When Sarmad Gilani joined Google as a software engineer in 2012, he was drawn to the company’s famously open culture, where employees can publicly criticize leadership and are encouraged to accept their racial identity and sexual orientation while on the job. job.
He said certain political positions, such as support for Black Lives Matter or Ukraine, were generally accepted and even embraced by the company. But there was one issue that Gilani was always reluctant to raise: the treatment of the Palestinians.
“You have to be very, very, very careful, because any kind of criticism of the State of Israel can easily be taken as anti-Semitism,” he said in an interview. Gilani, a 38-year-old American born to Pakistani immigrants, explained that his wariness also stemmed from a lifetime of being misunderstood and profiled as a Muslim.
That was before October 7th.
In the month since Hamas launched an attack inside Israel and Israel retaliated with a bombing campaign and invasion of the Gaza Strip, discussion on the topic on Google (for Muslims and Jews) has sunk into a quagmire. of hostility and intolerance, Gilani said. and other employees say.
Israeli and Jewish employees have expressed anger over messages posted on Google’s internal channels, including at least one that was openly anti-Semitic, and on Wednesday a group of The workers published a open letter directed at Google leaders accusing the company of a double standard that allows “freedom of expression for Israeli Google employees versus Arab, Muslim and Palestinian Google employees.”
The letter was not signed by any person. Instead, it was attributed to “Muslim, Palestinian, and Arab Google employees, along with anti-Zionist Jewish colleagues.” The New York Times discussed the matter with seven Google employees and reviewed messages posted on employee channels for this article. Some of the employees, including Mr. Gilani, were willing to be identified, but others asked not to be identified for fear of professional ramifications.
Pro-Palestinian employees say the company has allowed supporters of Israel to speak freely about their opinions on the issue, while coming down hard on Muslim employees who have criticized Israel’s retaliation in Gaza.
“I don’t feel safe saying what I want to say,” Gilani said in an interview before the letter was published.
Google said the acrimony described to the Times by Muslim and Jewish employees was limited to a small group of its many thousands of workers.
“This is a very sensitive time and issue across businesses and workplaces, and we have many employees who are personally impacted,” company spokesperson Courtenay Mencini wrote in an emailed response to questions. “The vast majority of those employees do not participate in internal discussions or debates.”
Google is not the only one facing this turmoil. The issue has exposed divisions in other elite institutions in the United States (universities, Hollywood and the Democratic Party, to name a few), while statements of solidarity with the Palestinians or calls for an Israeli ceasefire are met with condemnation for undermining Israel’s right to defend itself from terrorism.
Companies are struggling to find ways to address the conflict and set clear boundaries around acceptable speech on the topic. More broadly, anger over the conflict has led to a rise in hate crimes and threats against Jews and Muslims.
Among technology companies, Microsoft has removed posts from workers discussing the conflict, and in Meta, internal tensions also rose when the company removed internal messages from employees supporting other Palestinians in Meta.
But on Google, the question has a unique meaning.
Even compared to its Silicon Valley peers, Google has become a center for employee activism, a legacy of the company’s open and informal founding culture.
In recent years, Google employees have protested former President Donald J. Trump’s ban on immigration from Muslim-majority countries, rallied to protest the company’s handling of sexual harassment, formed a union, and They asked leaders to stop working with the Pentagon.
The letter sent Wednesday raises another sensitive point: Google’s role in a $1.2 billion contract to supply Israel and its military with artificial intelligence and other computing capabilities, technology that critics and activists say could be used to surveil Palestinians.
When the contract, called Project Nimbus, went into effect in 2021, several employees publicly objected and said they were threatened for speaking out in support of the Palestinians, claims similar to those in Wednesday’s letter. Last year, a Jewish Google employee who led an effort to get the company to drop her contract resigned, alleging retaliation against her.
After clashes broke out last month, employees started a new petition calling for Google to cancel Nimbus. As of Tuesday, it had 675 signatures, according to one of the employees.
“Criticizing Project Nimbus has made people targets,” said Rachel Westrick, a software engineer at Google, who said she supported the letter. Westrick said she also wanted the company to condemn violence against Palestinians, as it did with the Hamas attack, and address the racism she says her colleagues have experienced.
The company has said that Google’s role in Nimbus involves providing services for common government agency work and does not apply to highly sensitive or classified projects.
Calls to abandon Nimbus and other efforts to boycott the country are seen by supporters of Israel as hostile to the Jewish state. Jewish and Israeli workers also said the language their colleagues used was deeply offensive, particularly when Israel’s actions in Gaza were described as “genocide.”
An Israeli employee said she believed the company had allowed many pro-Hamas statements to spread unchecked within Google’s internal communications platforms. Google is slower to internally acknowledge anything related to Israel, in this worker’s opinion, compared to topics like Black Lives Matter and violence against Asian Americans.
Three people said a worker had been fired after writing on an internal company forum that Israelis living near Gaza “deserved to be affected.”
The company issued a statement condemning Hamas on October 7 and a few days later told Jewish employees that it was monitoring internal platforms for anti-Semitism and promised to take action, including firing violators, if necessary.
The following week, in an email to staff, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, acknowledged that Jewish employees were “experiencing an increase in anti-Semitic incidents” and that Palestinian, Arab and Muslim employees were “We are deeply affected by a worrying rise in Islamophobia and watch with horror as Palestinian civilians in Gaza have suffered significant losses and fear for their lives amid the escalating war and humanitarian crisis.”
But the employees behind Wednesday’s letter say this is not enough: “We demand that Sundar Pichai, Thomas Kurian and other Google leaders issue public condemnation of the ongoing genocide in the strongest possible terms,” it reads. Kurian is the CEO of Google’s cloud computing business.
Supporters of the Palestinians in Meta also feel they face unfair treatment. A handful of workers reported that on Workplace, Meta’s internal communications platform, posts that included the phrase “pray for Palestine” or otherwise expressed support for the Palestinians (without mentioning Hamas) were being flagged for removal. internally, according to two employees who shared the messages with The Times.
Around the same time that Meta workers were experiencing internal difficulties, the company said a “bug” in its code (a poor translation from Arabic) had led to the word “terrorist” being inserted into some users’ Instagram bios. whether they included the word “Palestine” or an emoji of the Palestinian flag. The Washington Post and 404 Media technology/2023/10/22/google-amazon-meta-gaza-israel-contracts/” title=”” rel=”noopener noreferrer” target=”_blank”>earlier reported about some of the problems in Meta.
A Meta spokesman declined to comment.
Gilani said he couldn’t understand what, if anything, he could say at work about what he considered the killing of innocent civilians.
He knows the risks of speaking out on such a divisive topic, thanks in part to an experience he had in 2014. After being repeatedly stopped by airport security, he filed a Freedom of Information Act request to try to find out if he was in a watch list. But instead of getting the information, he was approached and questioned by the FBI at the Google offices.
But now, he said, he worries that retaliation against Muslim employees is having a chilling effect on discourse at Google, and he has developed a playbook on how to talk about the issue at work: Condemn Hamas and Move On.
“It seems like you have to condemn Hamas 10 times before you say one little thing criticizing Israel.”
