An open letter from anonymous Google and Amazon employees “of conscience from diverse backgrounds” published on Tuesday in The Guardian called on the company to pull out of Project Nimbus and to cut all ties with the Israeli military. Project Nimbus is a contract under which the company is working with Israel’s government, national defense system and economic bodies to provide cloud services to the Israeli government, including the military, providing both storage and computational resources.
“We believe that the technology we build should work to serve and uplift people everywhere, including all of our users. As workers who keep these companies running, we are morally obligated to speak out against violations of these core values,” the letter said. The employees said they are remaining anonymous because they fear retaliation.
The $1.2 billion contract was signed in May.
“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 also said, adding: “We cannot look the other way, as the products we build are used to deny Palestinians their basic rights, force Palestinians out of their homes and attack Palestinians in the Gaza Strip – actions that have prompted war crime investigations by the international criminal court.”
According to the letter, more than 90 workers at Google and more than 300 at Amazon have signed on to the statement. Two employees, Gabriel Schubiner, a software engineer and researcher at Google, and Bathool Syed, a content strategist at Amazon, early Wednesday morning published an opinion article on the NBC News website also pressing for withdrawal from the project.