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Note: israel is intentionally lowercase throughout this letter out of disrespect.
Assalamu alaikum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatu
To my Muslim brothers and sisters, I offer this essay as a sincere naseeha (advice, نصيحة). I ask Allah to guide us to whatever is most pleasing to Him. I encourage you to read this in full, even if you disagree with me. It is the least you can do for our brothers and sisters in Palestine. Non-Muslims may also find benefit in this paper, and I encourage everyone to read it.
My name is Hasan Ibraheem and I am a former Google software engineer. On April 16th 2024, I joined my colleagues and participated in a worker led sit-in against Google’s involvement in the Palestinian genocide. I was arrested at my own office and fired the next day.
The Prophet ﷺ said:
“Whoso- ever of you sees an evil, let him change it with his hand; and if he is not able to do so, then [let him change it] with his tongue; and if he is not able to do so, then with his heart — and that is the weakest of faith.”
Source: 40 Hadith an-Nawawi, Hadith 34
Unmasking Evil
We are taught as Muslims, that we must do whatever we can when we see an evil. Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are all deeply entrenched in their direct support for the genocide against Palestinians due to their prioritization of profit over human lives. Without them, the scale of the genocide would not be what it is. Google and Amazon’s Project Nimbus contract exemplifies evil.
Project Nimbus is a 1.2 billion dollar contract that provides the israeli government, and specifically the military, with cloud infrastructure and AI services. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Oracle were all bidding for the contract, with Google and Amazon eventually winning the bid in 2021 [1]. Before Project Nimbus, Microsoft provided the vast majority of cloud services for the israeli government [2]. Even after the contract, most of the israeli government infrastructure still runs on Azure [3].
Since July 2022, we’ve known that Nimbus includes all of the ML and AI tools available through Google Cloud. That includes facial detection, automated image categorization, object tracking, and sentiment analysis of photos [4]. And while the No Tech for Apartheid campaign believed since the signing of this contract that there existed a strong tie between Nimbus and the military – a leaked copy of the Nimbus contract confirmed the israeli military as a direct signing party in April 2024 [5]. While Google to this day continues to downplay the military aspects of this contract - there is no doubt that Google and Amazon are handing their technology directly over to the people committing genocide.
We had our sit-in on April 16th 2024 which brought more media attention to the cause and prompted more investigations to take place. In July, we discovered that Google sponsored a conference called “IT for IDF”. When asked about their sponsorship, Google removed themselves from the website. They denied ever sponsoring the conference even in the face of screenshots showing otherwise. They had previously sponsored the conference in 2023 [6].
Thanks to an investigation by +972 Magazine [7], we know that at the “IT for IDF” conference, an israeli commander talked about how they specifically used Google, Amazon, and Microsoft’s cloud storage and AI services for the genocide. All three of their logos appeared front and center during the presentation. The companies were praised for their AI services and the ability to rapidly purchase much more storage without having to physically build the servers themselves as the military had done before. AWS in particular stores surveillance on almost everyone in Gaza.
The investigation is also full of quotes from different israeli military officers saying that the amount of data they have could be stored “only in companies such as Amazon, Google, or Microsoft”. They call the AI services provided by these companies “irreplaceable”. If the people responsible for the war crimes are praising these tech giants, it's undeniable that they are the backbone of this genocide and are responsible for the infrastructure that allows it to continue.
There was a conference dedicated to Project Nimbus in February 2024 where the head of israel’s “National Cyber Directorate” said that “phenomenal things are happening in battle because of the Nimbus public cloud, things that are impactful for victory” [8]. They brag about how useful Google and Amazon have been in the genocide against Palestinians.
In January 2025, a report showed how Google increased their sale of specific AI tools, including their AI assistant Gemini, to the israeli military specifically after October 7th [9]. A similar report on Microsoft showed that the military’s use of Azure AI services was 64 times greater by March 2024 than prior to October 7th [10]. These companies race to compete in who can be the biggest aide to genocide.
It is clear that there is no line these companies will not cross. These companies are tech arms dealers, and each one is worse than the next. The scale of this genocide is a direct result of the support of these companies who prioritize profit over human lives.
If you work for them, as I once did, you cannot turn away. This is now your problem too
Inaction is Complicity
You can try and convince yourself, like I did for some time, that the piece of code you’re writing is so far removed from the contract that you aren’t actually doing any harm. Or that the team you're managing doesn’t contribute to anything that would be part of the contract. But what would you say about a janitor who sweeps the floors of a bomb factory? What about the person who cleans the bathrooms at Lockheed Martin? Would you not say any job at a weapons manufacturer is supporting it?
My Thought Process
When I first learned about Project Nimbus while I was at Google, I initially tried to convince myself that the code I wrote had nothing to do with the contract. This was easy to do because I worked on a team responsible for hosting machine learning models for ads. I told myself that this contract had nothing to do with ads, and my money was fine. But something kept nagging at me. The inescapable idea, that no matter what I was doing at Google, I still had some share of its actions.
The majority of Google’s money comes from ads. The money from ads supports parts of the company that would otherwise not be profitable on their own. Google Cloud is one such example since it was unprofitable until 2023. Before that, it was being supported by the money that Google Ads brought in. So even though my work is entirely unrelated to the cloud that the military uses, my work benefited the company and allowed it to take on the contract.
All workers are complicit
Even services like Google Translate, Maps, GMail, Calendar, and many others serve to improve Google's public image. They make people reliant on Google, and make us dismiss the idea of boycotting them as too difficult. These services can also be abused directly. Google Photos is actually used by the IDF thanks to its facial recognition feature that groups faces together across photos. Google has done nothing to stop this [11].
For Google Cloud, AWS, or Azure employees this connection is a lot easier to make—the israeli military is directly paying your org. It is undeniable that part of your salary, no matter how small, is paid for in blood. Regardless of your day to day work, your labor still benefits a company that is actively arming the zionist occupation, killing Palestinians and stealing their homes.
Supporters of the Oppressors
There’s a khutbah by Imam Omar Suleiman where he talks about oppressors, and the supporters of the oppressors. He brings up a narration of when Imam Ahmad ibn Hanbal was in prison. His prison guard asked him if, as a prison guard, he would be considered a supporter of the oppressor. Imam Ahmad said “No. Those that support oppressors are the one who cuts your hair, the one who prepares your food, the one who washes your clothes, and the one who buys and sells from you. But as for you, you yourself are an oppressor.”
I believed that working at Google was at the bare minimum, aiding the oppressors. I did not want any amount of this genocide to be written down in my deeds on the day of judgment. If you’ve seen the destruction, the burning bodies, the lost limbs, the leveled buildings, the children who have lost everything. If you’ve seen all that, how could you accept any amount of it being tied to you?
I believed that while I remained employed, I had to do everything I could to fight against the oppression.
What can you do?
If you choose to do nothing at all after learning about your company's involvement in the genocide, then you are giving your approval to the actions your company is taking. So what do you do? As someone working at a company that is facilitating the genocide, you have a responsibility to do everything you can to stop it.
Organizing
You must join the other workers who are raising their voices against their employer for their support of this genocide. Whether you work at Google, Amazon, or Microsoft, there is a group of people who would love for you to join them. It starts with educating your coworkers about the company’s involvement in genocide. Send out petitions for your coworkers to sign. Organize an event to teach more people. Share news articles about your company's complicity. The more workers you educate, the more who will be willing to stand against the company.
This isn’t a pointless endeavor either. This is how we achieve change. We need internal pressure as well as external pressure. The only thing these companies care about is money. So we need to increase the cost of having these contracts and supporting genocide. We do that by increasing the number of workers voicing their anger. We do that by refusing to work on the systems being used for genocide. We do that by leaving to work somewhere else.
Only when the cost of dealing with genocide exceeds the profit they make, will these companies stop. Whether you believe this is possible or not, it is your obligation as a Muslim to act. You are not judged on whether your actions achieve your goals. Rather you are judged on whether you did the actions at all. The outcome is up to Allah.
Are you afraid of losing your job? Should you not be more afraid of staying silent while your labor goes towards enabling a genocide?
In a longer hadith (Bukhari 3208), we learn that our rizq is already predetermined for us before we are born. Rizq encompasses your money, and all provisions that are given to you beyond wealth. With your rizq already being set, it is then up to you where you get it from.
You might believe that by staying at your job, you're preventing zionists from filling your role. But if you aren't actively working against the oppression taking place, you're no better than a zionist in your role. Your silence empowers people to continue their oppression.
Quit or get fired
It does not make sense to believe your company is implicated in this genocide, but also believe it is fine to work for them without action. If you do not organize, you must leave. And even if you organize, your goal should be to eventually leave. Organizing does not absolve you of complicity indefinitely.
If you leave your job for the sake of Allah, you will surely be given something greater.
The Prophet ﷺ said:
“Verily, you will never leave anything for the sake of Allah Almighty but that Allah will replace it with something better for you.”
Source: Musnad Ahmad 23074
Start searching for a new job. Most of you reading this heard about the sit-in and my firing. If you began searching for a new job from that point, you would have likely found a job by now. You were able to get your current job, and inshallah you will get another. You just have to make a serious effort with the intention that you are leaving for the sake of Allah.
If you leave, do not leave silently. Send an email to your team, to your org, to anyone who will listen. Tell them why you are leaving. Tell them to read this letter. You have the chance to inform others of the Palestinian blood that is spilled for their paychecks.
The real biggest impact you can have for the cause is not to quit loudly, but to get fired. If you can organize with others to make enough noise about the company’s support of genocide that you force them to fire you, it will draw attention. You will have opportunities to share the story with media outlets, and to have a larger impact than you ever could while still at the company.
You will inspire others and become a part of something bigger than yourself.
Please join No Tech For Apartheid for Google/Amazon or No Azure For Apartheid for Microsoft.
If you’ve read the whole thing, thank you. You can reach out to me at hasan [at] h-i.dev