A Google employee was fired after protesting against Israel

• Google has confirmed that it has fired an employee who publicly protested against Israel.
• The worker stood up and shouted during the presentation presented by the managing director of Google in Israel.
• The employee was protesting Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract Google has with the Israeli government.

A Google engineer who publicly protested a Google chief speaking in Israel is now out of a job.

The employee demonstrated during a presentation by Barak Regev, managing director of Google Israel, on Monday in New York City.

The worker shouted, “I'm a software engineer at Google, and I refuse to build technology that supports genocide, apartheid, or surveillance.” Videos of this event.

Google confirmed that the company fired the employee To CNBC Friday.

“Earlier this week, an employee disrupted a co-worker who was giving a presentation, interfering with an official company-sponsored event,” the company said in a statement. the edge. “This behavior is not acceptable, regardless of the issue, and the employee has been terminated for violating our policies.”

Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider on Saturday.

Regev was speaking at Mind the Tech, an annual Israeli technology conference held in New York City. The employee was protesting Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion cloud computing contract between Google, Amazon and the Israeli government.

Google employees have previously expressed concerns over concerns that Israel may use the contract to support its military. Google executives have claimed that the contract is not being used to support military action.

The employee said in the video: “The Nimbus project exposes members of the Palestinian community to danger.”

More than 100 people, including Google employees, protested the project outside Google's New York office in 2022 after the resignation of Ariel Koren, an employee who spoke out against Project Nimbus.

Google workers also flooded the company's employee message board with comments about Project Nimbus on Thursday, CNBC reported. The forum was scheduled to be used to submit questions to Google executives for the International Women's Day summit on the same day, according to the outlet.

The report says Google shut down the forum over the comments, which a company spokesperson said was “divisive content and damaging to our workplace.”

Monday's incident comes after the entire YouTube Music team was fired last week. The Alphabet Labor Union, which represents workers at Google's parent company, He said That the team was laid off before they went to an Austin City Council meeting to promote a resolution calling on Google to bargain with them.

A Google spokesperson told Business Insider that Cognizant, a professional services company through which Alphabet hired the YouTube Music team, is responsible for terminating workers, not Google.

“Contracts with our suppliers across the company routinely expire at their normal expiration date, which was agreed upon with Cognizant,” the company said in a statement.

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet and Google, is facing recent calls for his resignation following the company's recent failures in artificial intelligence innovation. Google recently shut down its AI-powered image generator, Gemini, after it created historically inaccurate images.

On February 28, Axel Springer, the parent company of Business Insider, joined 31 other media groups and filed a $2.3 billion lawsuit against Google in Dutch court, alleging losses it suffered due to the company's advertising practices.