Google manager resigns after criticising deal with Israel 

A manager with Google in the US has resigned due to what she described as retaliation, a hostile environment and illegal measures by the company following her support for a letter from Google and Amazon employees protesting against the companies’ $1.2 billion collaboration with the Israeli military on a programme called Project Nimbus. The project facilitates surveillance of Palestinians and helps to expand Israeli settlements, all of which are illegal under international law.

The marketing manager for Google’s educations products, Ariel Koren, said that she was forced to leave her job at the major search engine because of the company’s hostile behaviour against her after she rejected the signing of a contract with the occupation government for $1 billion. Koren, 28, explained that her line manager gave her an ultimatum to either move to Brazil or lose her job. She tweeted that she was employed by Google for over seven years.

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“Instead of listening to employees who want Google to live up to its ethical principles, Google is aggressively pursuing military contracts and stripping away the voices of its employees through a pattern of silencing and retaliation towards me and many others,” tweeted Koren. She called on Amazon and Google employees to read about the Nimbus project, and urged employees at both companies to stand against it.

Google is weaponizing false narratives of antisemitism to justify this. They refused to investigate a threat sent to my & my anti-Zionist Jewish coworker's desks. Yet they issue warnings to Jews who support Palestinian rights. (trigger warning on letter: ) https://t.co/k0spKqu8q2

— Ariel Koren (@ariel_koko) August 30, 2022

“We prohibit retaliation in the workplace and publicly share our very clear policy,” a Google spokeswoman told the New York Times. “We thoroughly investigated this employee’s claim, as we do when any concerns are raised.”

The spokeswoman noted that the company is proud to have been chosen by the Israeli government to provide public cloud computing services to help transform the country digitally.