A marketing manager at Google just quit in protest. The reason? The company had tried to retaliate against her because she objected to a $1.2-billion joint deal with Amazon and the apartheid state of Israel.
The seven-year deal, called Project Nimbus, will see the Israeli Defence Forces supplied with an arsenal of AI-augmented, military-grade tech. Ariel Koren, the Google employee, worried openly that Nimbus would further enable the IDF to watch, oppress, and otherwise do harm to Palestinians.
After more than a year of mustering internal opposition to the agreement, Koren was abruptly given 17 days to move from San Francisco to São Paulo — a reassignment she says was unjustified and designed to keep her at arm’s length.
Soon after, she quit.
Fifteen of Koren’s former colleagues have since released testimonies criticizing Google’s intolerance of support for Palestinians, and 700 have signed a petition decrying the way she was treated.
But Google has already shown its hand. Not only has it revealed free expression among its ranks to be cause for a crackdown. With its full-throated aping of both the style and the substance of Israeli apartheid, it has slipped into the totalitarian mode — and made itself a willing accessory to crimes against humanity.