Israel-Hamas war: Why Google fired an employee after official event

Amid the escalating conflict in Gaza, Google is reportedly facing growing internal unrest over its business ties with the Israeli military. Earlier this week, an employee from the company's cloud division interrupted the keynote speech by the managing director of Google's Israel business at an event in New York. The employee protested publicly by saying, “I refuse to build technology that powers genocide.”

Before being booed and escorted out of the event, the protesting employee shouted, “No cloud for apartheid” towards Google Israel's managing director Barak Regev. To which, Regev replied “the privilege of working for a democratic company allows different opinions.”

According to a report by CNBC, the protesting Google Cloud engineer has been subsequently fired. While claiming to uphold democratic values, Google fired the employee for “interfering with an official company event” and violating unspecified policies.

Google’s ‘employee problem’This marked another moment for the tech giant as it grapples with an increasing number of political and cultural clashes. In recent years, Google has also been struggling to curb employee dissent.

The company’s role as a tech provider to militaries in the US and other nations has sparked outcry from its workforce for a long time. In 2018, employees protested the company’s Project Maven contract with the US Defense Department.

More recently, Google signed the $1.2 billion Project Nimbus deal to provide AI and cloud services to the Israeli government and military. After this crisis, more than 600 Google employees are said to have signed a letter urging the company to drop sponsorship of an Israeli tech conference.

Earlier this week, there was reportedly another internal controversy tied to the crisis in Gaza. Ahead of the International Women's Day Summit, Google's employee message board was bombarded with comments about the company's military contracts with Israel, the report noted.