Hundreds gather at Google’s San Francisco office to protest $1.2 billion contract with Israel

More than 400 protesters gathered at Google’s San Francisco office on Thursday to demand the tech company cut ties with Israel’s government.

Occupying a block of Market Street, attendees chanted, held up Palestinian flags, waved signs and listened to speeches by Google workers. Activists from the Palestinian Youth Movement and Jewish Voice for Peace also spoke, advocating for an Israel-Hamas cease-fire and an end to what they called Israel’s “apartheid regime.” 

The focus of the protest was Google and Amazon’s Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract with Israel, launched in 2021, that provides the country with local data centers and cloud computing services. At various points in the two-hour event, speakers led the crowd in chants accusing Google of complicity in a genocide.

When Rami Abdelkarim, an organizer with the Palestinian Youth Movement, addressed the crowd, he followed his demand that Google “End Project Nimbus” with a plea for a cease-fire and right of return for Palestinian refugees. After his speech, he told SFGATE that he thinks it’s “shameful” workers have to “take to the streets” to push their own company not to work with the Israeli government.

“People think of Google as a search engine, or a Bay Area tech hub,” Abdelkarim said. “But they’re war profiteers.”

Multiple speakers mentioned an article from The Intercept, which reported that Nimbus delivered Israel the technology for “facial detection, automated image categorization, object tracking, and even sentiment analysis.” Others referred to an NPR investigation reporting that Israel says it is using artificial intelligence to identify targets in Gaza, though the news outlet did not link the practice to Google’s technology.

A few speakers also mentioned the death of Mai Ubeid, who interned in a Google accelerator program in 2020 and was recently killed by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza, the Guardian reported. Since Hamas’ attack killed about 1,200 Israelis on Oct. 7, Israel’s siege and airstrikes have left more than 18,000 Palestinians dead, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health. The United Nations estimates that 85% of the Gaza Strip’s population has been displaced.

For most of Thursday’s protest, two dozen people lay wrapped in sheets — reading “Genocide” in Google’s signature rainbow lettering — in a “die-in” performance. At the end, they stood to raise up white kites, as a speaker read Refaat Alareer’s “If I must die,” written just over a month before the Palestinian poet was killed by an Israeli airstrike.

The protest was interrupted twice: A passerby yelled an obscenity, and a counterprotester made their way to the middle of the crowd, yelling that the protest was a “hate rally,” before being escorted out.

The ongoing conflict in Gaza has provoked broader interest in Project Nimbus and the Palestinian cause; the Los Angeles Times reported that an October protest against the contract, also in San Francisco, brought about 30 protesters. 

Google did not respond to SFGATE’s specific questions about Thursday’s protest or the state of Project Nimbus’ data centers, but spokesperson Anna Kowalczyk delivered a written statement.

“We have been very clear that the Nimbus contract is for workloads running on our commercial platform by Israeli government ministries such as finance, healthcare, transportation, and education,” she said. “Our work is not directed at highly sensitive or classified military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services.”

In 2022, a Google spokesperson told Wired that Israel’s military would have access to the technology, and The Times of Israel reported in 2021 that when Google and Amazon signed on to provide Israel with cloud services, the contracts barred the companies from blocking access to specific government entities. Israel’s Finance Ministry said Project Nimbus would serve the country’s “defense establishment,” Haertz reported in 2021.

The reported scope of the contract is part of what rankles Google workers like Valerie Kuan, who helped organize the protest and spoke with SFGATE via email on Wednesday and at the event.

“We wish for Google to stop aiding Israel’s military in any form, especially advanced AI capabilities, as long as they are consistently violating the human rights of Palestinians and their Arab neighbors,” the software engineer wrote. “This contract denies Google the right to withhold any provisioned services to the military, and thus, the entire contract with Israel must be stopped.”

Kuan also contested a point from Kowalczyk, who said in Google’s statement that the protest was organized by “organizations and people who largely don’t work at Google.”

“Google and Amazon workers are and have always been the main organizers fighting against Project Nimbus,” Kuan wrote.

“While we have been able to capture much of our community to rally around the No Tech for Apartheid campaign, it is our responsibility as employees to lead the efforts,” she added.

Hear of anything happening at Google or another tech company? Contact tech reporter Stephen Council securely at [email protected] or on Signal at 628-204-5452.