The campaign, led by current and former staff at tech giant Google, began as a murmur; it was initiated by a few pro-BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) workers who thought they could leverage the ubiquitous name of their employer to attack Israel.
An anonymous group of workers—all reportedly employed at Amazon and Google—penned a letter published in The Guardian in 2021. They called on the companies to scrap a cloud computing contract that had been signed with the Israeli government, known as Project Nimbus.
At the time, the letter writers claimed to represent 60 Google employees and 300 Amazon workers.
“The technology our companies have contracted to build will make the systematic discrimination and displacement carried out by the Israeli military and government even crueler and deadlier for Palestinians,” the letter alleged.
Since then, the so-called “No Tech For Apartheid” campaign has rumbled on, garnering little attention from the media besides the initial reports about the letter over two years ago.
But then the October 7 Hamas massacre breathed new life into the campaign; the atrocity seemingly galvanized its members who saw a revived opportunity opening up through which to attack the Jewish state.
In the six months since Hamas launched a war against Israel, there has been a rash of articles about Google’s anti-Israel activist employees and their plodding campaign. Such coverage included The Guardian’s piece about a vigil for an ex-Google intern, who reportedly died in an airstrike in Gaza, and was attended by barely a handful of people.
The latest piece dedicated to the campaign is a 2,000-word feature from Time Magazine titled “Exclusive: Google Workers Revolt Over $1.2 Billion Contract With Israel,” which takes readers on a tour of the conspiracy-addled minds of the members of No Tech For Apartheid.
The problems start with the headline that implies there is a mass or majority of disgruntled Google workers who are united against their employer in their hatred of Israel.
Of course, the piece makes no mention of the fact that Google has 200,000 employees globally (including 2,000 in Israel), while the campaign consists of “around 40 Google employees closely involved in organizing,” according to the article.
We must also assume that, rather than gaining traction and winning over the minds of their colleagues during the past two years, No Tech For Apartheid has actually lost members, considering that their numbers appear to have dropped by around 20 since the time they announced the campaign in The Guardian.
Time glosses over this salient detail, however, to instead describe the campaign as a “growing movement inside Google” while quoting ex-software engineer Eddie Hatfield, who was fired from his job after he interrupted a conference organized by his employer to scream at attendees.
Uncritically detailing Hatfield’s absurd claim that he was fired because company bosses “saw how much traction this movement within Google is gaining,” Time suggests Hatfield’s sentiments reflect a “wider climate of growing international indignation at the collateral damage of Israel’s war in Gaza…”
Yet, the primary problem with the piece is its failure to challenge the activist group’s risible claim that their campaign is solely focused on Project Nimbus.
Although Time admits there is “no evidence that Google or Amazon’s technology has been used in killings of civilians,” it is content to quote at length individuals such as Vidana Abdel Khalek, a Google worker who resigned from her job, who claims that Project Nimbus is knowingly being used to “harm innocent civilians” by a government that is “committing genocide.”
Time also states that No Tech For Apartheid’s protest is “as much about what the public doesn’t know about Project Nimbus as what it does.”
There’s a good reason for the campaign’s focus on something as vague as the public’s lack of knowledge about the technology: No Tech For Apartheid can’t explain how the tech supposedly “powers genocide,” as Hatfield yelled out during his conference stunt.
And that is the point that Time has obscured: the No Tech For Apartheid campaign may like to pretend that its efforts are about an expensive piece of cloud computing, but they are not. Rather, it is about demonizing and ostracizing Israel.
That is what lies at the heart of BDS—an international campaign that seeks to isolate and eventually dismantle the world’s only Jewish state.
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