Newspapers today report with great emphasis, and often with raised eyebrows, the incidents at La Sapienza University for Palestine. Yesterday there were clashes between some students and the police after the academic senate confirmed scientific collaboration with Israel. A dynamic already seen in other universities in recent days and which does not seem destined to abate.
In the same hours in the United States, dozens of Google employees started a sit-it protest in offices in New York, San Francisco, Sunnyvale and Seattle to ask to stop collaboration with Israel. In particular they refer to a project called Nimbus through which Google and Amazon provide the cloud infrastructure to the Israeli armed forces who then use it to continue the occupation of Gaza which so far has led to the death of over 34 thousand civilians and led to two million people starve. “No Tech for Apartheied” is the slogan of the protesters.
It is not the first time that Google employees, and Silicon Valley in general, have fought against it a military use of their technologies. A couple of years ago there was a sensational protest over a contract with the Pentagon, and therefore with the American Defense, which was frozen. And the English startup DeepMind, which Google bought a few years ago and which is today the engine of its artificial intelligence, made the certainty that there would be no military uses among the conditions for the sale. In short, the protest of these hours has roots that come from Californian pacifist counterculture and it is certainly finding new insights in the many employees of Arab origin in Silicon Valley companies.
But it’s not just this: the protest is also supported by a very active organization in the United States called Jews for Peace. One month ago a Google Cloud engineer, Eddie Hatfield, was fired for interrupting a conference while the head of Google Israel was speaking: “I refuse to develop technology that helps commit genocide,” the engineer shouted. Three days later a top Google executive resigned, the first of several. While ad Apple some employees were threatened with reprisals for speaking out solidarity with the Palestinian people with a brooch, a bracelet or a keffiyeh. Those who dismiss the protests on our campuses as the senseless actions of a small group of extremists are missing something.