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Microsoft's CEO for Israel to Appear at Event Celebrating Israeli Military AI
And an update on our podcast
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On Friday, Israel struck what it claimed was Hezbollah’s center of operations in southern Beirut, aiming to assassinate the organization’s secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah. Israeli Army radio is reporting it used F-35 planes with 2,000-lb. “bunker buster” bombs to hit southern Beirut and cited a senior official saying Israel had informed the U.S. of the strike. Follow our Twitter thread, which will be updated as new reporting emerges, as the event unfolds.
The strike came roughly at the same time Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was addressing the United Nations. Excerpts from his speech, as well as news of the diplomatic boycott by dozens of diplomats, are in the same thread.
Since the start of the war in Gaza, Big Tech has faced increased scrutiny from the public and its own employees about its business dealing with the Israeli military and government. Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, among many other tech firms, have maintained close ties with Israel despite allegations of war crimes in Gaza and indictments targeting senior military and political leaders. This close relationship has included the provision of controversial artificial intelligence and cloud computing software alleged to be employed in Israeli military operations, including in the ongoing war in the Gaza Strip.
Despite a growing backlash, the tech world has remained largely steadfast in maintaining its business relationships in Israel. As our story today by Murtaza Hussain shows, this support has even extended to tech firms like Microsoft sponsoring events honoring branches of the Israeli military involved in the assault on Gaza and sending their corporate representatives to take part.
Covering this subject is often too sensitive for reporters on the tech beat, but we have been relentless in focusing on this nexus of corporate complicity in potential war crimes and plan to continue to cover it in the months and years ahead. All our journalism is free, but if you appreciate this work, please upgrade to a paid subscription.
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Here is today’s story from Murtaza:
Tech companies providing support for Israel’s military have been wracked with internal dissent since the start of Israel’s siege on Gaza—and, now, its barrage of Lebanon.
Microsoft is co-sponsoring a conference in Israel to celebrate the 65th anniversary of the Israeli military's Center of Computing and Information Systems unit, known by its Hebrew acronym Mamram. The conference, called "I Love Mamram," is now scheduled to be held in Tel Aviv in November, after the "security situation" (presumably the growing conflict with Lebanon) pushed the date from September.
I Love Mamram's website features dozens of tech sponsors—including Microsoft, Price Waterhouse Coopers, and Red Hat—and speakers. Microsoft's CEO for Israel, Alon Chaimovitz, is slated to speak alongside a number of Israeli officers on various topics related to leadership and technology. Chaimovitz's topic has a patriotic ring: "How with the help of technology, business models, and real partnerships we will all together help the country move from resilience to growth." Two other representatives of the company will also lead a workshop on Microsoft Copilot, the company's "everyday AI companion."
Microsoft did not respond to a request for comment.
Mamram is not merely a banal IT service provider for the Israeli military. This summer, as reported by the Israeli news outlet +972 Magazine, a commander in the unit confirmed that it was providing cloud data services and artificial intelligence support for the Israeli military offensive in the Gaza Strip. In a speech at the "IT for IDF" conference held just outside of Tel Aviv this July, Racheli Dembinsky, a colonel in the Israeli army and commander in the information systems unit, confirmed that Mamram was assisting the offensive in Gaza through the provision of internal cloud services that she referred to as a "weapons platform" helping facilitate the campaign. Amid the war, Mamram was providing support to the Israeli military in conducting mass surveillance on the population of Gaza in addition to "marking targets for bombings, a portal for viewing live footage from UAVs over Gaza’s skies, as well as fire, command, and control systems," +972 reported.
In the same speech, Dembinsky indicated that cloud services from civilian tech giants, including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, were being employed by the unit for military tasks. After the military's existing technological infrastructure was overwhelmed by the amount of data and intelligence information flowing in during the conflict, services available on contract from tech companies became a stopgap to allow the military to continue operating its platforms. “The crazy wealth of services, big data and AI—we’ve already reached a point where our systems really need it,” Dembinsky said, adding that the services provided “very significant operational effectiveness” during the fighting in Gaza.
Dembinsky is also listed as a speaker at the upcoming conference.
The war in Gaza to date has killed at least 41,000 people, likely a significant undercount according to international medical observers, while destroying civilian infrastructure and rendering the territory largely uninhabitable. The Israeli military campaign has also triggered war crimes cases in both the International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court, amid global protest and condemnation. As a result of this legal and public relations backlash, tech companies with business relationships with the Israeli military have recently sought to distance themselves in public.
This summer, Google, which is partnered with the Israeli government on a controversial cloud computing initiative known as Project Nimbus, quietly pulled out as a sponsor for the "IT for IDF" conference which it had sponsored the previous two years, and where Dembinsky spoke about Mamram's activities this year. Google has been targeted by protests over its collaboration with the Israeli government over Project Nimbus, while firing dozens of its own employees for protesting the deal through sit-ins at its corporate offices.
"These protests are a sign that people are beginning to realize the complicity of many major corporations in what has been taking place in Palestine," said Tariq Ra'ouf an activist and founder of the employee organizing group Apples Against Apartheid. "Project Nimbus really was a red flag for people to begin taking action."
Microsoft too has been hit by internal dissent over its provision of tech services to the Israeli military, with reports from earlier this year describing clashes among employees and management over the company's involvement in the conflict. Along with other tech companies, Microsoft has also drawn scrutiny for matching employee donations to West Bank settlement organizations, as well as organizations raising funds for the Israeli Defense Forces, as Drop Site News reported in August.
According to employees at Microsoft and other firms, those donations, facilitated through a charitable giving platform called Benevity, have continued to be available to employees, allowing the company to match up to $15,000 in donations per U.S. employee per year to these organizations. At the same time, Microsoft has delisted the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, or UNRWA, as a subject for matching donations despite internal objections that the organization is a registered charity providing humanitarian aid to Palestinian refugees.
The apparent double standard has upset some Microsoft employees, who point out that the company is potentially helping facilitate violations of international law in contravention of its own internal ethics and human rights commitments.
"Microsoft likes to cultivate an image as a moral tech company that is different from competitors like Google, Amazon, or Facebook, and many employees took pay cuts to work here because they believed that message," said Hossam Nasr, a software engineer at Microsoft and organizer in a campaign called No Azure for Apartheid. "We've had over 400 employees sign petitions making their sentiment clear that we want Microsoft to stop selling cloud services to the Israeli military at a time it is accused carrying out a genocide, but they have been unapologetic."
In its corporate communications, Microsoft says its approach to political stances are informed by the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, a document which says that companies must "respect internationally recognized human rights, wherever they operate," as well as, "treat the risk of causing or contributing to gross human rights abuses as a legal compliance issue."
Yet in light of the ongoing support provided by Microsoft for the war in Gaza, including the provision of critical data services, employees say that the pretense that Microsoft is abiding by its public principles is no longer tenable.
"We need to think about what is happening at Microsoft as no different from what is taking place at weapons companies like Raytheon or Lockheed Martin. We are part of the military-industrial complex and are writing code that is killing people," Nasr said. "Israel would not have been able to kill this many Palestinians, or destroy this much of Gaza, if not for these technologies powered by Microsoft."