New York, March 9 (RHC)-- The calls for the ban on participation of Israel in international sports competitions have gained momentum amid the genocide in Gaza and murder of many Palestinian athletes.

Ubeid had graduated from a Google-funded coding boot camp, Gaza Sky Geeks, and later interned at a firm that was part of the Google for Startups accelerator program in 2020.  She had muscular dystrophy and, as such, used a wheelchair to get around.  However, according to several employees who spoke at the vigil, Google declined to publicly or internally acknowledge her killing by the Israeli regime or condemn it.

Mohammad Khatami, a Google software engineer and one of the organizers of the vigil, said the silence of the company and the chief executive, Sundar Pichai, on Ubeid’s death, was “a betrayal in the purest sense of the word.”

“No e-mail, no difficulty, no decision, no public statement and absolutely no shame,” Khatami said at the vigil just outside Google’s offices.  “Shame on [Pichai] and shame on Google.”

Less than a month into Israel’s war on Gaza, more than 1,700 Amazon employees presented CEO Andy Jassy with a petition calling for the company to “rescind all contracts with the Israeli military and call for an immediate, durable, and sustained ceasefire.”

At around the same time, an anonymous open letter was distributed internally by anti-Nimbus Google workers through company e-mail lists that said Project Nimbus was contributing to Israel’s human rights abuses against Palestinians.

“Through Project Nimbus, Google is complicit in the mass surveillance and other human rights abuses which Palestinians have been subject to daily for the past 75 years, and which is the root cause of the violence initiated on October 7th,” the letter said.  “If we do not speak out now, we are complicit in what history will remember as a genocide.”

The anti-Nimbus campaign reveals a significant shift in the face of the US tech industry’s strong business ties to Israel. It also reflects a broader trend among Americans, who have increasingly called for Joe Biden’s administration to stop its unwavering support for Israel and put an end to the genocide in Gaza.

An Amazon employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect his job, was quoted by media as saying that support is growing for their bid to kill the Nimbus contract with Israel.

“I’ve been seeing a lot more solidarity and sympathy even among people who are not traditionally political,” said the employee.