When Sarmad Gilani joined Google as a software engineer in 2012, he was fascinated by the company’s famously open culture, where employees can publicly criticize leadership and are encouraged to embrace their racial identity and sexual orientation at work.
He said certain political positions, such as support for Black Lives Matter or Ukraine, were usually met with approval and even adopted by the company. But there was one issue on which Mr. Gilani was always cautious: the treatment of the Palestinians.
“You have to be very, very, very careful, because any kind of criticism of the Israeli state can easily be construed as anti-Semitism,” he said in an interview. Mr. Gilani, a 38-year-old American born to Pakistani immigrants, said his wariness also stems from a lifetime of being misunderstood and portrayed as a Muslim.
That was before October 7th.
In the month since Hamas launched an attack inside Israel and Israel retaliated with a bombing campaign and invasion of Gaza, discussion of the issue on Google – for Muslims and Jews – has descended into a quagmire of hostility and intolerance, Mr. Gilani and other employees say.
Israeli and Jewish employees have expressed anger over messages posted on Google’s internal channels, including at least one that was openly anti-Semitic and, on Wednesday, a group of Workers published an open letter to Google leadership accusing the company of double standards that allow “freedom of speech for Israeli Google employees compared to Arab, Muslim and Palestinian Google employees.”
The letter was not signed by anyone. Instead, it was attributed to “Muslim, Palestinian and Arab Google employees, as well as anti-Zionist Jewish colleagues.” The New York Times discussed the matter with seven Google employees and reviewed messages posted in employee channels for this article. Some of the employees, including Mr. Gilani, agreed to be named, but others asked not to be named out of concern for professional repercussions.
Pro-Palestinian employees say the company has allowed supporters of Israel to speak freely about their views on the issue while cracking down on Muslim employees who have criticized Israel’s retaliation in Gaza.
“I don’t feel safe saying what I want to say,” Mr. Gilani said in an interview before the letter was published.
Google said the bitterness described by Muslim and Jewish employees to the Times was limited to a small group of its many thousands of employees.
“This is an extremely sensitive time and subject in every company and workplace, and we have many employees who have been personally affected,” Courtenay Mencini, a company spokeswoman, wrote in an emailed response to questions. “The overwhelming majority of these employees do not participate in internal discussions or debates, and many have said they appreciate our quick response and focus on the safety of our employees.”
Google is not alone in this turmoil. The issue has exposed divisions in other elite institutions in the United States – universities, Hollywood and the Democratic Party, to name a few – as statements of solidarity with the Palestinians or calls for an Israeli ceasefire are condemned as undermining Israel’s right to oppose terrorism defend.
Companies are struggling to address the conflict and set clear boundaries around acceptable speech on the issue. More broadly, anger over the conflict has led to a rise in hate crimes and threats against both Jews and Muslims.
Among tech companies, Microsoft removed some posts from employees that discussed the conflict, and internal tensions also rose at Meta when the company removed internal employee messages that supported other Palestinians at Meta.
But at Google, the topic has a unique meaning.
Even compared to its Silicon Valley competitors, Google has become a hub for employee activism, a legacy of the company’s open and informal startup culture.
In recent years, Google employees have protested former President Donald J. Trump’s ban on immigration from Muslim-majority countries, protested the company’s handling of sexual harassment, formed a union and called on management to stop working with the Pentagon .
The letter sent Wednesday re-emerges another sore point: Google’s role in a $1.2 billion contract to provide Israel and its military with artificial intelligence and other computing power, a technology that critics and activists say is used for surveillance could be used by Palestinians.
When the contract, called Project Nimbus, took effect in 2021, several employees publicly protested, saying they were threatened for speaking out on behalf of the Palestinians, allegations similar to those in Wednesday’s letter. Last year, a Jewish Google employee who lobbied for the company to back out of her contract resigned, saying it had retaliated against her.
After the fighting broke out last month, employees started a new petition for Google to terminate Nimbus. According to an employee, there were 675 signatures on Tuesday.
“The criticism of Project Nimbus has made people a target,” said Rachel Westrick, a software engineer at Google who said she supported the letter. Ms. Westrick said she also wanted the company to condemn violence against Palestinians, as it did the Hamas attack, and address the racism she said her colleagues had experienced.
The company said Google’s role at Nimbus is to provide services for everyday tasks of government agencies and is not applied to highly sensitive or classified projects.
Israel’s supporters view calls to abandon Nimbus and other attempts to boycott the country as hostile to the Jewish state. Jewish and Israeli workers also said their colleagues’ language was deeply offensive, particularly when Israel’s actions in Gaza were described as “genocide.”
An Israeli employee said she believed the company had allowed many pro-Hamas statements to spread unhindered through Google’s internal communications platforms. According to this employee, Google has been slower to take notice internally on Israel than on issues like Black Lives Matter and violence against Asian Americans.
Three people said a worker was fired after he wrote on an internal company message board that Israelis living near Gaza “deserved to be affected.”
The company released a statement condemning Hamas on Oct. 7, and a few days later told Jewish employees that it was monitoring internal platforms for anti-Semitism and promised to take action if necessary — including firing offenders.
The next week, Sundar Pichai, chief executive of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, acknowledged in an email to employees that Jewish employees were “seeing an increase in anti-Semitic incidents” and that Palestinian, Arab and Muslim employees were “severely affected by a “We fear the rise of Islamophobia and observe with concern how Palestinian civilians in Gaza have suffered significant losses and fear for their lives in the face of the escalating war and humanitarian crisis.”
But the employees behind Wednesday’s letter say that’s not enough: “We demand that Sundar Pichai, Thomas Kurian and other Google executives publicly condemn the ongoing genocide in the strongest terms,” it says. Mr. Kurian is the managing director of Google’s cloud computing business.
Supporters of the Palestinians at Meta also feel that they are at risk of unfair treatment. A handful of employees there reported that on Workplace, Meta’s internal communications platform, posts that included the phrase “Pray for Palestine” or otherwise expressed support for the Palestinians – with no mention of Hamas – were internally flagged for removal said two employees shared the news with The Times.
Around the same time that Meta’s employees were struggling internally, the company said a “bug” in its code – a mistranslation of Arabic – had caused the word “terrorist” to be inserted into some users’ Instagram bios when they use the word “Palestine” or a Palestinian flag emoji. The Washington Post and 404 Media had previously reported on some of the problems at Meta.
A Meta spokesman declined to comment.
Mr. Gilani said he did not know what, if anything, he could say in the workplace about what he saw as the killing of innocent civilians.
He knows the risks of speaking out on such a controversial topic, thanks in part to an experience from 2014. After being repeatedly stopped by airport security, he filed a Freedom of Information Act request to find out if he was doing so was a watch list. But instead of receiving the information, he was approached and questioned by the FBI at Google’s offices.
But now, he said, he’s worried that retaliation against Muslim employees could have a chilling effect on speech at Google, and he’s developed a guide on how to talk about the issue in the workplace: Condemn Hamas and Do It further.
“It feels like I have to condemn Hamas ten times before I can say even one small thing and criticize Israel.”