

More than 500 Amazon employees have signed an internal letter to Jeff Bezos and Andy Jassy calling for the company to acknowledge the plight of the Palestinian people. The move comes after Israeli airstrikes devastated Palestinians in Gaza, leaving 248 people dead. Hamas and Israel have since agreed to a ceasefire.
“We ask Amazon leadership to acknowledge the continued assault upon Palestinians’ basic human rights under an illegal occupation… without using language that implies a power symmetry or situational equivalency, which minimizes and misrepresents the disruption, destruction, and death that has disproportionately been inflicted upon the Palestinians in recent days and over several decades,” employees wrote. “Amazon employs Palestinians in Tel Aviv and Haifa offices and around the world. Ignoring the suffering faced by Palestinians and their families at home erases our Palestinian coworkers.”
Employees want the company to terminate business contracts with organizations that are complicit in human rights violations, like the Israeli Defense Forces. In April, Amazon and Google signed a $1.2 billion cloud computing contract with the Israeli government.
The note echoes similar petitions from workers at Apple and Google. On May 18th, Jewish employees at Google penned a letter to Sundar Pichai calling for the company to “reject any definition of antisemitism that holds that criticism of Israel or Zionism is antisemitic.” Two days later, The Verge published a note from Muslim employees at Apple.
Muslim tech workers say executives have been slow to voice support for Palestinians, or condemn the violence in Gaza. Many feel their CEOs are choosing to ignore Israeli human rights abuses because the situation is fraught. The result, according to multiple sources, is that Muslims in tech feel undervalued and ignored.
Read the entire letter from Amazon employees below:
Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Verge.
more recommended stories
Concerns over TikTok feeding user data to Beijing are back, and there’s good evidence to support them
Credit: Pixabay, CC BY-SA When English.
NIST selects four encryption algorithms to thwart future quantum computer attacks
The announcement follows a six-year effort.
Crypto ‘fear and greed’ gauge improves a bit after 60% selloff
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain If trader.
How to make voice and video calls from the Gmail app
You can kick off a voice.
Grab the jaw-dropping Matrix Awakens tech demo before it’s delisted this week
If you’ve wanted to experience the.
How technology has made your car ‘a candy store of distraction’
Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain In the.
How cybercriminals are targeting Amazon Prime Day shoppers
With Amazon Prime Day 2022 set.
Crypto broker Voyager Digital files for bankruptcy following the collapse of Three Arrows
Cryptocurrency broker Voyager Digital filed for.
4 ways to multiply in Microsoft Excel
There’s more than one method to.
Get two drones for the price of one
Don’t miss your chance on two.