Anti-Defamation League Pushes Google to Reject Review of Human Rights Abuses

The Anti-Defamation League is lobbying Alphabet, the parent company of Google, to vote down a shareholder proposal that would require the company to investigate whether its cloud services (specifically Project Nimbus, which is a contract with the Israeli government) are aiding human rights abuses in conflict zones (you know, like Gaza). Alphabet is expected to vote on the proposal at its next shareholder meeting on June 6th.

This week, the ADL sent a letter to Alphabet in which it described the proposal as a “ploy” by the Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions movement, which has long sought to curb American aid to the Israeli war machine. “Proposal 9 offers the pretense of concern for human rights when in fact it is a thinly disguised ploy to weaken Israel’s national security — and to undermine its right to defend itself — by pressuring Alphabet to withhold vital technology that supports the country’s self-defense capabilities,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO and National Director of the Anti-Defamation League.

Nimbus is described by Google as “cloud services to digitally transform the State of Israel.” What Nimbus is actually used for is still somewhat unclear. It is a cloud and AI system, so ostensibly it could be used for a lot of different things. Human rights groups have repeatedly asked for more information about the project, to no avail. Google isn’t the only large U.S. company involved in the project. Amazon is another major stakeholder that has provided cloud infrastructure.

Inside the company, concerns have swirled over whether Israel’s increasingly genocidal policies against the Palestinians may lead to legal action against Google for its complicity in the carnage. In December, the New York Times reported that company lawyers were concerned that “Google Cloud services could be used for, or linked to, the facilitation of human rights violations, including Israeli activity in the West Bank.”

Over the past year, Israel has decimated the Palestinian population in Gaza, leading to widespread condemnations of “genocide” and to war crime charges filed by the International Criminal Court against the nation’s leader, Benjamin Netanyahu. Some 50,000 Palestinians have reportedly been killed as a result of Israel’s assault, the majority of whom have been women and children, according to one UN estimate. Amidst its blitzkrieg of the region, Israel has targeted journalists and healthcare workers with impunity and has openly targeted hospitals and other critical infrastructure. The government recently announced plans to permanently occupy and “flatten” all of Gaza.

Google’s corporate kerfuffle over the Nimbus-related shareholder proposal also comes at the same time that The Intercept has revealed the degree to which the company intuited that Nimbus could prove problematic before it ever provided services to the Israeli government. The information is based on a confidential internal report from 2021 that showed executives’ anxieties about the potential for the deal to spin out of the tech company’s control. “Google Cloud Services could be used for, or linked to, the facilitation of human rights violations, including Israeli activity in the West Bank,” resulting in “reputation harm,” Google worried.

Even more problematically, Google worried that it would have a limited ability to control what Israel did with Nimbus. Due to the way in which the deal was structured, the project—once in Israel’s hands—would largely be beyond Google’s control. The report states that the company would “be constrained by the terms of the tender, as Customers are entitled to use services for any reason except violation of applicable law to the Customer.”

The Intercept article also makes clear the degree to which the Nimbus deal has wedded Google to the Israeli national security state. The article notes that the contract obligated the creation of a secret Israeli team within Google that was capable of handling the covert nature of the effort:

…Project Nimbus entails a deep collaboration between Google and the Israeli security state through the creation of a Classified Team within Google. This team is made up of Israeli nationals within the company with security clearances, designed to “receive information by [Israel] that cannot be shared with [Google].” Google’s Classified Team “will participate in specialized training with government security agencies,” the first report states, as well as “joint drills and scenarios tailored to specific threats.”

Google has spent years attempting to tamp down criticism (both from inside its own ranks and from outside groups) over its ties to the Israeli government. Concerned Googlers have frequently lobbied for the tech giant to cut ties with Project Nimbus. Meanwhile, groups like No Tech for Apartheid have continually sought to condemn the project and its potential role in the ongoing atrocities being committed by the Israeli government. Publicly, Google has never expressed anything approaching concern, maintaining that Nimbus is a critical program for a key ally in the Middle East.