West News Wire: On Tuesday, August 29, protests against Google’s agreement with the Israeli government to supply cloud services to the nation’s public sector and military were conducted outside the Google Cloud Next conference in San Francisco, California. The demonstrators are a part of the “No Tech for Apartheid” campaign, an alliance of present and former Google employees as well as local residents and other activists.
The number of Google employees who joined the demonstration, which was attended by about 1000 individuals, was unknown, according to a report by the news agency Reuters.
“We have more reasons than ever to recommit ourselves to organizing to ensure that tech companies like Google, based right here in the Bay and in the United States, cannot continue profiting off of and powering Israeli apartheid,” Dani Noble, an organiser with Jewish Voice for Peace, said on Tuesday.
Since they don’t want their labour to support Israeli apartheid and violations of Palestinian human rights, these employees have been organising over the past two years, according to Noble.
According to the Israeli finance ministry, Project Nimbus, which was signed in May 2021, is a multi-year project that aims to offer a comprehensive solution for the delivery of cloud services to the government, the defence system, and other groups in the business.
The project is divided into four phases: acquiring and building cloud infrastructure, creating government policies for cloud migration, integrating and migrating, and managing and optimising cloud activity.
Additionally involved in the initiative is Amazon Web Services.
Protesters have said the cloud technology was being used against Palestinians, including for surveillance, and racial segregation.
“As long as people are aware of this contract, there is nothing more powerful than people power. So what I would urge to people who aren’t the decision makers in Google and people who don’t make those top line decisions of keeping or dropping project numbers is that they should talk to their colleagues about it,” Rami Abdelkarim, a Bay Area organiser, said during Tuesday’s protest.
