A TITiPI bulletin on Microsoft and Israel: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 15:04, 12 October 2025

A TITiPI bulletin on Microsoft and Israel

October 10, 2025

Big Tech firms enable censorship, support violence, and assist in human rights violations. A definite example is Israel’s ability to spy on Palestinians using Microsoft cloud services which sparked much criticism. In an unprecedented development that saw one of the most powerful companies in the world publicly call off consorting with the Israeli army, this Microsoft case has made the front pages last month. In this bulletin, TITiPI asks how to understand this reshuffle, is it merely a public relations ploy or a rightful victory that should be claimed as such?

Complicity

Firstly, this shift in the equilibrium has not come out of the blue. At the background of the genocide in Palestine, protest and rebellion has emerged targeting Big Tech like never before. Whether workers or end-users, many have joint in numerous efforts to put pressure and expose complicity in major atrocities through groups like No Azure for Apartheid or No Tech for Apartheid. Big Tech blatantly supports oppression including the notorious elite cyberwarfare unit responsible for undercover action Unit 8200. BDS condemned the United Nations International Telecommunication Union’s (ITU) partnership in a summit with tech companies Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Cisco, Oracle, and IBM, who provide cloud infrastructure and AI technologies to the Israeli Ministry of Defense.

Resistance

Some of the grassroots campaigns that grew into a wave of initiatives where tech workers themselves organise protest attests to an extraordinary politicisation of this niche workforce. They set up unions, organised sit-ins, and urged their companies to end their complicity. They continue in the footsteps of the Polaroid employees who in 1970 fought collaboration with South Africa by organising anti-apartheid boycott campaigns. When Polaroid workers discovered that the company's products were being used by the White South African government to create photographs for the ID passbooks that all South Africans were required to carry, they called out their company for supporting fascism.

The recent engagement was becoming so inspiring that the company adapted its internal email system blocking messages with the word “Palestine”, “Gaza”, or “Genocide” in the subject line according to Microsoft workers. Instead of praising their employees moral standards, the company fired or asked police to arrest their employees.

Secondly, when a joint effort of The Guardian, +972 Magazine and Local Call and their investigation that revealed how Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform was used by the IDF it hit a critical mass. It was the final straw, Microsoft could not maintain its claim when internal assessment based on its own communication records and financial statements confirmed the allegations. For these corporations sometimes the risk of continuing profiting from warfare is bigger than the risk of losing profit from complicity with genocide. But this is a tug of war, pressure from below faces pressure from above. Looking closer at this particular announcement, this decision was not a clean break. It is more likely that data sets are moved between different servers. To understand the moral compass of Big Tech, let us remember when all the Big Tech stakeholders were at Trumps inauguration and consider President Donald Trump calling on Microsoft to fire its head of global affairs, Lisa Monaco, because of her ties to the Democratic Party. In other words, this is not the outcome of a sudden ethical awareness or belated discovery of its ‘terms of services’. The world wide protest movements against Israel’s violence and the undeniable global majority in support of Palestine has lead to this shift in the equilibrium.

It is unquestionable: this marks an important shift in Microsoft’s public stance and an announcement stated that it decided the Israeli Ministry of Defense will have “to cease and disable specified IMOD subscriptions and their services, including their use of specific cloud storage and AI services and technologies.”

Reflecting on all these developments, TITIPI asks what can we take away from this? This victory has taught us three important lessons:

- Companies have to be held accountable for how tech is used in repression and war, we must pierce through the lie that they are neutral/unaware and expose where necessary;

- Organising dissent matters and can lead to meaningful change, all change is the result of the combination of material and symbolic impact;

- Where it affects their profit, multinational corporations will always try to regain their privileges and ignore their ethical obligations.

In terms of the latter, we must stay vigilant. In the cynical words of the warmongers, ‘winning one battle is not the same as winning a war’. Perhaps this is only symbolic and will not change the abilities of the Israeli occupation forces overall. But even the small steps or mini battles have great value. They give hope, deepen courage, and burgeon dissent. As No Azure for Apartheid stated ‘The First Domino Has Fallen […] Now is the time to maintain, and increase, pressure until Microsoft fully divests’. For many this case has led to more questions, asking If Microsoft is complicit, how about the states hosting Azure storage or Microsoft’s AI services such as the ones based in the Netherlands?

Caution

It is important to remember two facts about the behavior of capitalist corporations (of their business-as-usual logics): these companies are not ethical and do not keep their promises, that is why even in this case we need to stay vigilant. But also, as seen in other cases known as ‘Disaster Capitalism’, Big Tech will jump in after disasters and war. It is likely that the very same corporations that enable genocide, will also offer the solutions for humanitarian rescue. We can imagine Big Tech will offer their services for building health, "greener" digital infrastructure and education. Now that the so-called peace agreement has been announced, we need to stay vigilant to how humanitarian operations might be loaded with rampant extraction under the guise of sneaky benevolence. The question is which corporations are going to jump into grab the loot of war and pillage the rebuilding of public services.

TITiPI would like to thank all the people who shared links and materials with us as sources for this bulletin.

TITiPI is committed to help make all ties to the Israeli military publicly known, including weapons manufacturers and contractors and to protect Employees and Uphold Free Speech. Last month TITiPI accompanied the screening of ‘A bunch of questions with No Answers’ with a stand dedicated to dis-investing from complicit tech and practicing computing otherwise. We will contribute another stand to PALESTINE NOW, Kaaitheater Brussels, 17-18 October.

Sign up for our newsletter at https://we.lurk.org/mailman3/lists/titipi.we.lurk.org and find updates of our activities on Mastodon: @titipi@post.lurk.org or drop us a line at titipi at titipi dot org

@@ Line 5: / Line 5: @@
 [[File:Boycott microsoft.jpg|alt=a collage of resistant images from microsoft boycott campaigns, features two pin badges and source code|frameless|500x500px]]
-=== Big Tech firms enable censorship, support violence, and assist in human rights violations. A definite example is Israel’s ability to spy on Palestinians using Microsoft cloud services which sparked much criticism. In an unprecedented development that saw one of the most powerful companies in the world publicly call off consorting with the Israeli army, this Microsoft case has made the front pages last month. In this bulletin, TITiPI asks how to understand this reshuffle, is it merely a public relations ploy or a rightful victory that should be claimed as such? ===
+<strong>Big Tech firms enable censorship, support violence, and assist in human rights violations. A definite example is Israel’s ability to spy on Palestinians using Microsoft cloud services which sparked much criticism. In an unprecedented development that saw one of the most powerful companies in the world publicly call off consorting with the Israeli army, this Microsoft case has made the front pages last month. In this bulletin, TITiPI asks how to understand this reshuffle, is it merely a public relations ploy or a rightful victory that should be claimed as such?</strong>
 === Complicity ===

A TITiPI bulletin on Microsoft and Israel: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 15:04, 12 October 2025