Google CEO Sundar Pichai broke his silence on Thursday regarding the firing of 28 employees who occupied an executive’s office in California and protested in the company’s New York building to demand the company terminate a contract with Israel.
“Ultimately we are a workplace and our policies and expectations are clear: this is a business, and not a place to act in a way that disrupts coworkers or makes them feel unsafe, to attempt to use the company as a personal platform, or to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics,” Pichai said in a company-wide email on Thursday.
“This is too important a moment as a company for us to be distracted,” he added. “When we come to work, our goal is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. That supersedes everything else and I expect us to act with a focus that reflects that.”
Email by Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar where he addresses the anti-Israel protests at the company.
The termination of the employees was announced in a company-wide memo on Wednesday by Google vice president of global security, Chris Rackow who described their actions as “unacceptable” and “extremely disruptive.”
Several of the employees were seen being arrested on their livestream after refusing to leave the offices for more than eight hours.
The protests were announced in internal emails to employees that shared a list of demands, including that Google drop its $1.2 billion contract with Israel for Project Nimbus, a cloud-computing project of the Israeli government.
Google employees getting arrested in the company’s Sunnyvale, CA office for occupying the office of an executive to call for the company to terminate a contract with Israel.
“Behavior like this has no place in our workplace and we will not tolerate it,” Rackow continued. “It clearly violates multiple policies that all employees must adhere to … we are a place of business and every Googler is expected to read our policies and apply them to how they conduct themselves and communicate in our workplace.”
Rackow stated that most of Google’s roughly 180,000 employees “do the right thing,” adding a warning: “If you’re one of the few who are tempted to think we’re going to overlook conduct that violates our policies, think again.”
The demands made by protesters included that Google cease all “business with the Israeli apartheid government and military,” and address the “health and safety crisis” among workers who are rattled over their labor being used to “enable a genocide.”
The terminations appear to be Google’s first hard steps to clamp down on the apparent rampant anti-Semitism throughout Google’s workforce. In February, The Daily Wire reported on internal anti-Semitic incidents taking place at Google, including the words “kill all Jews” found written on a bathroom wall inside its offices, and a Jewish employee being assaulted by anti-Israel protesters on one of their campuses. The Daily Wire also reported that a group of employees attempted to hijack an International Women’s Day event to bash Israel.
No Tech for Apartheid, the organization that helped organize the protests, called the terminations “illegal” and said workers who did not participate in the protest were also fired.
“Google just fired over two dozen workers, including those among us who did not directly participate in yesterday’s historic, bicoastal 10-hour sit-in protests,” the group wrote on Instagram. “This flagrant act of retaliation is a clear indication that Google values its $1.2 billion contract with the genocidal Israeli government and military more than its own workers.”
A spokeswoman for Google denied the claim that employees who did not participate were fired.
“Every single one of the twenty-eight people whose employment was terminated was personally and definitively involved in disruptive activity inside our buildings,” the spokeswoman told The Daily Wire. “We carefully confirmed every single one (and then actually reconfirmed each one) during our investigation. The groups were live-streaming themselves from the physical spaces they had taken over for many hours, which did help us with our confirmation. And many employees whose work was physically disrupted submitted complaints, with details and evidence. So the claims to the contrary being made are just nonsense.”
The spokesperson said Project Nimbus is for “for workloads running on our commercial cloud by Israeli government ministries, who agree to comply with our Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy.”
“This work is not directed at highly sensitive, classified, or military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services,” she added.
The group denied accusations of harassment and called Pichai and Kurian “genocide profiteers.”
“The truth is clear: Google is terrified of workers coming together and calling for accountability and transparency from our bosses,” the group continued. “They are choosing to reveal the falsity of Google’s ‘open culture’ in order to get rid of a threat. The corporation is trying to downplay and discredit our power.”
The group said that the firings “only serve as further fuel for the growth of this movement.”
This article has been updated to include a statement from Google.