Google has fired an employee who publicly protested the company’s work for the Israeli military. During a speech by a Google executive in Israel on Monday, the former Google Cloud engineer stood up and shouted: “I refuse to develop technology that supports genocide or surveillance.”
Google confirmed the firings in an email to CNBC, which was first reported by CNBC edge. “Earlier this week, an employee disrupted an official company-sponsored event by disrupting a colleague who was giving a presentation,” Google spokesperson Bailey Tomson said in an emailed statement. Regardless, this behavior is bad and the employee was terminated for violating our policies.”
The incident occurred at Mind the Tech, Israel’s annual technology conference in New York, where Google Israel managing director Barak Regev was giving a speech. The engineer was protesting Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion Israeli government contract to access cloud services from Google and Amazon. “Project Nimbus puts Palestinian community members at risk,” the employee said. “There’s no cloud apartheid.” Shortly after, the employee was escorted out of the demo room.
When the contract was signed in 2021, Google faced resistance over its participation in the Nimbus project. Hundreds of Google and Amazon employees published an open letter speaking out against the deal, saying the technologies “allow for further surveillance and illegal data collection on Palestinians.” ”
No Tech For Apartheid, a group that opposes the Nimbus project, released a statement on Friday about the engineer’s dismissal. “Google’s goal is clear: The company seeks to silence employees in order to cover up their ethical shortcomings,” the group said. “As a cloud software engineer responsible for critical technology that enables Project Nimbus to run on Israeli sovereign data centers, this worker had deep personal concerns about the direct, violent impact of his labor.”