E-commerce giant Amazon has suspended a software engineer who spoke against the company’s collaboration with the government of Israel.
Ahmed Shahrour, a Palestinian engineer based in Seattle working for Amazon’s Whole Foods, was told on Monday morning that he had been suspended with pay “until further notice” after posting messages on Slack criticising the company’s work with Israel, according to a report by CNBC.
“It has come to Amazon’s attention that a post you made in multiple internal company Slack channels may violate multiple policies,” the report quoted an Amazon human resources representative’s message. The e-commerce major informed in a message that it’s investigating the incident.
In an interview with CNBC, Shahrour, who has been working at Amazon for the past three years, said that the company revoked his access to the official email and tools and removed his Slack posts as part of the suspension. He claimed that Amazon didn’t state what policies his posts violated.
What did Shahrour write against Amazon?
Shahrour wrote messages in several internal Slack channels and sent a letter to Amazon executives, including CEO Andy Jassy, on Monday, highlighting his concerns.
He asked Amazon to call off Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion cloud computing contract launched in 2021 by Amazon and Google to supply the Israeli government with artificial intelligence tools, data centres, and other infrastructure.
“Every day I write code at Whole Foods, I remember my brothers and sisters in Gaza being starved by Israel’s man-made blockade,” the report quoted Shahrour’s letter.“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,” he added.
It also claims that Amazon has taken steps to “silence” employees who support Palestine and have criticised the war in Gaza.
The letter was previously reported by independent journalist Kali Hays. Livemint could not independently verify the report.
Details of Nimbus contract
Amazon has not commented on the Nimbus contract beyond saying it supplies technology to customers “wherever they are based”. Google has previously stated that it offers widely available cloud computing services to the Israeli government, which are not “directed at highly sensitive, classified, or military workloads.”
What did Amazon say?
Without directly referring to Shahrour’s letter, Amazon spokesperson Brad Glasser wrote in an email to CNBC, “We don’t tolerate discrimination, harassment, or threatening behaviour 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.”
Employees at Amazon, Google, Microsoft and other companies are speaking out against business dealings with the Israeli military. Last month, Microsoft dismissed two employees who had taken part in a protest at the company’s headquarters. In April 2024, Google sacked 28 employees following a series of protests over working conditions and its involvement in Project Nimbus. Tech firms have stepped up security at some conferences in recent months, in response to an increase in protests.