Amazon suspends employee who protested contract with Israel
Published in Business News
A Seattle-based Amazon employee says he was suspended last week after urging workers to join him in protesting the company's relationship with the Israeli government.
Ahmed Shahrour, a software engineer, sent emails to executives and posted in company messaging channels last Monday stating that he and other workers refused to remain complicit in genocide."
They were protesting a cloud-computing project that Amazon and Google have with the Israeli government. Through the $1.2 billion contract, called Project Nimbus, the tech giants provide cloud infrastructure and artificial intelligence technology to the government.
Reached for comment Friday, Amazon implied Shahrour's messages may have violated workplace policies.
“We don’t tolerate discrimination, harassment, or threatening behavior or language of any kind in our workplace, and when any conduct of that nature is reported, we investigate it and take appropriate action based on our findings,” Amazon spokesperson Brad Glasser said in an emailed statement.
Amazon has not discussed the details of the contract, while Google has said it doesn't provide any services for Israel's military.
Speaking to CNBC, Shahrour said he was suspended after sending messages on Slack and that his access to email and other tools at work were revoked.
In a letter shared online, Shahrour accused Amazon of complicity in the Israel-Hamas war, which was launched after Hamas' Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel and has resulted in over 64,000 Palestinian deaths in Gaza, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
Shahrour, who is Palestinian, wrote that he'd seen a double standard at Amazon, with some posts about Gaza being censored or deleted while racist messages and jokes about Palestinians proliferated on Slack.
CNBC reported that Shahrour was told by an Amazon human resources representative that his post last Monday in multiple Slack channels may have violated multiple policies.
At the end of his letter, Shahrour called on workers to start "a new, worker-led Palestinian resistance" at Amazon called the Amazon Worker Intifada. Intifada, an Arabic word usually translated to "uprising" or "rebellion," is used to describe periods of Palestinian conflict with Israel that have seen mass violence as well as nonviolent protest, civil disobedience and political reorganization.
Tech workers have clashed with company leaders over Project Nimbus before. Google employees staged sit-ins at the company's offices in New York and Sunnyvale, Calif., last year, protesting the contract. Dozens of employees were fired.
Tech giants like Amazon, Google and Microsoft, and their contracts with the Israeli government, are the crux of a spreading movement among employees.
The companies are the three biggest cloud-computing providers in the world and hold contracts with many countries. But workers within the pro-Palestinian movements like No Azure for Apartheid at Microsoft and No Tech for Apartheid, made up of Google and Amazon workers, are demanding their employers cut all ties with the Israeli government.
After months of protests and disruptions, tensions at Microsoft spiked in August.
On Aug. 26, protesters breached the office of Microsoft President Brad Smith and staged a sit-in. No Azure for Apartheid, a group specifically protesting Microsoft's cloud contracts with Israel, said four workers were fired afterward.
That incident followed on-campus protests in Redmond the week prior, during which the organization set up encampment-style protests on two separate days.
On Aug. 20, the second day of protests, some activists refused to leave and 20 were arrested, according to the Redmond Police Department. Of those arrested, three were former employees fired for similar conduct and one was a current employee, a Microsoft spokesperson said.
No Azure for Apartheid said that employee has since been fired.
Before the on-campus protests, activists disrupted some of Microsoft's marquee events, including a 50th anniversary celebration featuring a panel that included founder Bill Gates, former CEO Steve Ballmer and current CEO Satya Nadella.
Microsoft said on Aug. 19 that it's conducting an independent review of the use of its cloud-computing technology by the Israel Defense Forces, following reports from The Guardian newspaper that said a unit within the Israeli military was using Microsoft cloud servers to store surveillance data.
Microsoft said any such use would violate terms of service.
"Microsoft is not a government; it’s not a country. It’s a company," Smith told reporters on Aug. 26, following the protest in his office. "We will do what we can and what we should — and that starts with ensuring that our human rights principles and contractual terms of service are upheld everywhere by all of our customers around the world.
That review is ongoing. It's an update to a previous review by Microsoft in May, when the company said it found no evidence its cloud services were used to target people in Gaza.
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