It has been in the news for more than many times, Israel and Palestine is in conflict.
As a matter of fact, the conflict between the two is one of the world's most enduring conflict that can be traced back to centuries ago. Many tried to help resolve the conflict, but generations after generations, the two are still in war with each other, sending barrages of rockets to each other.
The world knows this, and so does Google.
But for the tech company, it's business. It doesn't care much about the politics, but as long as it can make money, there is where it's at.
And this time, the company was found making a secretive deal with Israel.
The deal was revealed by Ariel Koren, a product marketing manager for Google for Education who worked for the Alphabet company for seven years.
I am leaving @Google this week due to retaliation & hostility against workers who speak out. Google moved my role overseas immediately after I opposed its $1B AI/surveillance contracts with Israel. And this is far from an isolated instance.https://t.co/V4y05kOYQv pic.twitter.com/eRMrzTPYfb
— Ariel Koren (@ariel_koko) August 30, 2022
Koren who is Jewish, said that she intends to resign as a "retaliation" to what she described as "illegal actions by the company."
Koren protested against a $1.2 billion cloud deal, which Google signed with Amazon, and with the Israeli government and military.
In a post on the blogging site Medium, Koren said she and her colleagues had published a formal internal petition calling for Google to be transparent about Project Nimbus and, ultimately, to rescind the contract.
Civil society and human rights organizations have also joined them and launched a public petition calling on both Google and Amazon to end the contract.
Koren and many of her colleagues fear that Nimbus can be used by Israeli officials to commit human rights abuses against Palestinians and others, through the use of facial recognition and other machine-learning surveillance and profiling tools.
The petition received hundreds of signatures from Googlers and tens of thousands of people have signed the public petition.
Koren, a member of the Alphabet Workers Union, Communications Workers of America, and also the founder of Respond Crisis Translation, is indeed an activist.
She spoke nine languages, and was an interpreter who once helped asylum seekers fighting their cases in the U.S.-Mexico border in 2018.
To get Google to reconsider its alignment with Israel, Koren also lobbied executives.
Knowing that Koren has the power to gather the masses, in response, Google started considering her an 'opponent' to the contract, and because of that, according to Koren, the company began creating a "hostile environment" around her, and around her colleagues who voiced their concerns about the deal.
According to Koren,after voicing her opposition to the military contract, her superiors told her that her position was being relocated to São Paulo, and she could either move to Brazil from California, or lose her job.
This was kind of weird, since Googlers in Brazil were still working at home due to COVID-19.
So why should she move there?
"I have consistently witnessed that instead of supporting diverse employees looking to make Google a more ethical company, Google systematically silences Palestinian, Jewish, Arab, and Muslim voices concerned about Google’s complicity in violations of Palestinian human rights — to the point of formally retaliating against workers and creating an environment of fear. In my experience, silencing dialogue and dissent in this way has helped Google protect its business interests with the Israeli military and government."
"Google is weaponising its DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) and ERG (employee resource group) systems to justify the behaviour, so it is no coincidence that retaliation has disproportionately impacted women, queer, and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, (and) People of Colour) employees."
In response to the issue, Shannon Newberry, a Google spokeswoman, said that:
As a company with such huge reach and influence, and because employs a huge diversity of workers, protests from Google employees against their employers are not uncommon.
Back in 2018, employees of the company were quitting their jobs because of the company's involvement in Project Maven, a U.S. Defense Department program that uses AI to interpret video images and assist in targeting enemies in drone strikes.
Responding to the issue, Google said that it would not renew its deal with the Pentagon on this project. However, the company gave no assurance that it would not get involved in similar projects in the future.
Read: Google Project Maven In Helping Pentagon Create AI For Drones
