Ariel Koren, a Google employee who became a face of worker protests against the company’s contract with the Israeli government, announced her resignation yesterday. The Jewish marketing manager says she faced retaliation from management and some colleagues for expressing pro-Palestinian views within the company. In October she joined other Google and Amazon employees in public opposition to Project Nimbus, a $1. 2 billion contract for Google and Amazon to provide cloud computing to Israel, including its defense ministry. She says that Google later gave her an ultimatum: Agree to move to Brazil within 17 days or lose her job. Training documents leaked to the Intercept show Project Nimbus providing Israel with access to Google’s cloud AI services, including face and expression detection, video analysis, and sentiment analysis. Koren and others were concerned that the technology would be weaponized against Palestinians living in occupied territories and launched a campaign called No Tech for Apartheid . Despite previous worker protests over defense contracts, Google has recently expanded its defense business . On Wednesday, Koren, along with other current and former Google employees and Palestinian rights activists, spoke outside one of the company’s San Francisco offices to protest Project Nimbus. Workers from both Google and Amazon plan to protest at company offices in San Francisco, New York, and Seattle next month. Google did not respond to detailed questions, but spokesperson Shannon Newberry wrote in a statement that the company investigated Koren’s claim and found no retaliation. The US National Labor Relations Board dismissed Koren’s case alleging retaliation. Newberry said that Google’s cloud contract with Israel “is not directed to highly sensitive or classified workloads. ” Koren spoke to WIRED about what it’s like to become an outspoken critic inside Google, which has previously fired employees who have condemned the company’s business practices and AI projects . The conversation has been edited for length and clarity. WIRED: When did you decide to organize with coworkers to pressure Google management? Ariel Koren: In the summer of 2020. The Jewish employee resource group, Jewglers, of which I was a member, received an email from Google formally apologizing for having donated to Black Lives Matter. The group’s leadership had complained that this was inherently anti-Semitic because the Movement for Black Lives coalition includes organizations that have expressed alignment with the Palestinian human rights movement. We were infuriated to see the company apologizing for donating to the coalition leading the fight against anti-Black racism and violence in the US. We organized a letter from Jewish folks in the company calling on leadership to retract their apology. Instead of acknowledging our letter, Google donated to groups that the leadership of Jewglers had chosen. To us, this was a weaponization of false narratives of anti-Semitism. At that moment, we knew we needed to take a stand. How did that lead to protests about the Project Nimbus contract with the Israeli government? Google has not provided any transparency to its shareholders, the general public, or its own workforce about what this contract entails. We learned about it through the media and talking to each other. The contract was announced in 2021, during [an outbreak of violence between Israel and Palestine]. It would be concerning to see an AI or surveillance contract of this size at any time, with any military. It added insult to injury that Google announced this in the midst of the siege on Gaza. The contract states that Google can't pull out, even in the event of worker protests, and that Google has no right to regulate which government agencies become beneficiaries of the technology or how it gets used. Essentially, Google is building tools for the government and the military, but then wiping its hands of any responsibility to oversee the technology, something no company should be doing. Did you find it discouraging when you learned that the Project Nimbus contract seemed to have been written to prevent Google withdrawing its services? There is a precedent for Google pulling out of contracts in response to worker organizing. A large group of Google workers who were deeply concerned about Project Maven , a drone surveillance contract with the Pentagon, mobilized to call on the company to rescind the project. And ultimately, that worked . Another example is Project Dragonfly , the censored search engine that Google was building for the Chinese government . A coalition of concerned workers came together and were successful in calling on the company to cancel the project . That precedent is a source of hope for us. How have your conversations with executives about Project Nimbus gone? Well, we haven't gotten a single response from a single executive. So not much of a conversation. We’ve sent dozens of emails from so many different workers across the company. We've sent petitions, we've sent letters, we've requested meetings, we have escalated this up our entire management chain. Before we went public with our concerns about the project, we did our due diligence and escalated our concerns internally. It was only after being completely sidelined and ignored for a long time that we were forced to take our concerns to the public. Did you anticipate that you would face resistance or discipline for speaking out? We decided as a group that Gabriel [Schubiner, another Jewish Google employee] and I would be the ones who would assume the risk of speaking out. My Palestinian coworkers have not been afforded the privilege of feeling safe doing that. One of my biggest hopes is that Google will not only affirm that workers have the right to speak out, but also that its Palestinian workers have the right to bring their full selves to work. After your experience, would you advise a politically minded person to join Google and try to drive change, or to stay away because the company is immovable? That is a complicated question. I think people within Google who defend their values in solidarity with other workers committed to holding the company accountable play an important role. For anyone thinking of joining Google, I would highly encourage you to join the Alphabet Workers Union and take part in worker efforts to resist abuses of power by the company. .