Dozens of anti-Israel Microsoft employees, many wearing face masks and keffiyes, swarmed the company’s headquarters in Washington state to protest the Big Tech giant’s ties to Israel’s military.
The protesters set up tents in a “liberated zone” on the Redmond campus, renaming it the “Martyred Palestinian Children’s Plaza” — and toted signs that urged co-workers to “Join the worker intifada: no labor for genocide.” Other placards said “stop starving Gaza.”
A group calling itself “No Azure For Apartheid” organized Tuesday’s sit-in after The Guardian reported that an Israeli military intelligence agency was using Microsoft’s Azure software to amass recordings of phone calls made by Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
“Once again, the enablers of genocide and apartheid choose to criminalize those that oppose the bombing of Palestinians, rather than the war criminals ethnically cleansing and starving our people in Palestine,” the group — an offshoot of No Tech For Apartheid — wrote on X.
The group also published a lengthy manifesto calling for a “worker intifada” and stating that “it would not be cogs in the Israeli genocidal machine.”
“The group was asked to leave, and they left,” a Microsoft spokesperson told The Post on Wednesday.
About 50 current and former Microsoft workers took part in the sit-in, company officials said.
Microsoft had said it was not aware “of the surveillance of civilians or collection of their cellphone conversations using Microsoft’s services” and would conduct a formal review of the allegations.
The protest was the latest sign of ongoing unrest at Microsoft over its contracts with Israel.
In May, the company reportedly began barring employees from using certain words in company emails, including “Palestine,” “Gaza” and “genocide.”
It also fired a software engineer who interrupted a speech by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella to protest the help given to the Israel’s military.
Elsewhere, Google fired more than two dozen employees last year for disruptive anti-Israel protests at its offices.
As The Post exclusively reported, Big Tech employees were among the biggest individual donors to New York City mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani’s campaign.
the Demcratic socialist has faced heat during the campaign cycle over his refusal to back away from the phrase “globalize the intifada.”
