Washington - Saeed Erekat - In October of this year, software engineers at the giants Google and Amazon wrote an anonymous open letter objecting to Project: Nimbus - a $1.2 billion contract that would provide The services of these companies to the Israeli state - due to the harm that may be caused to the Palestinians. The letter also called for rejecting "future contracts that would harm our users," including contracts with "any and all military organizations in the United States and abroad."
“However, these companies’ complicity with Israel — rooted in their commitment to the US empire — goes far beyond direct contracts with the State of Israel. American computing companies such as Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Google and Facebook contribute to Israel’s colonial project in multiple ways,” according to an investigation by Mondowise. .
According to the investigation, Google invests in supporting and acquiring Israeli startups, which “were created on the basis of efforts to intimidate Palestinians and rob them of their property and the meaning of their lives, and offer more than just a service provider to the State of Israel, as Google is actively promoting the Israeli agenda and promoting Zionist propaganda.” ".
Google also occupies (physical) space in Colonial Palestine, where the company's presence facilitates further destruction of the land, and Google's products – which in some cases are Israeli products – openly reflect a racist Zionist viewpoint.”
Google reaps profits from the US-Israel alliance
It is no secret that Google is allied with the US empire, as the company provided its services to the US military and police forces (including the company (ICE), which is known for its repressive methods on immigrants. Google was also a partner of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). A CIA, FBI, and FBI accomplice in the NSA's mass surveillance program Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, founding chair of the Defense Innovation Council, and a group of scientists, corporate elites, and government officials working to ensure that The Pentagon has the latest in persecution technology — technologies that are often co-developed with Israel.
Google opened its first facilities in Israel in 2006. It currently has offices in both Tel Aviv and Haifa, employs more than 1,600 Israelis, and plans to build additional facilities in occupied Palestine. On a 2012 visit with then-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Eric Schmidt declared, "The decision to invest in Israel was one of the best decisions Google has ever made." "This is Israel - the flag, the sun and Google," added Netanyahu, perpetually courting the imperialists.
The Google CEO made clear one thing the company is getting out of the alliance: a trained workforce. “Your people seem more organized in life,” Schmidt told Netanyahu, after serving in the Israeli army, which is where they get their impressive “data analysis capabilities.” According to Mondowais, “Since then, Schmidt has put his money where his mouth is, investing $18 million in 2015 in a “cybersecurity” initiative set up by the former head of Unit 8200 — the notorious counterinsurgency and surveillance unit in the Israeli army. When Schmidt visited Israel the following year, Israeli troops gathered at their base to spell "Google" in his honour.
Mondowise concludes that Israel's efforts to terrorize, monitor, and displace Palestinians produce technologies that Google feeds on, as (Google) acquired several Israeli companies emerging from this colonial pipeline, including Waze for $1.1 billion (in 2013), and SlickLogin, for an undisclosed amount (in 2014), Elastifile for $200 million, and Alomaa for $150 million (in 2019), among others. Meanwhile, Google's investment wing, Gradient Ventures, is pouring millions of dollars into Israeli companies, all of which benefit from the Israeli state's tools of surveillance and control, which it now sells to the world as "cybersecurity."
Google also benefits from the continued theft of Palestinian lands. The company recently agreed to integrate Google Pay into Bank Leumi — an Israeli bank famous for funding Jewish-only settlements like Pisgat Zeev, built on land expropriated from Beit Hanina, Shuafat, and other Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem. Bank Leumi also offered real estate loans to Jewish settlers. Since the clients of the Israeli bank are getting more and more “digital”.
Google, in turn, uses its resources to push the Israeli agenda and spread Zionist propaganda - while continuing to occupy Palestine.
Zionism is like Google
In 2008, Google co-founder Sergey Brin visited Israel for the third time. In an interview with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Brin immersed himself in Israel's achievements. "It's unbelievable," Brian said. “I was familiar with the history of Israel in general, but I really see… what was really accomplished… out of nothing, just dirt.” For Brin, Palestine does not exist, but everything that existed before Zionist colonization was “just dirt.” European settlers, Zionist legend has it, made the desert flourish.
This racist narrative is reflected in how Google is occupying cyberspace. Every part of Google's Tel Aviv headquarters, located in the Electra skyscraper, was designed "based on a scene found somewhere in Israel." In one area is a desert landscape. In another, fake orange trees and wooden boxes. Here, Google renews the Zionist myth of Jaffa oranges as an "Israeli" product. It is reported that the Palestinians cultivated and exported oranges, for hundreds of years before the formation of Israel. Israel confiscated Jaffa oranges and used the lands stolen in the Nakba to grow and benefit from this fruit. Thus, "the design of Google's corporate headquarters screams Zionism," according to Mondowise.
This alignment with Zionism comes with a financial backing: Google has even dedicated one of its skyscraper floors to Campus TLV, an initiative created by then-Prime Minister Netanyahu through which the company helps Israeli startups to boom.
Google also acted as a general advisor to the Israeli occupation state. This was demonstrated in the Google project “E-novate Israel” – a sort of precursor to the Nimbus project.
The E-innovate Israel project was launched in 2013, with the stated goals of helping Israel increase its gross domestic product and “providing the [Israeli] government with a systematic model for the application of information and communication technologies.” The project's promotional video promises to integrate "internet tools and technologies" into every government wing, including "defense" and "home front defense", in addition to "construction and housing". The launch of the E-novate Israel Initiative occurred under the auspices of Naftali Bennett — the current Israeli prime minister, then economy minister — infamous for boasting about killing “a lot of Arabs.” In his speech, Bennett declared that "if the State of Israel embraces even some of the innovative principles [presented by Google] that have proven successful in the private sector, we have a great future ahead of us."
Google narrates the future of Israel in Zionist terms such as: Israel is not a colonial settler regime, but an “innovation” factory that will benefit everyone (“an emerging country”). Creative Israel Google E-novate says, “Israel is a nation of independent thinkers whose innovation, creativity, and leadership are part of our DNA and collective spirit.” This project also repeats the Zionist orange story, explaining that Israel “progressed from exporting oranges to exporting technologies.”
In Google's brand of Zionist propaganda, Israel's "primary asset" is not the land, labor, or knowledge it stole from the indigenous people of Palestine, but "the Israeli people, who have an uncanny ability to think creatively and constantly come up with ideas." These "innovative" ideas have made Israel the world's largest exporter of drones, and a supplier of weapons and counter-insurgency tactics to oppressive regimes around the world.
Suppression of resistance
Another way to reaffirm Zionist narratives is to bury the alternatives. Over the years, Google has (to varying degrees) lowered anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist sites in its search results — including the progressive CounterPunch site, the "World Socialist" site and the "Blacklist Report" exposing Israeli crimes.
Palestinians have been regularly targeted due to criminalization and censorship on (anti) social media platforms. Palestinian poet Dareen Tatour was arrested in 2015 and later imprisoned by Israel for posting her poem “Resist My People, Resist Them” on Facebook, Google and on YouTube, while countless Palestinian voices have been expunged from these fascist platforms. As Palestinian writer Maryam Barghouti recently argued, these platforms do more than silence individuals — they “erase us [Palestinians] entirely, cleaning up and pardoning the criminal acts with which Israel replaces us with its settlements and settlers, burying us in the abyss of history as ghost dwellers.”
When Google Earth shows up, Palestinians are already treated like ghosts that haunt the landscape — and the settlers' perspective rises again.
Google's Zionist View of Space
Controlling territory is a major goal of settler societies, which is why Israel is investing massive resources in mapping and navigation technologies — tools that also attract companies like Google. As engineer Eyal Weizmann (an Israeli who worked at Google) documented, Israel created detailed 3D computer models of Palestinian areas to facilitate settlement and control. Israeli war thinkers have also adopted disturbing spatial metaphors such as the notion of “walking through walls” — Israel's euphemism, lifted from critical theory, for tearing down Palestinian homes in urban areas, implemented by the state in the West Bank in 2002, during the second intifada.
Google shares Israel's ambition to monitor the Palestinian territories, directing all movements from a military perspective.
In 2001, Google bought CIA-sponsored Keyhole and used the company's 3D mapping software as the basis for Google Earth [,[g hGvq Google Earth]. The CIA used Keyhole during the occupation of Iraq, in the early 2000s, to monitor Iraqi movements, identify targets, and overlay surveillance information (such as intercepted communications) onto geospatial displays.As the US and Israel practice a similar kind of terror on the people they occupy, Google is there to provide some tools.
Google expanded its spatial capabilities by acquiring the Israeli company Waze (which spun off from Unit 8200 of the Israeli army) for $1.1 billion in 2013. Google not only benefited from its Waze navigation software; Rather, it is the technology that evolved from it.
Waze was designed to give an Israeli view of the public space based on the output of the Israeli army. For example, the program does not give directions in the West Bank. After consulting with the IDF's "Judea and Samaria Division" (a Zionist label for the West Bank area), Waze programmed its software to "warn Israeli drivers" when they entered areas inhabited mostly by Palestinians (the so-called "Area A" of the West Bank) — which Israel envisioned They are areas of terror.
Similarly, Google Maps presents a Zionist view of the Earth. According to Google Maps, Jerusalem is the capital of Israel, and the terms "West Bank" and "Gaza" have in the past been replaced by the word "Israel". Google Maps also showed large swathes of the West Bank as voids, reminiscent of one of Google's co-founders' sense that what isn't Israel is "just dirt."
As pointed out by the Palestinian group 7amleh, Google Maps excludes “Palestinian areas not recognized by Israel” but displays only Jewish settlements, and ignores “all restrictions on the movement of Palestinians, such as checkpoints and restricted roads, that impede freedom of movement for the Palestinian Palestinians, and if they are not taken into account they can cause a serious danger to the Palestinians.” In general, he will not give directions to and from Gaza.
Even Israel's apartheid wall - more than 700 kilometers (440 miles) long, built to grab more land and further break up Palestinian towns and villages - is not shown on Google Maps. Such Zionist facades prompted Palestinians to create alternative maps through initiatives such as PalMap and Palestine Open Maps.
However, Google adheres to the colonialist point of view. In October, when the “Apartheid Wall” label somehow made it onto Google Maps, the Zionist group alerted the Jewish News Syndicate (JNS) to Google, which promptly removed it. A Google spokesperson reportedly told JNS that they "took swift action to update this inappropriate bug."
The Nimbus Project: Another Stage of Colonization
Project Nimbus demonstrates once again that Google is committed to Israel's agenda. Through this project, Google also continues to settle the Palestinian territories.
Israel has already started building the facility that will house Google's servers, along with the necessary infrastructure. According to an Israeli news source, the facility will require four fuel tanks on site with a capacity of more than 200,000 liters. The facility is being built in Bnei Zion, a Jewish settlement (“moshav”) in central Palestine that was established in 1947 with the help of the Jewish Agency for Israel — which is, in the words of Joseph Massad, “the chief Zionist member in charge of advancing Jewish colonization of Palestine.” In addition to promoting Jewish-only settlements and expelling Palestinians, the Jewish Agency has also attacked Boycott, Sanctions, and Divestment (BDS) initiatives as "anti-Semitic".
The residents of Bnei Zion, who live on this stolen land, have tried to block the construction of the Google facility through Israeli courts - but not out of concern for the Palestinians. Residents fear that computerizing the servers with government data will open the facility to physical attacks “from Lebanon and Gaza.” They also worry about the environmentally damaging effects of the facility, and the opaque state bureaucracy that approves such projects without soliciting residents' input. And, of course, Israel was built by this opaque bureaucracy, which for decades expropriated land for Jewish settlement only and blocked Palestinian development projects. The construction of the computing facility in this colonial project, with its environmental destruction, continues with the enrichment of Israel, Google, and partner companies such as Amazon.
It is worth noting the wide range of companies feeding on colonial projects such as the Nimbus Project. While Google and Amazon won the computing services contract, Microsoft, IBM and Oracle were also competing for it. (Oracle already has an underground server facility in Jerusalem and plans to open another one, while Facebook and Apple are also expected to build additional Israeli facilities.) The consulting firms also get a piece of the pie: Anglo-Dutch firm KPMG will help direct the Israeli project, winning the contract. It was also competed for by Deloitte, Ernst & Young, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) and McKinsey.
The dismantling of the colonial system and its institutional claws
In addition to facilitating criminalization and state violence, “Google and its peers also engage in “progressive” counterinsurgency to protect the interests of the American empire,” according to Mondowise.
These companies have created the farce of so-called “ethical tech”: the idea that with the right “ethics” code and the right “partnerships,” these companies and their state partners can work for the “common good.” Google, Microsoft, and other companies have sponsored academics, political analysts, government consultants, and journalists who push this “ethics” training, and use progressive propaganda to protect the industry’s investments in prison and colonization.
And he adds: “When the ‘ethics’ train began to lose steam, the same forces set about funding academics and anyone else who could promise to rebrand the same industry as ‘anti-racism’, ‘feminist’, ‘decolonising’ or ‘decolonial’.” itself, without challenging its imperial existence. The result is a spectacle: a clash between so-called “big tech” companies and the pundits who fund them, who are really two sides of the same coin; And on the fringes of this largely US-driven landscape are alternative analyzes and forms of regulation that are not invested in these industries and their repressive technologies — but rather are paving the way for their abolition. Palestinian activist groups such as Stop the Wall, for example, have identified companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook as a "colony" that is part of the Israeli system. The abolition of the colonial system means that these destructive entities must go.”