Just over a dozen people gathered outside Google’s offices in New York and Sunnyvale on Tuesday. Among those in New York was Google cloud software engineer Eddie Hatfield, who was fired days after disrupting Google Israel’s managing director at March’s Mind The Tech, a company-sponsored conference focused on the Israeli tech industry, in early March. Several hours into the sit-ins on Tuesday, Google security began to accuse the workers of “trespassing” and disrupting work, prompting several people to leave while others vowed to remain until they were forced out. The 2021 contract, known as Project Nimbus, involves Google and Amazon jointly providing cloud computing infrastructure and services across branches of the Israeli government. Last week, Time reported that Google’s work on Project Nimbus involves providing direct services to the Israel Defense Forces. […]
On March 4, more than600 other Googlers signed a petition opposing the company’s sponsorship of the conference. After Hatfield was fired three days later, Google trust-and-safety-policy employee Vidana Abdel Khalek resigned from her position in opposition to Project Nimbus. Then, in late March, more than 300 Apple workers signed an open letter that alleged retaliation against workers who have expressed support for Palestinians, and urged company leadership to show public support for Palestinians. Hasan Ibraheem, a Google software engineer, is participating in the sit-in at his local Google office in New York. “This has really been a culmination of our efforts,” he tells WIRED. Since joining No Tech for Apartheid in December, Ibraheem says, he has been participating in weekly “tabling” actions being held at Google office cafes in New York, Sunnyvale, San Francisco, and Mountain View, California. It involves holding a sign that says “Ask me about Project Nimbus” during lunch break, passing out flyers, and answering questions from coworkers. “It’s actually shocking how many people at Google don’t even know that this contract exists,” Ibraheem says. “A lot of people who don’t know about it, who then learn about it through us, are reasonably upset that this contract exists. They just didn’t know that it existed beforehand.”