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During a keynote speech by Barak Regev, managing director of Google's Israel business, in New York on Monday, a Google Cloud engineer publicly protested against the company's work for the Israeli military, resulting in his termination.

Google Cloud Engineer Says Company Building Tech That Powers Genocide

A video showed the engineer standing up and shouting, "I'm a Google Cloud software engineer, and I refuse to build technology that powers genocide, apartheid, or surveillance. Project Nimbus puts Palestinian community members in danger."

The crowd booed him as security personnel escorted him out of the conference venue. The Mind the Tech conference, sponsored by the Israeli newspaper Calcalist, is promoting the Israeli high-tech industry.

According to the Daily Mail, the Israeli government launched Project Nimbus in April 2021. It is a $1.2 billion contract with Amazon and Google to provide cloud services for the country's government and military.

Google Fires the Cloud Engineer

CNBC reported that this put Google in another challenging position after several political and cultural internal and external conflicts in recent years. The company also continued to struggle to quell employee dissent.

Before this incident, over 600 Google employees signed a letter urging the company to withdraw its sponsorship of the annual Mind the Tech conference.

In reaction to the incident, Regev emphasized the importance of accommodating diverse viewpoints within the company, telling the crowd, "Part of the privilege of working in a company, which represents democratic values is giving the stage for different opinions."

However, a Google spokesperson told CNBC that the engineer was fired for "interfering with an official company-sponsored event."

The spokesperson also said that "this behavior is not okay, regardless of the issue, and the employee was terminated for violating our policies," but did not specify which policies were violated.

Tags

Google, Israel