UKLFI has warned Amazon and Google that anti-Israel NGOs appear to be behind a campaign by “anonymous workers” to persuade them to cancel a billion dollar contract to supply Israel with cloud computing services.

Anonymous Amazon and Google workers’ supposedly wrote a letter to the Guardian claiming 300 Amazon workers and 90 from Google had signed a letter calling on Amazon and Google to drop the cloud contract, which is known as Nimbus.

UKLFI has now written to Amazon and Google with information that undermines the claim that this campaign that was started by workers at Amazon and Google.

The time line indicates that the campaign was co-ordinated by anti-Israel NGOs.

On 12 October  at 11.45 BST NBC News  published an op-ed by two Amazon and Google workers, which attacked the Nimbus contract. One of the co-authors was Bathool Syed, a content strategist at Amazon, whose  Instagram page links directly to a website called  notechforapartheid.com.

A letter in the Guardian was published on Tuesday 12 October at 17.15 BST, by “anonymous Google and Amazon workers”, which stated that “So far, more than 90 workers at Google and more than 300 at Amazon have signed this letter internally “.  Since the signatories were anonymous there was of course no proof of who or how many people actually signed the letter.

The  “No Tech for Apartheid” website was launched on 13 October at https://www.notechforapartheid.com/, and it  appeared to be in response to the Guardian article. The website urges people to add their names to an automatically generated email to these Amazon and Google executives, demanding that they should pull out of the Nimbus contract.

The Wayback Machine web archive shows that the activity on the website began on Wednesday 13 October 2021 at 14.43 BST.  (screenshot at A4).

The “No Tech for Apartheid” website is professionally designed and contains a great deal of content, including long articles from five different Palestinians describing “life under apartheid”. On 13 October it contained endorsements from 40 anti-Israel organisations.

It would be impossible for such a website to have been prepared in just one day. The domain Notechforapartheid.com was actually created on 17 August 2021, one month before the letter in the Guardian was published. (Appendix A3) It was published by Jewish Voice for Peace (an anti-Israel organisation) and M Powerchange.org – which describes itself as “the largest Muslim digital advocacy organization in the U.S.” These appear to be the organisations behind the so called workers’ campaign to stop the Nimbus contract.

Rather than a campaign led by workers within Google and Amazon against the Nimbus contract, this appears to be a co-ordinated campaign by anti-Israel organisations and activists which started well before the letter to the Guardian.

Caroline Turner, UKLFI director commented:  “This campaign appears to be another attempt by anti-Israel groups to undermine the only democratic and inclusive country in the Middle East. We hope that Google and Amazon will disregard it.”