Shortly after Israel escalated its violations of the ceasefire in Gaza, bombing and murdering hundreds of Palestinians, Google announced a USD$32 billion acquisition of Wiz.
This acquisition marks a continuation of Google’s brazen support for Israel and “is [a] doubling down by investing in the colonial, racist, apartheid project of the so-called Israeli state,” as a spokesperson for No Tech for Apartheid has commented. This acquisition also comes amidst Google and Amazon workers’ campaigns against the companies’ involvement with Israel through their cloud computing contract Project Nimbus.
Wiz is an Israeli cloud security startup founded in 2020 by former members of Unit 8200. Unit 8200 is the Israeli military’s infamous clandestine intelligence unit, which has developed and deployed mass surveillance and technology systems such as Lavender and Gospel, that are complicit in severe human rights abuses against Palestinians.
Anna Bacciarelli, senior researcher in Human Rights Watch’s technology rights and investigations division, interviewed in the article, warned the acquisition signals Google’s attempts to further entrench its stakes in military technology for national security purposes, thereby deepening ties with the Trump administration and Israel. In February, Google dropped its pledge not to use AI in weapons systems and surveillance tools.
Google is increasing its dominance over cloud infrastructures. It has been expanding its cloud presence in the Middle East recently, providing government services in the UAE and Kuwait and partnering with Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund.
Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Azure control two-thirds of worldwide cloud infrastructure and are all deeply complicit with Israel’s genocidal regime. You can understand these companies as computational infrastructures that have massive reach and create political, economic, financial and ideological dependencies across our societies. They operate with impunity, embedding themselves in structures of power and violence globally.
Microsoft Azure, as of last week, was named a priority target – the highest level in the BDS targeted boycott strategy – by the Boycott Divest and Sanctions (BDS) movement, after leaked documents revealed the Israeli military as a major AI client, exposing deeper, and more profitable ties than previously known. Brave workers continue to call the company out.
Tech billionaires aid and abet the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people and uphold Israel’s apartheid regime. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Google’s Sundar Pichai, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, TiKTok’s Shou Zi Chew, Apple’s Tim Cook, and OpenAI’s Sam Altman’s attendance at Trump’s inauguration is telling of big tech’s alignment with a fascist regime in the US, whose imperial reach extends far and wide. The very same suite of tech tools that target and kill Palestinians are also deployed to surveil, criminalise and deport protestors, people at the border, incarcerated folks, and other Black, brown, Muslim, low-income, immigrant, queer, trans communities.
We implore fellow readers in our network to join or start a campaign to pressure your employer, university or organisation to cut ties with Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and all their subsidiaries. You can find examples and contacts here, here, here and here.
See: Google ‘playing with fire’ by acquiring Israeli company founded by Unit 8200 veterans at Middle East Eye.