Google Fires 28 Employees Amidst Sit-Down Protest Over $1.2 Billion Deal With Israel

Google has laid off 28 employees who participated in a sit-down protest over the company’s “$1.2 billion agreement with Israel”.

The firings come after 9 employees were suspended and then arrested in New York and California on Tuesday.

The terminations come after a sequence of incidents where staff, including individuals wearing traditional Arab headscarves, protested by marching to the office of Google’s senior cloud executive in California, while others staged sit-ins at Google’s New York City headquarters.

In a memo sent to all employees on Wednesday, Chris Rackow, Google’s head of global security, said that “behavior like this has no place in our workplace and we will not tolerate it.”

In their reply, the group organising the protests, known as "No Tech for Apartheid," labeled Google's terminations as a “flagrant act of retaliation”.