An Amazon employee based in the US this week railed against what he deemed the company’s support of Israeli military actions devastating Palestinian territories. He was quickly let go.
Ahmed Shahrour, an Amazon software engineer based in Seattle, on Monday made a lengthy post to multiple internal Slack channels at a little after 8 am Pacific Time, addressed to all company employees. In captures of the post shared with me, Shahrour noted some of his work over more than three years at Amazon, like working on its Alexa product and app, and on technical products for Whole Foods, the grocery chain that Amazon owns. He explained his pride at working for the company, feeling that working there meant he was helping “drive innovation” in the world.
“That belief has been shattered,” Shahrour wrote.
It started to falter in the wake of the Oct. 7 2023 terrorist attack on Israel, according to the post, when Amazon CEO Andy Jassy “sent an email expressing sympathy for Israeli hostages without a single acknowledgment of Palestinian life.” Although Shahrour worked in Seattle, he wrote that his family lives on the West Bank, a large Palestinian territory that is being severely impacted amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas War. He referred to Jassy’s email and a similar public post to X from the CEO as “a blatant act of white supremacy, signaling that brown lives are worth less. My family is less. I am less.” (His message is in full below the story).
While Shahrour’s message reads like a clear-eyed act of personal protest, amid the Israel-Hamas war, the internal culture for employees at major companies like Amazon has turned from one that for years mostly welcomed and even encouraged broad employee conversations to allegedly censorious, particularly when the topic is political. Last month, Microsoft fired several employees after they protested the company’s Azure cloud service being used by the Israeli military to host recordings of phone calls made by civilians in Palestinian territories. Last year, a group of employees at Meta wrote a letter to CEO Mark Zuckerberg claiming that any internal posts support of people in or from Palestinian territories was being almost immediately deleted. Not long after, a group of Google employees was fired after protesting the company’s work on Project Nimbus, a contract for cloud services for the Israeli government.
Amazon’s AWS is also part of the contract for Project Nimbus. Shahrour criticized the contract on Monday as one that supports “critical cloud infrastructure for the Israeli Defense Forces, Israeli Aerospace Industries and Rafael Advanced Defense Systems,” claiming further that Amazon’s “technology subsidizes this genocide.” Groups like Amnesty International and a UN special committee, as well as human rights groups within Israel, have defined Israel’s actions in the war as a genocide. Israel says it is engaged in self-defense.
Shahrour’s post said that at least one of his colleagues had been fired for internal statements in support of Palestinian people, while another received a written warning for doing so. Within the morning of his post, Shahrour’s messages were deleted and his employee profiles with the company were deactivated, leading colleagues to state on Slack that he was fired. A current Amazon employee told me the same, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal.
Brad Glasser, a spokesperson for Amazon, when asked about Shahrour told me: “We don’t tolerate discrimination, harassment, or threatening behavior or language of any kind in our workplace, and when any conduct of that nature is reported, we investigate it and take appropriate action based on our findings.”
During almost two years of the Israel-Hamas War, at least 75 Israelis have been reported as taken hostage and killed by Hamas, with another 40 Israelis still held captive. Meanwhile, the United Nations human rights chief on Monday condemned Israel for the “mass killing” of civilians during the war and the “hindering of sufficient lifesaving aid”, saying the country had a case to answer before the International Court of Justice. As of July, more than 60,000 people in the Palestinian territories have died as a result of Israeli attacks, most of them civilians, according to several reports and estimates.
Shahrour said that some efforts to go through internal channels and express his and other employee grievances regarding Amazon’s Nimbus contract were not effective over the last year. Those efforts included an employee petition that garnered 1,700 signatures calling on Jassy and Amazon to drop its contracts that involve the Israeli military. The petition was “ignored,” according to Shahrour’s post.
“I am left with no choice but to resist directly,” he added.
Other recent original reporting from me:
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Text of Slack message:
Dear Amazon Workers,
When I first joined Amazon over three years ago, I was a proud Amazon software engineer. I came here driven by a belief in technological brilliance and a desire to be the best engineer Amazon had ever seen. I contributed to Alexa experience and delighted customers directly through the Amazon app, including upgrading the wake word engine for hundreds of thousands of users globally. In my current role at Whole Foods, I build the internal tools that manage recipes for stores worldwide. I believed I was helping drive innovation at a top “FAANG” tech company.
This belief has been shattered.
On October 7th 2023, Israel began its genocide in Gaza. The number of hostages in the West Bank, where my family lives, skyrocketed. Two days later CEO Andy Jassy sent an email expressing sympathy for Israeli hostages without a single acknowledgement of Palestinian life. This was a blatant act of white supremacy signaling that brown lives are worth less. My family is less. I am less.
His public tweet reinforced this hierarchy, offering support only to one side while our humanitarian crisis was rendered invisible. “The attacks against civilians in Israel are shocking and painful to watch. I have been in touch with our teammates there to make sure we do everything we can to help support their family’s and their safety, and to assist however we can in this very difficult time. We’re also in close contact with our humanitarian relief partners on the ground and will be supporting their efforts. Hoping that peace arrives as soon as possible.”
As the genocide ensued, I watched Zionist Amazon employees spew racist vitriol in public Slack channels with impunity. I saw Palestinians referred to as “human animals who deserve nothing but death” and jokes cracked about the terrorist pager attacks in Lebanon. Yet, when Palestinian employees and allies attempted to raise awareness of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, their posts were immediately censored and deleted. A Palestinian worker received a written warning for sharing a CNN article about American doctors volunteering in Gaza — simply because it contained the truth about children being murdered by gunshots to the head. At least one worker was terminated for speaking out.
The racist double standard is not an oversight; it is policy. It protects the perpetrators and silences the victims.
Then I learned the horrifying truth: Amazon is not a neutral observer. We are active participants. Amazons $1.2 billion Project Nimbus contract with the Israeli military and government provides the critical cloud infrastructure (AWS) for the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), Israeli Aerospace Industries (IAI), and Rafael Advanced Defense Systems. The latter two are arms manufacturers directly supplying the bombs that are murdering people who look like me. Project Nimbus powers AI systems like Lavender and Habsora, which automate targets and facilitate the mass killing of civilians in Gaza. Our technology subsidizes this genocide. The contract guarantees uninterrupted service — even amid ongoing war crimes — ensuring the IDF has the low-latency infrastructure needed for its genocidal assault.
The profound moral shock of Amazon’s complicity plunged me into a period of deep despair, to the point where I nearly resigned without plan. However, a colleague helped me realize that abandoning my post inly serves Amazon shareholders and executives profiting off of the project the project to perpetrate the genocide; the more powerful act is to stay and organize with my fellow workers to dismantle Project Nimbus from within.
We the workers have tried the appropriate channels. We circulated a petition that gathered 1,700 Amazonian signatures, calling on Andy Jassy to rescind all contracts with the Israeli military and demand an immediate, durable ceasefire. It was ignored. We have submitted shareholder proposals, like the 2024 call for an independent investigation of AWS customers committing human rights abuses. It was rejected.
Working within this framework of white supremacy has only suffocated our voices while the people of Gaza are becoming extinct.
Every day I write code at Whole Foods, I remember my brothers and sisters in Gaza being starved by Israel’s man-made blockade. I live in a state of constant dissonance: maintaining the tools that make this company profit, while my people are burned and starved with the help of that very profit.
I am left with no choice but to resist directly.
To the Amazon executives incubating Project Nimbus: do yourselves a favor and drop it. We, the workers, outnumber you. We will force your hand. We are done using your channels. A new, worker-led Palestinian resistance is forming at Amazon.
To my worker comrades, we truly have two choices, either find a new job at an entity/institution/corporation that is not complicit in this genocide or we organize to dismantle Nimbus. “Learn and be curious” by talking to me and your local community members just outside the re:invent building next to the spheres in downtown Seattle during lunch. We’re flyering!
Ahmed