Far-left activists working inside major U.S. tech companies are waging an anti-Semitic Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel in response to Israel defending itself from Palestinian terrorist attacks last month.
The push for the anti-Semitic BDS campaign comes after Palestinian terrorist organizations — Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad — launched more than 4,300 rockets at Israel last month with approximately 680 falling inside of Gaza. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) responded by launching targeted strikes against the terror groups, resulting in the deaths of more than 200 terrorists, as well as the destruction of more than 60 miles of underground tunnels they were using.
The activist tech workers “are strategizing with outside activists over the best way to agitate against cloud contracts with the Israeli government,” Politico reported. “A May 21 webinar for activists interested in demilitarization in the Palestinian territories, which BDS organized, included a breakout room devoted entirely to tech worker activism on the issue.”
An employee at Google who was part of organizing the activist’s efforts said that what is happening is “a broader reckoning within the technology industry about its involvement in Israel.”
The report noted that Microsoft “divested” from an Israeli firm after activists within the company pressured them to do so last year. The report said that activists inside Google and Amazon were trying to pressure their companies into canceling major contracts with Israel’s government. Amazon is currently in talks to set up three data centers in Israel while Google is setting up a new Google Cloud region in Israel.
“A major target of pro-Palestinian activists’ ire is a $1.2 billion cloud contract called Project Nimbus, which the Israeli government awarded to Amazon and Google last month,” the report added. “Though public information about the contract is scarce, Israel has said the companies will help provide cloud services to government agencies and the Israeli Defense Force. Shahar Bracha, the acting CEO of a technology-focused unit within the Israeli prime minister’s office, lauded Amazon’s cloud-computing unit and Google as ‘the Rolls-Royce and the Maserati of the cloud world.’”
Maria Jeffrey Reynolds, a spokesperson for Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), said in a statement that the activists inside the tech companies were “a bunch of privileged people in Silicon Valley” who were pushing their companies “to participate in the anti-Israel BDS movement.”
The U.S. government late last year recognized “the global anti-Israel BDS campaign as anti-Semitic,” then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said. “We want to stand with all other nations that recognize that the BDS movement for the cancer that it is and we’re committed to combatting it.”
NGO Monitor responded to the announcement by saying in a statement:
The equating of BDS with antisemitism echoes the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, which defines attempts to deny “the Jewish people their right to self-determination” and apply “double standards” as antisemitic.
Combating antisemitism and ending the exploitation of universal human rights are both issues of great importance, and the need to address these objectives should transcend political divisions. In this context, NGO Monitor has called for governments, as well as NGOs, to adopt the IHRA working definition of antisemitism.
“The founding goals of the BDS movement, and many of the strategies employed in BDS campaigns, are fundamentally anti-Semitic,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, ADL CEO. “The vast and swift support for these bipartisan resolutions from across the board critically demonstrates the true priority for Americans is working toward a peaceful two-state solution with Israel as a Jewish state.”
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Source: Dailywire
