How 'Israel' Employs Google Services to Oppress Palestinians?

After a campaign of persecution and harassment that began in March 2022, a Google employee resigned in protest at the latter's signing of a contract with the Israeli military.

Ariel Koren, marketing director of Google's educational products, said the company treats Palestinian, Muslim, and even non-Zionist Jews in a hostile way for criticizing "Israel."

So, she resigned because they were trying to take revenge on her, the New York Times reported on August 30, 2022.

 

Retaliatory Policy

Koren wrote on Twitter: "I will leave Google because of the policy of retaliation and hostility against employees who talk and criticize."

She noted that the company moved her from the United States to Brazil as punishment for opposing contracts with "Israel" for the purpose of using artificial intelligence to monitor Palestinians.

In a detailed message published on the Medium website on August 30, 2022, and Google blocked access to it, she confirmed that during her work, she noticed a systematic silencing of Palestinian, Jewish, and Arab voices, "amounting to revenge," as she put it.

She explained that the repression of these dissenting voices within the company is due to their refusal to be complicit in Palestinian human rights violations in exchange for protecting its business interests with the Israeli army and government.

"Our Palestinian co-workers are being silenced throughout the company, and employees who support Palestinian rights receive warnings from the HR department, harassment, wage cuts, and negative performance reports," she said.

"Instead of listening to employees who want Google to adhere to its ethical principles, the company aggressively pursues military contracts, suppresses the voices of its employees, and seeks to silence and retaliate against them."

Ironically, Ariel Koren is Jewish but anti-Zionist and has accused Google of constantly seeking to silence anti-occupation Jews.

Together with a Jewish colleague, Gabriel Schubiner, she is running the campaign against the Nimbus project contract, which Google signed with the Israeli military in July 2021 and runs until 2028.

In solidarity with Jewish opponents of the project, hundreds of Google employees signed a petition criticizing the company's hostility to its employees because of their pro-Palestinian views.

They signed a petition demanding that Google rescind its retaliatory decision against it for protesting the project of cooperation with the Israeli army.

They have had a subset since 2020, called the "Jewish Diaspora in Technology," with nearly 500 members, that has become the center of the anti-Nimbus Israeli project with Google.

A number of Google employees (Palestinians, Muslims, Jews, and Arabs) posted an anonymous video, fearing reprisals, explaining what was going on against them, and volunteers read their stories aloud.

 

Methods of Punishment

In her letter, Koren revealed details of Google's moves against the Palestinians and their employees on claims of "anti-Semitism," other than selling surveillance software to the Israeli army used against Palestinians.

There is a Jewish website on Google called Jewglers, an internal group that aims to support "all Jews within the company."

The other group, called Jewish Diaspora Solidarity, is trying to challenge Israeli influence on Google.

"We object to the confusion between Israel and the Jewish people, and we affirm that anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism," the group says.

He incited Jews via the Jewglers platform against pro-Palestine employees, whether they were Jews, Palestinians, Muslims, and others.

Louis Caine previously spoke on the Jewish website Forward on October 28, 2021, about this clash between Jewish Google employees, some of whom support the Israeli Occupation's influence while others oppose it.

He referred to the role of the Jewish Diaspora Solidarity group in highlighting Israeli crimes during the May 2021 aggression on Gaza by asking the Google administration, in a letter, to present the suffering of Palestinians during the war and expose the crimes of the Occupation.

In her letter, Koren says, as an example of Google's persecution of employees sympathetic to Palestine: "When an anti-Israel Jewish employee sent an email to the company's management asking them to show Israel's war crimes, they referred him for discipline."

She said that many cases of employees who sympathized with Palestinian human rights had been referred to functional disciplinary committees, although when Jewglers demanded that Google's management express solidarity with "Israel," they responded to them.

She also reported that on June 28, 2021, "we (a group of 28 Jewish employees against Israel) sent a letter to Google managers objecting to their dealings with Jewglers being the sole representative of Jewish opinion," and we were surprised to be referred for investigation.

We sent a letter signed by 627 Google employees demanding freedom of expression of our opinion on supporting the Palestinians through the company and criticizing the Israeli Occupation's crimes.

She explained that it went so far as to send members of the Israeli group Jewglers, which is embraced by Google, aggressive messages to two thousand Muslim employees bullying them.

Koren and another Jewish employee received death threats via email because they were anti-Zionist, and when she complained to Google's personnel department, he didn't care or investigate.

The group's directors told them that "the political debate about the State of Israel violates Google's policy," and only positive political messages about it are allowed.

 

In the Service of 'Israel'

In her latest talk, Koren revealed that on June 22, 2020, a month after U.S. police killed African-American George Floyd and sparked public outrage, Google donated to the Black Lives movement supporting black rights.

But the pro-Israel Jewglers group protested and demanded that Google apologize, which has already happened, claiming that these "black groups" also support the views of Palestinian groups in America.

"Countless employees have tried to talk about the abuses Palestinians have been subjected to and repressed, but when vague military contracts with Israel, such as the Nimbus project, emerge here, I felt like I was working for the bad guy."

The Jewglers Jewish Group is officially funded by Google and gives them an official platform to express Jews supporting the Israeli Occupation.

Some Google employees spoke of being punished after co-workers accused them of anti-Semitism for declaring support for Palestine, calling them "Palestinian-Americans," according to the British website Middle East Eye on August 30, 2022.

This is not the first time that the Israeli Occupation has harnessed major search engines and social networking sites to serve it.

Facebook and its owner, Mark Zuckerberg, play a role in deleting and restricting any content about Palestinian events supporting resistance against the Occupation.

During the Israeli aggression on Jerusalem and Gaza in May 2021, leaked internal documents from Facebook revealed that the company restricted the accounts of Palestinian activists under decisions to modify the content to obliterate the Palestinian narrative and support the Occupation.

The closure of dozens of Palestinian accounts and the deletion of content supporting the Palestinian cause on the grounds that it is "shocking and harmful to the public" prompted Palestinians to file a formal complaint against Facebook.

They said in their complaint that "the Facebook administration participates in the policy of obfuscating the suffering of the Palestinian people under the pretext of harmful materials, and hides what is happening in the Al-Aqsa Mosque against Muslims and from war crimes in Gaza and elsewhere."

Seventeen U.S. media organizations have published a series of reports called "Facebook Papers," including hundreds of leaked documents about the site's incitement of extremist groups against Palestinians and Muslims.

After complaints were filed against Facebook, investigations by the site's management showed officials admitting their involvement in fueling violence and hatred against Indian Muslims, Palestinians, and others, the Wall Street Journal reported on October 23, 2021.

According to Time magazine, published the same month, Facebook-owned Instagram removed posts referring to the Al-Aqsa Mosque and hashtags it mentioned during the war on Gaza in May 2021.

Facebook team officials claimed that there had been an inaccurate classification of some of the words commonly used by Palestinians, including "martyr" and "resistance," as incitement to violence.