Google employees who occupied the California office of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian for more than eight hours to demand the company stop doing business with Israel were arrested late Tuesday.
The employees broadcast their protest on a “notech4apartheid’ Twitch livestream. The video showed they given the opportunity to leave voluntarily, and then arrested by police after refusing to do so.
In the stream, a man is seen approaching the protesters to notify them that they were put on administrative leave and asking them to leave.
BREAKING: Google employees were arrested after occupying their boss's office for more than 8 hours to demand that the company sever ties with Israel.
WATCH: pic.twitter.com/W4WQO8NNgH
— Kassy Akiva (@KassyDillon) April 17, 2024
“It’s getting kinda late,” the man says. “I wanted to ask you, you know, to cooperate, you’ve been placed on admin leave and we’d like to see if you’d just voluntarily [leave] it’s been a while. Can you do that for us?”
When he threatens to call law enforcement, employees state that they understand. Seconds later, police walk in the office and detain them all before the livestream cuts off.
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.
Demands also include that Google cease all “business with the Israeli apartheid government and military,” stop the “harassment, intimidation, bullying, and silencing,” of Palestinian and Muslim employees, and address the “health and safety crisis” among workers who are rattled over their labor being used to “enable a genocide.”
Organized by No Tech for Apartheid, the protesters claim they will remain in the office until Google drops Project Nimbus and heeds the other demands.
Anti-Semitism appears to be rampant 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.
“By choosing to provide the Israeli government and military with our powerful cloud computing and AI technologies, we have continuously enabled Israel’s apartheid state in Palestine and ongoing genocide in Gaza,” the protesters write in a letter to Kurian. “Years of being silenced, ignored and lied to by leadership has confirmed to us as workers that our concerns will not be heard without significant action, and as you read this, we are sitting in the office of Thomas Kurian, the CEO of Google Cloud, until our demands are met.”
Protests also took place at other Google offices in New York City, San Francisco, and Seattle.