ACTION ALERT: Amazon and Google Employees Sign Anonymous Open Letter Slamming Contract With Israel
October 15, 2021
Naomi Grant, Director of Communications [email protected]
202-601-7422
(Washington, D.C., Oct. 15) Nearly 400 Amazon and Google employees signed an Oct. 12 open letter in The Guardian slamming a $1.2 billion contract selling cloud services to the Israeli military and government.
EMET condemns these Amazon and Google employees in the strongest terms. The open letter refers to Israel’s fictional “systematic discrimination and displacement,” while completely ignoring very real human rights abuses such as Iran’s arbitrary imprisonment, torture and abuse of prisoners, including children, frequently to the point of death, on trumped up charges; China imprisoning its Muslim Uyghurs; and the systemic detention and arbitrary imprisonment and torture of individuals and use of chemical weapons on groups in Syria.
This move by Amazon and Google employees - who cowardly signed the letter anonymously - is meant to demonize and delegitimize the state of Israel by using a double standard to judge the sole Jewish state but no other nation. These characteristics are at the root of antisemitism, particularly in the 21st century.
According to the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Office of Anti-Boycott compliance, Part II of the Export Control Reform Act of 2018, “The anti-boycott provisions of the EAR [Export Administration Regulations] encourage, and in specific cases, require US persons to refuse to participate in unsanctioned foreign boycotts. They have the effect of preventing U.S. persons from advancing foreign policies of other nations that run counter to U.S. policy.”
Should Google or Amazon take heed of its misguided employees, they could be violating U.S. law and complicit in corporate antisemitism.
Said EMET president and founder Sarah Stern, “These 400 people are either uninformed or chose to ignore the facts. There would be no Palestinian-Israeli conflict had the Palestinians accepted any one of Israel’s very generous offers: the 1947 UN Partition Plan, Camp David in 2000 and the even more generous plan presented to PA President Mahmoud Abbas by then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert at Sharm al Sheik in 2007.”
The letter by these self-righteous employees of Facebook and Google mentions that they feel “morally obligated to speak out,” saying, “This contract was signed the same week that the Israeli military attacked Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.” Israel did not ask for this war, nor did they initiate this war. They, as opposed to Hamas, do not indiscriminately fire any rockets at anyone. This was a pure and simple war of self-defense on the part of the Israelis.
Continued Ms. Stern, “I was in Israel during the May war when approximately 4,340 missiles were fired from Gaza into Israeli residential communities. We had fewer than 60 seconds to get into our sealed rooms. How would these Facebook and Google employees feel if a terrorist organization fired missiles into their homes and workplaces in California from Mexico, or New York from Canada? It is way past time to put an end to this holier-than-thou ‘virtue signaling’ based on illusions, distortions and lies, once and for all.”
Please contact Google at 1-855-836-1987 and Amazon at 1-206-266-2992 or 1-888-280-4331 to let them know that denying Israel a contract is unacceptable and potentially illegal.
