ALBAWABA – During the Mind The Tech event in New York City, which was held in support of Israeli tech and its collaboration with US firms, a speech for Google Israel managing director Barak Regev was cut off by a Google Cloud engineer who stood up against the company's support for Israeli with Project Nimbus.
He said: "I refuse to build technology that powers genocide!" sparking protests by multiple activist groups in Midtown, NYC under the #NoTechForApartheid umbrella.
The heavily funded Mind The Tech conference is running in New York City for two days (Mar. 4 and 5) with the theme of supporting Israeli high-tech in attendance of multiple large firms and governmental entities like BlackStone, Google, Mayor of NYC and Israeli Ambassador for UN, among others.
The protested Project Nimbus is a $1.2 billion funded cloud computing project for the Israeli government and military in collaboration with Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services in order to provide Israel with cloud computing and machine learning infrastructure, criticized for supporting the ongoing occupation of Palestinian lands and believed to further facilitate abuse and unlawful data collection of Palestinians according to The Guardian report.
While Barak Regev from Google Israel was giving a speech during the event, he was interrupted by a Google Cloud engineer who noted that Project Nimbus “puts Palestinian communities in danger”, before being forcibly pushed out of the hall.
The engineer who held back from specifying his name due to professional grounds, spoke to Hall Gate NYC, saying “I don't see any way forward to continue my engineering work without doing this, adding “I consider this a part of my engineering work, and I hope other engineers within Cloud see me do this, and I hope that it galvanizes them.”
In a timely manner after the engineer was dragged out of the room, a lady named Ilana who is a member of Jewish Voices for Peace according to Hall Gate NYC, protested the Israeli tech support, chanting “Google is complicit in genocide!”, in reference to the 30,534 Palestinians who have been killed by Israeli forces in Gaza since Oct. 7, before a nearby woman shoved her to the ground.
A petition asking Google to stop sponsoring Mind the Tech has been signed by over 600 Google employees and growing according to Wired. The letter is directed to Google marketing leadership saying "We need Google to do better,” and demanding the company to “withdraw from Mind the Tech, issue an apology, and stand with Googlers and customers who are despairing over the overwhelming loss of life in Gaza.”
