College graduates join workers opposing Google, Amazon's "Israel" deal
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College graduates have joined Workers Against Nimbus in their resistance against Google and Amazon's contracts with the Israeli military.
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A man holding the Palestinian flag, New York, United States. (Nataliia Pugach)
While Google and Amazon employees have been fighting against their companies' contracts with the Israeli military, college graduates have also joined the defiance.
In May 2021, in the middle of "Israel's" assault on Gaza, Amazon and Google signed a $1.22 billion contract to provide cloud technology to "Israel's" public sector and its military - the project is known as 'Project Nimbus.'
Google and Amazon workers have formed a coalition resisting Project Nimbus, and look to strategize against the implementation of the technology.
The two tech giants have not - at least publicly - addressed the campaigns being held against them, namely Workers Against Nimbus and #NoTechForApartheid. However, the campaigns have, even to a meager extent, affected the company's employment.
“The students who are graduating from university and who have applied to Amazon and Google are turning down all of these interview requests,” an anonymous Amazon employee told MintPress News. “They’re specifically telling Amazon and Google, ‘We’re not going to these interviews because of Project Nimbus.’’
“By doing business with Israeli apartheid, Amazon and Google will make it easier for the Israeli government to surveil Palestinians and force them off their land,” a website for the #NoTechForApartheid campaign says.
Project Nimbus would provide cloud services to "Israel" that will aid in the illegal collection of data on Palestinians, which might be used to enhance practices described by rights organizations, such as Human Rights Watch, as crimes of apartheid.
The contract, furthermore, also prohibits Amazon and Google from denying services to a number of governmental entities, barring tech firms from boycotting "Israel" or stopping technologies from being exploited to inflict human rights abuses.
“[W]e had to face the fact that those of us Palestinian tech workers with family and loved ones in Gaza or the West Bank, those of us living in diaspora, would now be enabling violence and oppression against our own communities – all while professing the importance of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,” wrote Workers Against Project Nimbus in a July 26 newsletter.
Google and Amazon did not respond to MintPress News' requests for comment on Project Nimbus or the campaign running against it.
