked Israel, saying that “Project Nimbus was implicated in human rights abuses against Palestinians,” the Intercept reported. Google’s Human Resources office called him in for a meeting, Khatami said, and asked him if his words could be perceived as justifying Hamas’s October 7 attack, which killed 1,300.
“The idea that I even have to qualify my humanity to say that I don’t condone the killing of innocent people points to some sort of racism,” he told the Guardian. “But even then, I’ve gone out of my way to make it clear that no violence against innocent people is acceptable. We were just explaining, ‘Hey, Google’s complicit in this occupation, and if we want the violence to end, we have to go to the root cause of it.'”
Protestors “received no response from [the Cloud] CEO,” one sit-in participant Ray Westrick said, and it was “really telling that [Google] would rather let us sit there for over 10 hours and arrest us for peacefully sitting in his office than have leadership engage in our demands in any way at all.”
Although working at Google is an “honor,” Westrick said, she can’t “in good conscience not do anything while Google is a part of this contract, while Google is selling technology to the Israeli military, or any military.”
Google and Amazon employees authored an anonymous Guardian article in 2021 to protest the Nimbus contract. In it, they said that Google and Amazon’s pursuits of “contracts with institutions like the US Department of Defense, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), and state and local police departments,” are “part of a disturbing pattern of militarization, lack of transparency and avoidance of oversight.”