Two Google employees opposing a joint project with Israeli government reveal their identities

The project will make the systematic discrimination deadlier for Palestinians, they argue

Several anonymous workers at Google and Amazon last month signed a petition demanding their employers to cancel a contract with Israeli government to build cloud-based data centres.

Two Google employees, who are among the signatories, have now revealed their identity, highlighting their Jewish backgrounds and calling on their employer to pull out of the Nimbus project.

Project Nimbus is a $1.2 billion contract under which Amazon and Google have been selected to provide cloud services to the Israeli military and government agencies. The initiative is an Israeli effort to build its own local cloud-based servers.

In April, Israel's Finance Ministry announced the winners of the Nimbus project contract (Google and Amazon) and said that the cloud services under the project will be hosted by local cloud providers.

It added that the data on the cloud "will remain within Israel's borders under strict data security regulations overseen by the relevant government offices."

However, in an open letter published in The Guardian last month, a group of anonymous employees at Amazon and Google opposed the involvement of their companies in the Israeli project and called on the two tech giant's executives to halt work on the venture.

"We condemn Amazon and Google's decision to sign the Project Nimbus contract with the Israeli military and government, and ask them to reject this contract and future contracts that will harm our users," the letter said.

"The technology our companies have contracted to build will make the systematic discrimination and displacement carried out by the Israeli military and government even crueler and deadlier for Palestinians" and "deny Palestinians their basic rights," it added.

The "employees of conscience" wrote in the letter that they were from diverse backgrounds and believed the technology they develop "should work to serve and uplift people everywhere."

While the petition had been anonymous so far, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) reported last week that two Jewish Google employees who had helped devise the open letter recently renounced the anonymity of the petition and chose to reveal their Semitic nationality.

"For me as a Jewish employee of Google, I feel a deep sense of intense moral responsibility," said Ariel Koren, who works in Google's education division.

"When you work in a company, you have the right to be accountable and responsible for the way that your labor is actually being used."

Koren claimed that the petition had already been signed by over 1,000 employees, who prefer to remain anonymous.

Two Jewish Googlers (Ariel Koren and Gabriel Shubiner) cited privacy of data as one of the primary reasons for the petition.

Despite protests, workers' call to end the Project Nimbus contract faces an uphill battle.

The contract reportedly contains a clause that prevents tech giants from pulling out under the influence of any boycotts.

In a statement to the JTA, an Amazon spokesperson said that the company was "focused on making the benefits of our world-leading cloud technology available to all our customers, wherever they are located."

Google did not reply to a request for comment.