STATEMENT—From @Google workers with the No Tech For Apartheid campaign on Google’s sponsorship of this week’s “IT for IDF” conference in “Israel” this week.
Google’s likely participation in “IT for IDF,” an arms trade conference happening this week in “Tel Aviv,” cements its continued complicity in facilitating the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and is heinous & shameful.
For years, Google has lied to the media, the public, & its workers. Google executives have claimed that Project Nimbus, its joint $1.2 billion cloud contract with Amazon for the Israeli military and government, was “not intended for military workloads” and “focused on civilian contracts.” Despite Israeli & U.S. media proving otherwise, Google has insisted that Project Nimbus did not do business with the Israeli military, which is waging genocide in Gaza.
Google’s sponsorship of “IT for IDF” is yet another example of its deceitful complicity. Google has participated in and sponsored this conference in the past, and continues to cement its ties to Israeli apartheid.
As of July 9, 2024, Google Cloud’s logo no longer appears as a sponsor on the “IT for IDF” website. We note that the logo was present as late as July 8, 2024, which we share below. We have reasons to believe that the abrupt removal of the logo is in part a response to the alarm that Google workers of conscience raised internally. The pitiful act of hiding the logo suggests that the company is well aware of its complicity in genocide and apartheid and is more obsessed with its image than actually removing material support for Zionist state’s decimation of entire family lines of Palestinians in Gaza. If the association with the IOF is compromising enough to hide, we challenge Google to do the right thing and drop Nimbus immediately.
Workers did not join Google to work for a military contractor. Google has no business sponsoring a military conference—let alone one led by the Israeli Occupation Forces that is waging an active genocide that has taken the lives of over 186,000 Palestinians. Google must drop Nimbus and halt all business with Israel. We will not stop organizing until our demands are met & Palestine is free.
