Anonymous Arab Googler :

I am not Palestinian but as an active member of the Arab Googlers community who has been involved in DEI efforts at Google, I would like to give a testimony to what I have experienced. Prior to 2021, I had always been made to believe and feel that Google is one of the most inclusive companies. However when the violence in Gaza escalated in May of 2021, I started to notice just how discriminatory Google is against Palestinians. I noticed that the inclusivity Google claims to offer many marginalized groups is sorely lacking for my Palestinian friends and colleagues. When the violence escalated in 2021 in Gaza, there was no support whatsoever from Google’s leadership team offered for Palestinians. As a DEI advocate within the company, I had seen most other global catastrophes result in tangible institutionalized support for other impacted communities. But in this case, Google’s official DEI team made no wide acknowledgement of Palestinian Googlers and we couldn’t get any sort of response from leadership as to why. On the other hand, company leadership directly emailed Israeli employees and the Jewglers listserv. When we created efforts to encourage open conversations between Palestinians and Israelis, we received a lot of negative and hurtful and aggressive reactions from members of the Jewglers group. Things were so aggressive and hurtful that we had to escalate many abusive comments to our leadership teams and to HR, but our leadership team turned us down instead of listening to us. When we pointed out aggressive and harmful language directed at Arab Google employees to HR, there was no action taken to support us. But on the other hand, when Jewglers members made complaints, those complaints often resulted in retaliatory action against Googlers, in many cases who had simply written in a company forum or listserv a message of support for Palestinian rights. This showed me an extremely clear bias has been institutionalized within the company, aligned with the same business interests we see at play in Project Nimbus.