Smoke billows after an Israeli strike on Al-Nassr Street in Gaza City on September 12. Photo / Omar Al-Qattaa, AFP
After months of mounting frustration over the war in Gaza and his employer’s dealings in Israel, Amazon software engineer Ahmed Shahrour said he reached a breaking point last week.
He posted a letter last Tuesday NZT in dozens of internal Amazon messaging channels demanding his employer terminate its contracts with the Israeli Government, according to screenshots seen by the Washington Post.
“I want to pressure Amazon to cut ties with Israel completely,” Shahrour, who said he is Palestinian, told the Post.
Within hours of posting his messages in internal Slack groups, Amazon deactivated his accounts and suspended him with pay, he said.
Amazon declined to confirm Shahrour’s account, but spokesperson Brad Glasser said: “We don’t tolerate discrimination, harassment, or threatening behaviour 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”.
The incident involving Shahrour is the latest to become public in a long-running conflict between Silicon Valley tech giants, including Microsoft and Google, and small groups of employees protesting against corporate ties to Israel’s Government and military.
A minority of the firms’ employees, like Shahrour, have said their employers’ contracts with Israel leave them feeling complicit in that country’s policies towards Palestinians and the war in Gaza.
In response, the companies have continued to service their contracts while also moving to quash internal dissent, firing protesting employees and summoning police to arrest workers.
Google employs 183,000 people and Microsoft 228,000 globally, according to financial filings.
Amazon’s total workforce is more than 1.5 million people across its offices and vast logistics network.
The Anti-Defamation League, which campaigns against anti-Semitism, said in an email statement about Shahrour’s suspension that: “This clear action helps protect all employees, customers, and shareholders, and sends a strong message to all that such behaviour is unacceptable”.
Microsoft has said it provides software, cloud and artificial intelligence services to Israel’s Ministry of Defence.
Google and Amazon share a cloud computing project called Nimbus that serves departments across Israel’s Government. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post.)
The Post reported early this year that Google staff rushed to provide more AI tools to Israel’s military in the weeks after Hamas’ attack on October 7, 2023, that triggered the Israel-Gaza war.
Google employees learned this month that Israel’s Government in June posted a document listing US$45 million ($75.6m) in advertising spending with the company, a document first reported by Drop Site News.
A spokesperson for Google noted that, although the Israeli Government does advertise on its YouTube service, the document “is not an agreement between the Israeli Government and Google”.
A group called No Tech for Apartheid that includes current and former Google and Amazon workers said in a news statement that its members “reject our company’s complicity in genocide” and called for it to “end all business with the Israeli Government, new and old”.
More than 50 Google employees were fired last year after participating in a protest organised by the group at company offices.
At a company meeting at Microsoft on Friday, its president Brad Smith addressed incidents last month in which protesters were arrested at its headquarters, including some employees who want the company to drop its cloud computing contract with Israel. Some were later fired.
At the meeting, Smith, whose office was occupied by the protesters, acknowledged concerns that Israel’s Government may have misused Microsoft’s tools for surveillance of Palestinians. Microsoft provided a copy of his remarks to the Post.
He said company leaders learned “information that we did not have before” when the Guardian reported in August that Microsoft’s Azure cloud service was used by the Israel Defence Forces to store covertly recorded cellphone calls of Palestinians.
“We do not allow our services to be used for … the mass surveillance of civilian populations,” Smith said.
“We will get to the bottom of this,” he added, citing the company’s hiring of a law firm to investigate, which was first announced last month.
Smith also said Microsoft will strengthen its reporting process for human rights concerns and encouraged workers to raise them through official channels.
But he said it was “common sense” for workers who occupied offices to be fired. “I know that people who work here get it and support that,” he said.
Employee activists had been calling on tech companies to cut ties with the United States military and Israel for years before the war in Gaza began over concerns about potential militarisation of their work.
A group of Google employees condemned the Nimbus contract with Israel’s Government when it first became public in 2021.
Soon after, the No Tech for Apartheid group, combining current and former employees of Amazon and Google with outside activists, started organising protests and circulating petitions demanding the companies drop Nimbus.
Protest activity at Amazon and Google jumped after Israel in October 2023 began its war on Gaza in response to Hamas militants killing about 1200 people and taking about 250 hostages in the October 7 attacks.
More than 60,000 Palestinians have been killed since Israeli forces responded by assaulting Gaza, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, whose numbers do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
In April 2024, nine Google employees were arrested at a No Tech for Apartheid sit-in at a company office in New York, one of the protests which resulted in the raft of dismissals. A lawsuit brought by some of the fired workers alleging the company unlawfully retaliated against them is ongoing.
Google spokesperson Courtenay Mencini said the company has been “very clear” about its rules for acceptable use of its technology that govern the Nimbus contract.
Regarding the protest that led to arrests, Mencini said the employees involved were “making other employees feel threatened and unsafe”.
“By any standard, their behaviour was completely unacceptable,” she said in a statement. “We stand by our decision to terminate the employment of these individuals.”
At one of the August protests at Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington, 20 people were arrested, Smith said at the Friday company meeting.
The protest group recently shared footage of those arrests that shows police officers dragging protesters and tents. It said in a public letter to Smith and Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella that more protests will follow and called on them to admit to “abetting genocide and starvation”.
The week after that incident, Smith said at the meeting, seven protesters barricaded themselves inside his office and started an internet live stream. NPR reported that the stream captured police moving in to arrest the group, two of whom were Microsoft employees.
Pushback on Amazon’s ties to Israel from employees has been more muted than at Google and Microsoft, in part because of tensions between the Arab employee resource group and pro-Israel staff members.
Earlier this summer, the Arab group’s Slack channel temporarily disappeared after a co-worker based in Israel intentionally hid it, two Amazon workers said.
Shahrour said the incident contributed to his decision to post his letter internally, prompting a mixture of support and criticism in messages from other employees before his account was deactivated.
Later, while handing out flyers on the footpath outside Amazon’s headquarters in Seattle, Shahrour said some employees approached him to debate his views.
A large event planned by Amazon staff this year to show support for Palestinians was cancelled at the last minute, according to an employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect his job.
The employee received a written warning from Amazon management after sharing a CNN article on Slack that described doctors who had volunteered in Gaza and called for a ceasefire. The warning is on the employee’s permanent record, the employee said he was told by human resources.
The employee said that since then he has been “more careful with my wording,” while other workers have “been more quiet and shyer” about posting at all.
Shahrour, who remains suspended from Amazon, said the ability of Arab employees to discuss the ongoing war in Gaza at work has increasingly been restricted, pushing him to think more about the conflict.
“If you put anything about Palestine, it will get reported and you will be under investigation,” he said.
He said he was among those arrested on Microsoft’s campus in August.
Shahrour hopes his actions this week will inspire his co-workers to follow the lead of the Microsoft group and create “a local resistance within Amazon”, he said.
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