Over 500 Google employees expressed solidarity with a colleague who was reportedly pushed out of her job for her views on the company’s Israel military contract, The Los Angeles Times reported on Tuesday.
Ariel Koren, a product marketing manager at Google for Education, voiced “criticism of Project Nimbus, a 1.2-billion (US dollar) contract Google and Amazon Web Services entered into with the Israeli military and government,” according to the LA Times.
BREAKING—@Google is punishing a worker who spoke out against Google's contract w Israeli apartheid gov that inflicts violence on Palestinians
500+ Googlers defended her & their right to protest tech contracts that power state violence #NoTechForApartheidhttps://t.co/DIgA7WKPyv pic.twitter.com/4m2G1BmgwO
— MPower Change #NoTechForApartheid (@MPower_Change) March 15, 2022
The American newspaper also reported that Google’s employee felt “she has faced added scrutiny since last spring.”
“In May she called on Google to express solidarity with Palestinians in the wake of an assault on Gaza by Israel that killed more than 250 people,” the newspaper reported.
“In October, she led efforts to draft a letter among Google and Amazon workers that criticized Project Nimbus, a multi-year plan to open data centers in Israel and provide infrastructure for a full suite of cloud services to the government and military”.
Last November, Koren was reportedly logged into a video conference call where her boss urged her to move to Brazil if she didn’t want to lose her position.
Now, her co-workers have signed a petition accusing Google of “unjustly retaliating” against Koren.
“Sadly, Ariel’s case is consistent with Google’s dangerous track record of worker retaliation that has made mainstream headlines in the past few years,” the petition reads.
As @latimes reports, Google's retaliation against Ariel began when she criticized @Google and @Amazon's Project Nimbus contract and called on both companies to stop providing services to the Israeli government and military.
Here's her powerful MSNBC interview with @AymanM: pic.twitter.com/mhjgJmSnR4
— Jewish Voice for Peace (@jvplive) March 15, 2022
This is not the first time Google workers speak out against their company’s decision to supply the Israeli army and government technology aimed at harming Palestinians.
In a column published in the UK-based Guardian newspaper last October, nearly 100 Google employees, along with more than 300 Amazon workers, said they felt “morally obligated” to speak out against contracts with Israel, known as Project Nimbus.
(The Palestine Chronicle)
