Some Amazon and Google employees want the companies to stop working with the Israeli government

As the Israel-Hamas war continues, tensions are rising in US workplaces.

Some workers at Amazon and Google are again calling on their employers to cut business ties with the Israeli government over its response to the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas. While such objections from employees can create communication challenges for people pros, one HR leader believes the calls could be a positive if they show diversity of thought within an organization.

The latest. More than 1,700 Amazon employees signed a petition requesting that CEO Andy Jassy end the company’s contract with the Israeli military, writing that “by providing a cloud ecosystem for the Israeli public sector, Amazon is bolstering the artificial intelligence and surveillance capabilities of the Israeli military used to repress Palestinian activists and impose a brutal siege on Gaza,” the Washington Post reported.

Rob Munoz, an Amazon spokesperson, said in an emailed statement to the Post that the company is “focused on making the benefits of our world-leading cloud technology available to all our customers, wherever they are located.”

Meanwhile, a Palestinian software engineer and former Google for Startups accelerators program intern and her family were killed by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza last month, which sparked renewed calls from Google employees for their company to cancel its participation in Israel’s Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion cloud computing contract that both companies won in 2021, the Guardian reported on Dec. 1.

“The overwhelming majority of those employees are not engaged in internal discussions or debate, and many have said they’ve appreciated our fast response and our focus on the safety of our employees,” Courtenay Mencini, a spokesperson for Google, in a statement on the issue to the Guardian.

This is not the first time Amazon and Google employees have called on the company to cut ties with the Israeli government: In October 2021, anonymous workers started a campaign called No Tech for Apartheid, publishing an open letter in the Guardian condemning their employers’ participation in Nimbus.

Open work cultures. While hearing dissent from employees isn’t necessarily a pleasant experience, Amelia Ransom, VP of DE&I at project management platform Smartsheet, with more than 20 years in HR, believes it shows employees feel comfortable with their employer.

“If a culture is healthy enough to tolerate questions and dialogue, that might be uncomfortable, [but] that;s a sign of a healthy culture,” she said. “Sometimes the healthy tension is where good responses and good ideas happen, so just allow it sometimes.”

Ransom also pointed out it’s also a positive sign that an organization has diversity of thought. “That is a benefit to having a diverse organization and having people with diverse skills and backgrounds and have diverse viewpoints.”