Google and Sergey Brin know their company’s technology is not neutral – it is a pillar of Israel’s machinery of destruction.

Sergey Brin, the billionaire co-founder of Google, recently accused the UN of being “ transparently antisemitic” because, in its exhaustively researched  report, it rightly pointed out Google’s complicity in the ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and the escalating settler violence in the West Bank.

Brin’s denial of involvement in the genocide in Gaza is not only morally blind but extremely dangerous. It distracts from the real tragedy unfolding in Gaza and, by resorting to tiresome tropes, attempts to silence legitimate criticism with accusations of antisemitism.

Brin insists that calling this genocide offends Jews who have survived history’s worst crimes. But what exactly does he call it? What name does he give to the burial of entire families beneath their homes, to the deliberate starvation and dispossession of millions? A people’s past suffering does not grant them exclusive rights to define atrocity, or to deny it when others endure it.  Israel, through decades of occupation and violence, has forfeited any claim to moral authority. In fact, numerous Jewish organisations and voices around the world have strongly opposed Israel’s actions in Gaza precisely because they recognise the moral imperative to speak out against atrocities, regardless of who commits them.

According to the UN Genocide Convention, genocide is “acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group”. What has unfolded in Gaza meets that definition with chilling precision. More than 55,000 Palestinians are already counted among the dead – but who is left to count the bodies buried under pulverised neighbourhoods, or to record the names of entire families erased in a single airstrike? This is the largest population of paediatric amputees and orphaned children in living memory.

If Google were serious about accountability, it would immediately terminate Project Nimbus and all other contracts that fuel military violence and human rights abuses.

Yet from his billionaire’s perch, Brin shrugs this catastrophe away, drawing facile parallels to his own family’s past suffering. Why is it so often those who should understand the price of dehumanisation who are quickest to deny it when others are targeted? What does Brin need to see before he calls it genocide? More corpses? More pulverised infrastructure? Must every child be starved or buried under rubble before the truth becomes undeniable?

The UN report unequivocally lays out Google’s complicity. Through its involvement in Project Nimbus — a US$1.2 billion contract awarded by Israel to Google and Amazon — the company has played an active and central role in supporting the genocide in Gaza. The project empowered the Israeli military with advanced cloud computing and artificial intelligence capabilities – tools essential for processing vast amounts of data, co-ordinating attacks and executing precision strikes on densely populated civilian areas. Google is providing Israel with the instruments of genocide.

Internal documents obtained by  _The Washington Post_ confirm that Google staff directly assisted Israel’s Ministry of Defence and military after the October attacks, deliberately discarding ethical commitments that had previously restricted the company from weaponising its AI technologies. Even more troubling, Google suppressed internal dissent by terminating employees who raised principled objections. A company that silences its workforce, while publicly claiming innocence, is not only duplicitous and greedy, it is also an integral part of the genocidal machinery, which Israel has refined with chilling expertise.

Brin and Google aren’t alone in this grim enterprise. The UN report names other corporate giants profiting from Israel’s war on Gaza. Lockheed Martin, Elbit Systems, and Israel Aerospace Industries have filled their ledgers by providing bombs, drones, and fighter jets that obliterate homes and hospitals. Amazon, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard have supplied surveillance tools and cloud infrastructure to track, monitor and repress Palestinians. Even banks and insurers have invested in settlement expansion, cementing apartheid as a lucrative business model. Together, these companies have woven an economy where genocide becomes just another line item on quarterly reports, with US taxpayers footing much of the bill.

Google and Sergey Brin know their company’s technology is not neutral – it is a pillar of Israel’s machinery of destruction. Denial or deflection is morally indefensible and only paves the way for more killing. If Google were serious about accountability, it would immediately terminate Project Nimbus and all other contracts that fuel military violence and human rights abuses. But we all know that will never happen. The profits are simply too good, and the cost — thousands of Palestinian lives — too little.

Republished from Common Dreams, 16 July 2025

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.