Google workers take part in a bicoastal sit-in protest against Project Nimbus in Sunnyvale, California on April 16, 2024. 

(Photo: @MPower_Change/X)

Investigation Exposes Big Tech Ties to Israeli Genocide in Gaza

"It's more than complicity: It's direct participation and collaboration with the Israeli military on the tools they're using to kill Palestinians," said one policy expert.

The Israeli military is using cloud storage and artificial intelligence services provided by U.S. tech titans for "direct participation and collaboration" in what many critics around the world call Israel's genocidal assault on Gaza, according to an investigation published this week.

Two Israeli publications—+972 Magazine and Local Call—on Sunday published a joint investigation revealing that the Israeli military is using Amazon Web Services (AWS) to store data gleaned from the mass surveillance in Gaza, where nearly 10 months of bombings and ground invasion have left more than 140,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing, according to local and international estimates.

Multiple sources told the outlets that pressure on the IDF since the October 7 Hamas-led attacks on Israel has "led to a dramatic increase in the purchase of services from Google Cloud, Amazon's AWS, and Microsoft Azure." The report states that cooperation between the IDF and AWS "is particularly close" and "even helped on rare occasions to confirm aerial assassination strikes in Gaza—strikes that would have also killed and harmed Palestinian civilians."

IDF Col. Racheli Dembinsky—who spoke at a recent "IT for IDF" event near Tel Aviv—told investigative journalist Yuval Abraham that the "most important" advantage offered by cloud computing companies is advanced artificial intelligence capabilities. AI, she said, provides the IDF with "very significant operational effectiveness" as it obliterates Gaza.

Last year, Abraham published an investigation on the same two websites that showed how the IDF is using AI to select targets, essentially creating what one former Israeli officer called a "mass assassination factory." In April, the journalist revealed that the IDF was using a previously undisclosed AI system that had replaced "human agency and precision" with "mass target creation and lethality."

According to Abraham:

Many of Israel's attacks in Gaza at the beginning of the war were based on the recommendations of a program called "Lavender." With the help of AI, this system processed information on most Gaza residents and compiled a list of suspected military operatives, including junior ones, for assassination. Israel systematically attacked these operatives in their private homes, killing entire families. Over time, the military realized that Lavender was not "reliable" enough, and its use decreased in favor of other software. +972 and Local Call could not confirm whether Lavender was developed with the help of civilian firms, including public cloud companies.

In 2021, Israel signed a $1.2 billion contract with Amazon and Google for Project Nimbus, which provides cloud services to the Israeli government and military. The move sparked the #NoTechForApartheid campaign, in which disaffected tech workers and dozens of advocacy groups rose up against Big Tech's complicity in Israeli human rights crimes in Palestine.

"Technology should be used to bring people together, not enable apartheid and ethnic cleansing," the campaign explained in 2021.

Earlier this year, Google—which Abraham said was briefly listed as a sponsor of the "IT for IDF" event—fired 50 employees for protesting Project Nimbus.

IDF Col. Avi Dadon told Abraham that "of course" tech companies want to work with the IDF, because "it's the strongest marketing."

"What the IDF uses was and will be one of the best selling points of products and services in the world," Dadon explained.

However, Big Tech's alleged complicity in Israeli human rights violations is coming under more intense scrutiny lately as Israel is on trial for genocide at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and International Criminal Court Prosecutor Karim Khan seeks arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. Khan also sought ICC arrest warrants for two Hamas leaders, Mohammed Diab Ibrahim Al-Masri and Ismael Haniyah, who were both recently assassinated by Israel.

Last month, the ICJ ruled in a separate case that Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories including the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza is an illegal form of apartheid that must immediately end.

Some campaigners have noted that Google is apparently violating its own AI principles, which vow that the company "will not design or deploy AI in… technologies that cause or are likely to cause overall harm… weapons or other technologies whose principal purpose or implementation is to cause or directly facilitate injury to people… technologies that gather or use information for surveillance violating internationally accepted norms… [or] technologies whose purpose contravenes widely accepted principles of international law and human rights."

Others have noted Google and Amazon's lack of transparency on how its systems are being used.

"Neither company has publicly disclosed what, if any, human rights due diligence they carried out before participating in Project Nimbus," Zach Campbell, a digital rights expert at Human Rights Watch, told Abraham. "They haven't mentioned which, if any, red lines there are in terms of what would be permissible use of their technology."

Tariq Kenney-Shawa, U.S. policy fellow at the Palestinian think tank Al-Shabaka, told Abraham that while "there's always a lot of focus on the direct military assistance the United States provides to Israel—the munitions, fighter jets, and bombs," far less attention "has been paid to these partnerships that span both civilian and military environments."

"It's more than complicity: It's direct participation and collaboration with the Israeli military on the tools they're using to kill Palestinians," he stressed.

COMMON DREAMS