Amazon, Google workers call for termination of Israeli military contracts

A coalition of Amazon and Google workers released an open letter Tuesday calling on their respective employers to pull out of a contract with the Israeli government. 

More than 300 Amazon and nearly 100 Google employees have anonymously signed the letter published in The Guardian demanding the termination of Project Nimbus.

Both companies are providing cloud services to the Israeli military and government under the $1.2 billion contract signed earlier this year. 

“This contract was signed the same week that the Israeli military attacked Palestinians in the Gaza Strip – killing nearly 250 people, including more than 60 children,” the workers wrote. 

“The technology our companies have contracted to build will make the systematic discrimination and displacement carried out by the Israeli military and government even crueler and deadlier for Palestinians,” they added. 

The cloud services will help Israel illegally collect data on Palestinians, the workers argue, that will be used to further policies that Human Rights Watch says constitute crimes of apartheid. 

A spokesperson for Amazon’s cloud unit, Amazon Web Services, declined to comment on the existence or content of the letter.

“AWS is focused on making the benefits of our world-leading cloud technology available to all our customers, wherever they are located,” the spokesperson told The Hill.

The Hill has reached out to Google for comment.

Both companies have previously been hotbeds for worker organizing against controversial contracts.

Google ultimately terminated its contract to track individuals in drone footage for the Department of Defense, dubbed Project Maven, after internal opposition in 2018. 

Workers at Amazon have called for the company to stop selling its Rekognition facial recognition software to law enforcement.

Despite internal opposition to working with police, military and immigration enforcement agencies, the country’s biggest tech companies have kept silently signing contracts by working through third parties.

Updated at 2:32 p.m.