Amazon and Alphabet, cloud service providers to the Israeli military, and Microsoft have faced protests from employees and critics in the last several months.
Amazon.com Inc. on Monday terminated an employee who participated in protests against the e-commerce giant’s ties to the Israeli government, according to a Bloomberg report, months after a similar move by Microsoft.
Ahmed Shahrour, a 29-year-old Palestinian engineer, was fired for violations of the company policy, including statements intended to “threaten, intimidate, coerce or interfere with” senior leaders and colleagues, according to an email seen by Bloomberg.
Amazon and Alphabet supply cloud-computing infrastructure to Israel’s government and military under a broader agreement known as Project Nimbus. The tech giants, along with Microsoft, have faced protests from critics of Israel’s military actions in Gaza, where thousands were killed before a ceasefire took effect on Monday.
Shahrour, who worked at Amazon’s Whole Foods Market unit, recently posted a series of messages to corporate Slack chat rooms criticizing Amazon’s connections to Israel. He also protested and handed out fliers at Amazon’s Seattle headquarters campus.
In August, Microsoft fired four workers protesting the company’s alleged ties to Israel with the slogan “No Azure for Apartheid.” That came after a joint media investigation led by The Guardian newspaper showed that the Israeli military surveillance agency used the Azure software to store countless mobile phone call records and recordings of Palestinian civilians living in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza.
Microsoft late last month said it disabled some use of its software by the Israeli military after that investigation, and its own findings that some mass surveillance data was stored on its servers.
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