Google Terminates 28 Employees over Protests Against Israel Contract

Google has fired 28 employees for their involvement in sit-in protests at the company’s offices in New York and Sunnyvale, California, against Google’s $1.2 billion contract with the Israeli government and military.

The New York Post reports that Google has terminated 28 employees for their participation in sit-in protests at the company’s offices in New York and Sunnyvale, California. The protests, organized by the group “No Tech For Apartheid,” were aimed at Google’s $1.2 billion “Project Nimbus” contract, in which Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services provide cloud-computing and artificial intelligence services to the Israeli government and military.

The demonstrations took place on Tuesday, with protesters occupying the 10th floor of Google’s Chelsea office in Manhattan and the personal office of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian in Sunnyvale. Some protesters wore traditional Arab headscarves and wrote a list of their demands on Kurian’s whiteboard. Breitbart News previously reported that several Google employees were arrested when they refused to leave the offices they occupied.

In a companywide memo obtained by the Post, Google’s vice president of global security, Chris Rackow, described the protesters’ behavior as “unacceptable, extremely disruptive, and made co-workers feel threatened.” He stated that the employees “took over office spaces, defaced our property, and physically impeded the work of other Googlers.”

Critics at the company have expressed concerns that the technology provided through “Project Nimbus” could be weaponized against Palestinians in Gaza. The fired staffers, in a statement shared by No Tech For Apartheid spokesperson Jane Chung, accused Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian of being “genocide profiteers,” claiming that “their tech has enabled 100,000 Palestinians killed, reported missing, or wounded in the last six months of Israel’s genocide.”

Local law enforcement confirmed that four arrests were made in New York for trespassing, while five protesters were arrested and released in Sunnyvale for criminal trespassing. It remains unclear if all nine arrested employees were among those fired.

A Google spokesperson confirmed the firings, stating that the protests were part of a “longstanding campaign by a group of organizations and people who largely don’t work at Google.” The spokesperson emphasized that “physically impeding other employees’ work and preventing them from accessing our facilities is a clear violation of our policies, and completely unacceptable behavior.”