Worlds collide at Amazon Spheres as pro-Palestinian group protests cloud giant’s Israel contracts

Carrying bullhorns and signs depicting Amazon executives as war criminals, about two dozen people protested outside the Amazon Spheres in Seattle on Thursday evening, calling on the company to stop providing technology to Israel for what they described as genocide in Gaza.

The protesters said they were trying to disrupt what they believed to be a gathering of Amazon executives, state and local leaders, U.S. State Department officials and Australian government representatives on an upper floor of the Spheres, on the eve of the World Cup match between the U.S. and Australia.

Contacted Friday, Amazon described the gathering differently. The company said the event underway during the protest was for members of Seattle’s business and sports communities, Australian parliamentarians, and Amazon employees celebrating the World Cup. A separate meeting concluded before the protests began, the company said, without specifying who attended that meeting.

“We respect individuals’ rights to engage in peaceful public demonstrations,” said Montana MacLachlan, Amazon spokesperson, in response to GeekWire’s inquiry. The company, she added, is “committed to being a responsible corporate citizen in the Puget Sound region, Washington state, and every community we serve.”

The protest group, which goes by the name Amazon Worker Intifada, described the protest as part of an effort to escalate pressure on the company’s leaders over the issues. An affiliated group, No Azure for Apartheid, has been protesting Microsoft for more than a year over its work for Israel.

The protesters object to Amazon’s work with Israel, including Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract that Amazon and Google won in 2021 to provide cloud and AI services to the Israeli government, including the Israeli military and weapons suppliers, according to leaked contract and procurement documents.

The protesters marched to the Spheres shortly before 6 p.m. Thursday, walking in a circle outside the glass-domed buildings with signs, drums, balloons, noisemakers and Palestinian flags, engaging in call-and-repeat chants such as, “Say it loud and say it clear — Amazon’s a war profiteer.” 

Amazon workers and soccer fans walked by on the sidewalk, some stopping to take in the scene. Small groups of people in business attire walked through the protest to the Spheres entrance.

A banner at the edge of the space read “Amazon War Criminals Meeting Here.” Another depicted Amazon CEO Andy Jassy and AWS CEO Matt Garman, with blood on their hands, embracing what appeared to be a bomb. “We See Your Crimes,” it read.

Members of what appeared to be a wedding party, including a woman in a white bridal dress and a man in a suit, emerged at one point from one of the restaurants at the base of the Spheres and tried unsuccessfully to persuade the protesters to stop or move elsewhere.

In a press release after the protest, the group said its demonstration forced Amazon to reroute attendees, and that an arriving Australian delegation had to use a different entrance to get around the protesters. The group also said an event attendee grabbed and shoved a protester’s camera.

After protesting for an hour at entrances on both ends of the courtyard between the Spheres and Amazon’s Day One tower, the group moved to the Lenora Street side of the Spheres, where they released two helium balloons on strings with loud noisemakers attached, attempting to position the noisemakers outside the windows where an event could be seen taking place inside. 

One of the leaders of the protest Thursday was Ahmed Shahrour, a Palestinian software engineer in Amazon’s Whole Foods division in Seattle who was fired in October over internal Slack posts criticizing the company’s ties to Israel.

Amazon said at the time that he violated multiple company policies, alleging that he “misused company resources, including by posting numerous non-work-related messages pertaining to the Israel-Palestine conflict.”

Shahrour called it “a blatant act of retaliation designed to silence dissent from Palestinian voices within Amazon and shield Amazon’s collaboration in the genocide from internal scrutiny.”

On Friday, Amazon spokesperson MacLachlan said of that incident, “We don’t tolerate discrimination, harassment, or threatening behavior or language of any kind in our workplace, and when any conduct of that nature is reported, we investigate it and take appropriate action based on our findings.”

No Azure for Apartheid, which includes current and former Microsoft workers, has staged repeated protests of its own, similarly calling on Microsoft to cut ties with Israel.

They set up an encampment on the Redmond campus last year, where 20 people were arrested for trespassing, and later occupied the office of Microsoft President Brad Smith. Microsoft has fired several employees over various protests and activities, citing violations of company policies.

After a Guardian investigation revealed that an Israeli military unit had used Microsoft’s Azure cloud to store millions of intercepted Palestinian phone calls, the company cut off the unit’s access and opened a review that recently led the company to announce that it would tighten its human-rights controls on its work with national security agencies.