"We think that Microsoft has no place being accomplice of a genocide."
STJV union members of Arkane Studios have joined the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement and have called for parent company Microsoft to end its support of Israel.
As union members have detailed in an open letter, the BDS movement called for a targeted boycott against Microsoft and, specifically, Xbox.
“[BDS] chose to do so to cast light on how the Israeli military has been using Microsoft services to help out on its genocidal assault on Palestinian, as it’s been revealed by the Associated Press,” reads a portion of the open letter.
“Microsoft has continued, and reinforced, their collaboration with the Israeli military in the last years, providing both cloud services through their Azure service, as well as AI systems to accelerate and automate their crimes, which, as an example, have been revealed to be used to help define bombing targets.
“We think that Microsoft has no place being accomplice of a genocide, and as Microsoft employees, we don’t want to be part of this sinister project for Gaza,” the open letter continues. “Moreover, we think it’s our responsibility, as tech workers, to raise the alarm, and to ensure that our technologies are used to make the voices of the oppressed heard, and not facilitate their demise.”
BDS itself calls Microsoft, “perhaps the most complicit tech company in Israel’s illegal occupation, apartheid regime and ongoing genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza”.
“Microsoft partners with the apartheid regime of Israel and its prison system. It provides the Israeli military with Azure cloud and AI services that are central to accelerating Israel’s genocide of 2.3 million Palestinians in the illegally occupied Gaza Strip. After 34 years of deep complicity with Israel’s military, the Israeli army relies heavily on Microsoft to meet technological requirements of its genocide and apartheid regime,” BDS said.
In a statement released back in May, Microsoft said it had “found no evidence to date that Microsoft’s Azure and AI technologies have been used to target or harm people in the conflict in Gaza.”
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