<div style="text-align: justify; "><span style="font-size: 1rem;"><b>Google and its ties with the Israeli government are front and center in headlines again, as several workers have been arrested and fired in the US for staging sit-ins at the company’s offices.</b></span><br></div><div style="text-align: justify; "><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Workers have been protesting for years against the tech giant’s work with the Israeli government and military, calling for the shutdown of Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion agreement that also includes Amazon, which they say has made Google an “active arm of the Israeli genocidal war machine” against Palestinians.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Their concerns have been backed by tech experts and analysts such Antony Loewenstein, who believes the controversial project plays a central role in Israel’s oppression of Palestinians.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">“Project Nimbus is a key asset for Israel’s military-industrial complex in its war in Gaza and across occupied Palestine,” said Loewenstein, author of The Palestine Laboratory, a widely acclaimed book on Israel’s arms and surveillance industry.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The Project Nimbus agreement was announced by Israel’s Finance Ministry in 2021 and, on the face of it, related to the tech giants jointly providing cloud computing services and helping Israel build local cloud storage server centers.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Other details of the contract were mostly kept secret, but reports from outlets such as The Intercept revealed some startling details, like how the cloud services would give Israel greater AI-powered capabilities for facial and image recognition used for mass surveillance of Palestinians.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">It also included enhanced means for tracking objects and sentiment analysis, a discredited technology with high risks of misuse.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Soon after the deal was announced, workers from Google and Amazon came out against it, saying Israel would use it “for further surveillance of and unlawful data collection on Palestinians,” and facilitate the “expansion of Israel’s illegal settlements on Palestinian land.”</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Over the past three years, protests have continued and workers of Google and Amazon set up groups like No Tech for Apartheid, dedicated to advocacy against projects such as Nimbus, which they say “are helping to make Israeli apartheid more efficient, more violent, and even deadlier for Palestinians.” - Anadolu Agency</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify; ">bnbd24/fas</div>