Google fires 28 workers for protesting $1.2 billion Israel contract

Google has fired more than two dozen employees for protesting its $1.2 billion contract to provide the Israeli government and military with cloud and artificial intelligence services.

Twenty-eight people were fired after nine employees were arrested Tuesday night following a sit-in at the company’s offices in Seattle, New York and Sunnyvale, California — including one at Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian’s office, according to the group that organized the demonstration, No Tech for Apartheid.

Protesters sat in his office for more than nine hours, wearing shirts and raising banners that read “No more genocide for profit,” until they were eventually arrested.

It is the latest high-profile clash in the U.S. stoked by tensions over the Israel-Hamas war.

“These protests were part of a longstanding campaign by a group of organizations and people who largely don’t work at Google," a Google spokesperson said in a statement Wednesday.

"A small number of employee protesters entered and disrupted a few of our locations. Physically impeding other employees’ work and preventing them from accessing our facilities is a clear violation of our policies, and completely unacceptable behavior. After refusing multiple requests to leave the premises, law enforcement was engaged to remove them to ensure office safety," the statement said.

"We have so far concluded individual investigations that resulted in the termination of employment for 28 employees, and will continue to investigate and take action as needed," it added.

The protests were led by No Tech for Apartheid, a group of tech workers who have been demanding Amazon and Google drop their Project Nimbus, which is a joint $1.2 billion contract providing the Israeli government and military with cloud infrastructure, artificial intelligence services and data centers.

No Tech for Apartheid said that the workers had engaged in a “peaceful sit-in and refusing to leave did not damage property or threaten other workers” and that Google had fired them “indiscriminately.”

“This excuse to avoid confronting us and our concerns directly, and attempt to justify its illegal, retaliatory firings, is a lie,” it said in a statement late Wednesday, accusing the company of valuing its contract with the Israeli government more than its employees.

Google issued a stern warning to its employees, with the company’s vice president of global security, Chris Rackow, saying, “If you’re one of the few who are tempted to think we’re going to overlook conduct that violates our policies, think again,” according to an internal memo obtained by CNBC.

The company also said its work "is not directed at highly sensitive, classified, or military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services.”

“Google Cloud supports numerous governments around the world in countries where we operate, including the Israeli government, with our generally available cloud computing services,” a Google spokesperson told CNBC on Wednesday evening.

The Israeli prime minister's office and the Israel Defense Forces did not immediately respond to requests for comment from NBC News.

The workers were also protesting labor conditions at the company — saying the contract was affecting “health and safety on the job” — and what they said was Google’s disregard “for the well-being of our Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim colleagues facing Google-enabled racism, discrimination, harassment, and censorship.”

The project has become a “major health & safety workplace conditions issue,” with many employees quitting after having cited “mental health consequences of working at a company that is using their labor to enable a genocide,” the group said in a statement posted Wednesday on Medium.

“On a personal level, I am opposed to Google taking any military contracts — no matter which government they’re with or what exactly the contract is about,” Cheyne Anderson, a Google Cloud software engineer based in Washington, told CNBC on Wednesday.

Anderson was one of the nine workers arrested across the country Tuesday, with some of the arrests streamed live on Twitch.

Four people were arrested for “trespassing” inside Google’s New York office, a New York police spokesperson told NBC News on Wednesday. Almost 50 protesters had taken part in the demonstration, the spokesperson said.

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com