friday as Microsoft celebrated its 50th anniversary two employees interrupted the proceedings to protest the company's continued collaboration with the Israeli military earlier this year the Associated Press found that Israel had been using AI models from Microsoft as part of a military program to select targets in Gaza and Lebanon the people who took part in the protest on Friday join us for a short conversation about what happened at the event and um why she decided to participate in an act of protest thank you so much for speaking
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with Middle East so my name is Itad Abasad i am Moroccan i have been an employee at Microsoft for three and a half years now or yeah I should say former employee because as of today Vana and I got fired for protesting Microsoft's involvement in the genocide in Gaza my name is Vana Agarwal i've been at Microsoft for a year and a half i joined as a software engineer i'm also an organizer with uh the campaign no Azure for apartheid that demands that Microsoft live up to its own purported ethical values by ending its direct and
indirect complicity in Israeli apartheid and genocide there's been recent reporting showing the Israeli military's reliance on Microsoft Azure cloud technology and AI services like a $133 million contract to provide cloud and AI services to the military directly has surged during its genocide of Palestinians in Gaza so according to usage data from March 2024 Israeli military's usage of Microsoft and open AI artificial intelligence spiked nearly 200 times higher than pre-occtober 2023 between the six months before October
7th and then the the four months after the usage of Microsoft services um from the Israeli military increased by over 60% cloud and AI are really the bombs and bullets of the 21st century this is not something that Microsoft really discloses very publicly or brags about this has really been unveiled through discussions with the Israeli military that these outlets have had or uh like leaked contracts it's it's really not um something that most employees knew about as this information has started to come to light and articles have been
published Microsoft employees have have started to voice their concerns and the workers are are agitated it's been a process of trying all their like quote unquote preferred methods of approaching the issue like uh concern posts on like our internal forum that are directed to like leadership we've tried submitted questions during the ask me anything calls direct meetings with with the direct reports of the CEO none of them led to anything like in in the best case scenario we just get like I hear you type of messaging and nothing changes in
the worst case scenario were fully just ignored or dismissed they are suppressed uh they are silenced they are intimidated and often workers are also retaliated against we had two workers back in October of 2024 who were fired for speaking up against the company's role in Israel's apartheid and genocide and organizing a vigil on campus it went from a process of okay let's try all these methods that Microsoft like promotes to bring up human rights concerns and then when none of those led to any change is when we decided okay we
need to do something where they have to listen to us and what better way than just like an event where senior leadership was present where press and audience was present like we felt that that was really the only method that was left for us to get the message across could you tell us a little bit about the protest itself you walked up towards the stage and you addressed a person named Mustafa i knew going in that um I wanted to specifically address Mustafa because as I mentioned I worked in the AI organization mustafa is the AI CEO had
not said anything about how our technology is used i I specifically had in mind that I would address him because it's it's my code that he's allowing to to be used for for crimes ai is used for targeting and for surveillance and I just wanted to hold him accountable and just say we know like it has been exposed that this is what you're using my and other employees work for like what do you have to say to that it's a stunning image right to see uh an Arab woman coming forward speaking to someone with the name Mustafa begging them to
stop participating in the genocide of other Arabs of of Palestinians of Muslims i'm Moroccan uh Mustafa is half Syrian we're both familiar with the Palestinian cause and what's been going on and all the human rights violations so that's what made me even more uh adamant on you know catching a flight and like going to an event to talk to him is like listen you are also from you know our region so how is it that you allow our work to be used to destroy it no matter the AICO's ethnicity it's something that they should be held
accountable for but the thing that's been going viral is yeah this connection with Mustafa that we're both from the region and yet as you mentioned like representation doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to be representation in prioritizing human lives over profit like that just did not happen later in the event I was able to disrupt when they brought all three Microsoft CEOs on stage which included Satia um Bill Gates and Steve Balmer my protest was rooted in a lot of passion and anger that I and I know so many others within Microsoft
and outside of Microsoft feel towards its hypocrisy in its missions and values versus the actions it takes i was really powered by and fueled by all of the anger of you know the past employees that have tried to speak up tried to voice their concerns whose comments got deleted who questions went unanswered the employees who were fired last October all of the hundreds of thousands of of Palestinians in Gaza who have been murdered and injured or displaced i wanted to let Microsoft know how everybody feels and that we are not
alone and and make our demands clear microsoft complicity in Israeli genocide and part and apartheid needs to be terminated through all Azure contracts and partnerships with the Israeli military and government they need to make all the ties to the Israeli state military and tech industry publicly known and they need to conduct a transparent and independent audit of these ties to ensure compliance with their own human rights statements a lot of people aren't aware of Microsoft's role in this genocide because it it's
best known for very innocuous things like Teams or Microsoft Word and so on and so forth but Microsoft really has a major major footprint in all major military infrastructures in Israel microsoft has service agreements with Israeli military more than 600 individual subscriptions listed under specific divisions units bases and project code and a lot of these are through project code names or subscriptions that are innocuous and and not necessarily indicative that they're tied to Israeli military relationship with mem for example the military
central computing unit responsible for the military's tech infrastructure a number of other highly classified units inside like the Israeli prime minister's office relationships that exist but aren't as explicitly named and seen i think that this like positive image of wow this is like an environment for like smart people doing good that has been fostered over like a couple of decades essentially helps conceal the truth of how these companies prioritize profit over human rights i think they've crafted like a really deceptive image of
being you know the places where all innovation for social impact happens and uh most of what you hear is you know all all their projects and products that are used in uh positive ways they never market the other side of it which is really the site that they've been shown to prioritize in their business decisions did you receive hate from your colleagues or from you know outsiders did you experience an outpouring of support from colleagues like what exactly happened after that after I was escorted out I sent the mass emails
telling people in the company about Microsoft's involvement with the military and so within like an hour or like two uh Microsoft just cut off all my access to my work email and and uh work teams account so I barely had the chance to like get any sort of responses before I was just cut off without any notice but during the time that I did have that access briefly um it was really a mix i had some people just say like "Thank you so much i did not know this and now I feel really disgusted.
" And I had people be like "Oh yeah I knew this but I always felt afraid to like bring it up but now I will like talk about this with my colleagues at lunch." like because even though that's what we work on it's so hush- hush that everyone's worried about bringing it up and in our emails we had a call to action that included just have the conversation just like spread awareness within the company and so there was a lot of that messaging of people feeling inspired to now say the word and and and discuss what Microsoft is involved in
obviously I also had hey emails like hey we're going to call ICE on you like you should get kicked out or you deserve to get fired from this company but I would say despite the hate messaging I would say it was overwhelmingly people just expressing gratitude either for the new information or for the like inspiration to talk about it you took action and now there's been a major consequence for you so you know what's what's your takeaway from this and for others who are also in this sort of situation i do not regret
like speaking up at the event i think as employees who are directly building products within Microsoft and helping the company thrive I really don't think we have the option to just look away or pretend that we're not concerned by the human rights violations that are being caused by our work the feeling for me of waking up at 9:00 a.
m to do my job and just in the back of my mind wondering if oh is the product that I'm working on today being provided to the Israeli military that is just something that I could not silently live with like I had to at the very least like say something and spread awareness and going into the event in my head it was if even like 10 new people learn about Microsoft's complicity and Microsoft completely retaliates against me it will have been worth it as time went on I just found it more and more difficult to continue giving my time my energy and my care to
a company that was just so clearly on the wrong side of history my labor is tacit support for what this company is doing and any work put towards this company is only fueling this system so I decided that I I wanted to leave my job at Microsoft i I wanted to do what I could in my last few days blast this message and expose Microsoft for who they are and expose the CEOs for what they're Rain.