Ariel Koren, the former director of marketing for Google’s educational products department, protested with a number of her colleagues in front of the company’s headquarters in San Francisco, USA, in protest against company’s management’s decision to sign a contract with the Israeli occupation government.
The contract signed with the Israeli occupation, worth 1.2 billion dollar, provides for transferring the database of the occupation army and police to the so-called “cloud technology”, including the use of applications that allow facial recognition.
During the stand, more than 100 Google employees denounced the company’s signing of a contract with the occupation government as part of a project called “Nimbus” for a period of seven years, which entered into force in mid-2021, while it is noteworthy that cloud technology; It allows for more monitoring and illegal data collection on Palestinians, and it facilitates the expansion of illegal Israeli settlements on Palestinian land.
Ariel’s participation in the stand in came as part of the “No Technology Apartheid” activities organized by technicians and programmers against Google and Amazon.
“More than 750 of my colleagues have signed a petition to rescind her retaliatory practices, and join us in calling on Google to do the right thing and terminate its Nimbus project,” Ariel said in her speech.
“Google’s message to its employees was to remain silent, but the employees’ response is clear, that we will fight back against revenge, we will support each other,” she added.
Ariel condemned “Google’s stifling of the voices of its employees,” noting the company’s discrimination against Palestinian employees and those loyal to the Palestinian cause, which it highlighted after announcing its resignation from the company on August 30, 2022.
According to Ariel, it is clear that the intention is to create a frightening influence among Google employees who reject the Nimbus project.
Other speakers at the protest denounced Google and Amazon’s contract with a “colonial country that violates international law,” according to them, and the two companies’ insistence on completing the Nimbus project, which provides advanced technology to harm the Palestinians.
Ariel Koren’s resignation came against the backdrop of her transfer, as she denounced a huge contract that Google entered into with the Israeli occupation government last year, worth one billion dollars within the Nimbus project.
For its part, the Google employees’ union announced in a statement distributed during the protest, that other protest will be carried out on September 8 and 9 in front of the company’s headquarters in New York, Seattle and the Bay of San Francisco.
