largest mobilization since start of Gaza war shakes up US universities

Details

Written by Super User

Category: Americas

Published: 27 April 2024

Hits: 600

By María Antonia Sánchez-Vallejo, El Pais

NEW YORK - It is Occupy Wall Street — the 2011 movement that protested against capitalism in its very cradle — with keffiyehs. University campuses in the United States are experiencing the largest mobilization since the war broke out in Gaza in October. Protest camps have been set up from east to west, with Columbia University in New York as the epicenter. The mobilization represents a dramatic new stage of the demonstrations that have been taking place on campus for months. The pro-Palestinian camps have helped revive the debate on antisemitism in U.S. campuses, which at the end of last year led to the resignations of the presidents of Harvard University and Pennsylvania University. Jewish students and teachers say they feel threatened and warn of the risk of an open confrontation.

Protest camps on several campuses in the country have been evicted by the police, with the latest standoff taking place Monday night at the public New York University (NYU), where dozens were arrested. University presidents have had to adopt exceptional measures, such as deploying police and numerous security guards at the entrances, which have been closed off with fences; shutting the facilities to strangers — only students can enter, after scanning their ID — and adopting remote classes until the end of the semester to reduce the number of students on campus. This is what was decided by Columbia, where on Tuesday hundreds of students remained camped in dozens of tents clustered in a circle on one of the center’s esplanades.

Police arrest a protester on the New York University (NYU) campus on April 22.

Most of the protesters wear face masks and Palestinian keffiyehs, they do yoga, play music, play cards and, for the most part, finish their class work: the last school day is April 29. They have taken over from a first camp that was broken up by the police last week, with a hundred arrests. The camp is as well-organized as that of the 2011 anti-austerity protests in Spain and Greece: there are food services, a medical care tent, generators, a program of activities, including board games and yoga, and a large sign that establishes the rules, the first of which is to commit to continuing camping and not giving up even a millimeter of space “in solidarity with the Palestinian people.” On Monday night, the Jewish students in the protest camp celebrated the traditional seder, the dinner that marks the beginning of the Jewish Passover.

With the support of numerous teachers, the protesters are no longer calling only for a ceasefire in Gaza (a demand they have been making since the war began), but are now also calling for students arrested last week to be readmitted after an unknown number were expelled from campus, and for the university to divest from companies linked to Israel. Jewish students, for their part, claim that criticism of Israel for its offensive against Gaza has led to blatant antisemitism and makes them feel unsafe. There is a clear divide between the two sides, while important university donors, mostly Jewish, have announced that they plan to suspend funding from departments and centers until corrective measures are taken. This was a move made by Robert Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots NFL team and a former Columbia student who maintains a center for Jewish students at the university.

The sudden intensity of the pro-Palestinian protests has not taken university presidents by surprise: they are a testament to the dozens of marches and demonstrations that cross New York almost daily, with the support of a large number of progressive Jews. But, unlike the last three months of 2023, this time the reaction from the university authorities has been firm: police have been allowed to take action. The students arrested in Columbia last week were taken away by officers with their hands in zip ties.

The growing mobilization against the Gaza war and calls for a ceasefire has put extra pressure on U.S. President Joe Biden, who has been modulating his initial strong support for Israel by calling on the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu to alleviate humanitarian suffering in Gaza. This shift was particularly evident after Biden received tens of thousands of protest votes from progressive Democratic voters of Arab origin in the primaries.

The precarious balance between freedom of expression and security and inclusivity on campuses has been near-destroyed. From coast to coast in the United States, university presidents have spent the last six months struggling to draw a clear line, but their failure to act decisively — or their timid stance — has cost them the support of parents, politicians, illustrious students and, ultimately, students on both sides: either for tolerating the protests, as Columbia initially did, or for calling the police to disperse the first encampment last week. Members of Congress went to the campus on Monday to see whether order was being maintained. The debate on antisemitism on campuses has become the new front of the cultural and political wars in the United States.

The initiative in Columbia was quick to catch on, sparking other protest camps in Michigan, Berkeley, Minnesota, NYU, and MIT, whose university president was also seriously questioned in a Congressional hearing that accused the prestigious Ivy League universities for not condemning antisemitism strongly enough. At Yale, police detained 50 protesters on Monday, accusing them of breaking and entering. After the police action, the protest spread even further and the students ended up blocking an intersection. At NYU, there were also several arrests, while the president’s office issued a statement claiming that the rally in front of the Faculty of Business, in the heart of the city, included people not affiliated with the university. “We also learned that there were intimidating chants and several antisemitic incidents reported,” said the statement.

Israel-Gaza war protests spread to more universities across US

Details

Written by Super User

Category: Americas

Published: 26 April 2024

Hits: 620

NEW YORK - What began last week at Columbia University, where students refused to end their protests against Israel's war in Gaza despite pushback from the New York school and arrests by police, has spread across the country. Students at various college campuses are staging similar demonstrations that are also being met with police response.

In one of the latest incidents, on Thursday police responded as student protesters at Princeton University in New Jersey began setting up an encampment, according to media reports.

In a video posted on X, an officer said, "You all are in violation of university policy. These tents must come down now." Protesters were also shown chanting, "Free, free Palestine."

A couple states away in Massachusetts, police forcibly removed an encampment set up by students at Emerson College in Boston and arrested more than 100 people, according to media and police reports. The tents were removed shortly after 1 a.m. on Thursday, police said. Emerson canceled classes Thursday.

Students at Harvard University, Tufts University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology set up similar encampments.

Meanwhile, Atlanta police and Georgia state troopers removed a camp on Emory University's quadrangle Thursday morning.

And in Washington on Thursday, hundreds of demonstrators gathered at George Washington University to call for universities to divest from companies linked to Israel and to drop disciplinary charges against pro-Palestinian student protesters. The protest was organized by students from George Washington, Georgetown University and others in the region.

Last week, tensions escalated on Columbia's Manhattan campus when city police arrested more than 100 pro-Palestinian protesters.

University officials decided to switch to hybrid learning for the remainder of the semester, which will conclude by the end of next week. The university has again extended the deadline, this time until early Friday morning, for students to dismantle tents.

"I condemn the antisemitic protests," U.S. President Joe Biden told reporters Monday. "I also condemn those who don't understand what's going on with the Palestinians."

Palestine Legal, a U.S. pro-Palestinian group, filed a federal civil rights complaint against Columbia in the wake of last week's mass arrest of anti-war protesters after the school called police to clear demonstrator encampments, the group said Thursday.

Similar scenes have been playing out this week from Connecticut and Illinois to Texas and California.

In New Haven, Connecticut, on Monday, police arrested 48 protesters, four of whom were not students, at Yale University after they refused to leave an encampment on a plaza at the center of campus.

Two days later at the University of Texas at Austin, hundreds of protesters were met with university officers as Texas state troopers responded in riot gear. Dozens of students who did not leave the area were arrested.

"Arrests being made right now & will continue until the crowd disperses," Texas Governor Greg Abbott posted on X. "These protesters belong in jail. Antisemitism will not be tolerated in Texas. Period. Students joining in hate-filled, antisemitic protests at any public college or university in Texas should be expelled."

A photojournalist covering the protest for Fox 7 Austin was arrested after being caught in the tumult between students and law enforcement, the station said. Footage on social media shows the journalist being knocked down by officers.

Hours later on Wednesday, in contrast to the police response in Texas, police peacefully arrested student protesters at the University of Southern California. That evening, a few dozen demonstrators standing in a circle with locked arms were detained one by one without incident. More than 90 protesters were arrested on campus.

A day later, USC announced it would cancel its main graduation ceremony, scheduled for May 10. The university had already canceled a commencement speech by the school's pro-Palestinian valedictorian, citing safety concerns.

What is Project Nimbus, and why are Google workers protesting Israel deal?

Details

Written by Super User

Category: Americas

Published: 23 April 2024

Hits: 783

NEW YORK - Tech workers are protesting against use of artificial intelligence and other cloud technologies by Israel in its war on Gaza.

Google employees based in the United States staged protests at the tech giant’s offices in New York City, California and Seattle last week to oppose a $1.2bn contract with the Israeli government.

Known as Project Nimbus, the joint contract between Google and Amazon signed in 2021 aims to provide cloud computing infrastructure, artificial intelligence (AI) and other technology services to the Israeli government and its military, which has faced condemnation for its ongoing war on Gaza.

Israel has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians, overwhelmingly civilians, and destroyed vast swaths of the Palestinian coastal enclave since it launched the military offensive last October. The country has justified the offensive saying it is targeting Hamas fighters who carried out a deadly attack on October 7.

Here is a look at why tech workers are opposing military collaborations amid misuse of AI and other technologies in conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine among others.

Why are Google employees protesting against Project Nimbus?

Last week’s sit-ins in New York and California’s Sunnyvale were led by No Tech For Apartheid, which has been organising Google employees against Project Nimbus since 2021. Employees are opposing their employer’s ties with Israel, which is facing a genocide charge for its war on Gaza at the World Court.

Tech workers are demanding that they have right to know how their labour is going to be used. With little clarity about the project, they fear the technology might be used for harm. Workers at Amazon and Facebook parent Meta have also clashed with their employers over war links.

“It is impossible to feel excited and energised to work when you know your company is providing the Israeli government products that are helping it commit atrocities in Palestine,” said, Tina Vachovsky, staff software engineer at Google, in a testimonial published on No Tech Apartheid website.

According to a 2021 report by the US-based news outlet The Intercept, Google is offering advanced AI capabilities to Israel, which could harvest data for facial recognition and object tracking as part of Project Nimbus.

Activists and academics have been alarmed by Israel’s use of AI to target Palestinians, while legal scholars say the use of AI in war violates international laws.

“There’s actually a shocking lack of transparency around exactly what this project covers, outside of providing interoperable, comprehensive cloud computing, which is essentially systems of data storage, data management, and sharing,” Ramesh Srinivasan, professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), told Al Jazeera.

“Data for the Israeli governments, of course, is likely to extend to the Israeli [army]. So it’s a project that marks and sort of highlights the direct connections that big technology companies in the United States have, not only to the so-called military-industrial complex, but to directly aiding and abetting the Israeli government.”

In a statement, the tech giant said that the Nimbus contract “is not directed at highly sensitive, classified, or military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services”. The tech behemoth says it works with several governments around the world, including Israel.

The company fired at least 28 employees on Tuesday for “violating Google’s code of conduct” and “policy on harassment, discrimination and retaliation” during the events on Tuesday. In addition, at least nine Google employees were arrested for the sit-ins at its offices in New York and Sunnyvale.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai issued veiled a warning in a blog post last week.

“We have a culture of vibrant, open discussion that enables us to create amazing products and turn great ideas into action. That’s important to preserve. But ultimately we are a workplace and our policies and expectations are clear: this is a business, and not a place to act in a way that disrupts coworkers or makes them feel unsafe, to attempt to use the company as a personal platform, or to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics. This is too important a moment as a company for us to be distracted,” he wrote.

But tech workers have not been fazed by the warning. Mohammad Khatami, a Google software engineer who was arrested for participating in the sit-in in New York, told US outlet Democracy Now that workers were arrested for “speaking out against the use of our technology to power the first AI-powered genocide”.

Is there a history of tech workers opposing collaborations with militaries?

This isn’t the first time Amazon and Google employees have voiced their displeasure with Project Nimbus. Last October, Amazon and Google employees expressed their concerns anonymously in an open letter published by the UK news outlet The Guardian:

“We are writing as Google and Amazon employees of conscience from diverse backgrounds. We believe that the technology we build should work to serve and uplift people everywhere, including all of our users. As workers who keep these companies running, we are morally obligated to speak out against violations of these core values. For this reason, we are compelled to call on the leaders of Amazon and Google to pull out of Project Nimbus and cut all ties with the Israeli military. So far, more than 90 workers at Google and more than 300 at Amazon have signed this letter internally. We are anonymous because we fear retaliation.”

In 2018, thousands of Google employees protested against a contract with the Pentagon known as Project Maven. In 2017, Google partnered with the Pentagon to use the company’s AI technology to analyse drone surveillance footage.

In February, roughly 30 activists gathered around the entrance to OpenAI’s San Francisco office, due to the company quietly removing a ban on “military and warfare” from its usage policies in the previous month. OpenAI would eventually confirm it was working with the US Department of Defense on open-source cybersecurity software solutions.

On March 4, at the Mind the Tech conference in New York, Google employee Eddie Hatfield stood up in a conference room and shouted, “I am a Google Cloud software engineer, and I refuse to build technology that powers genocide, apartheid, or surveillance!”

Hatfield was fired days after interrupting the managing director of Google Israel, Barak Regev. This would eventually set the stage for the recent protests against Project Nimbus.

In December of last year, in response to Project Nimbus, 1,700 employees sent a petition to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy stating 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”.

Rights organisations – Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International – have accused Israel of committing international crimes of apartheid against Palestinians. An earlier UN report had accused Israel of establishing an apartheid regime.

Which other tech companies have tied up with the Israeli military?

It’s not just cloud computing tech companies providing contracts to the Israeli military. In a report published last week by Brown University, Roberto J Gonzalez, professor of cultural anthropology at San Jose State University, describes how the US public company Palantir Technologies is involved with Israel.

“For years, Palantir has had multiple contracts with the Israeli [army], and it extended its support for Israel after its war against Hamas began in October 2023,” Gonzalez says in published on April 17.

Palantir, the Denver-based data analysis firm that provides military institutions with artificial intelligence, was co-founded by right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel. Palantir, which has worked with the US National Security Agency, has previously provided tech solutions for the Israeli military.

American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), an international organisation that works to challenge injustices globally, has maintained a directory of “C­o­m­p­a­n­i­e­s P­r­o­f­i­t­i­n­g f­r­o­m I­s­r­a­e­l­’­s 2­0­2­3­-­2­0­2­4 a­t­t­a­c­k­s o­n G­a­z­a”.

More than 50 companies hailing from the US, China, Germany to the United Kingdom have been listed.

“This is a form of corporate welfare not only for the largest weapons manufacturers, like Lockheed Martin, RTX, Boeing, and General Dynamics, which have seen their stock prices skyrocket, but also for companies that are not typically seen as part of the weapons industry, such as Caterpillar, Ford, and Toyota,” the AFSC Action Center for Corporate Accountability states.

What do we know about collaborations between tech companies and militaries around the world?

The US military and spy agencies signed contracts worth at least $53bn between 2019 and 2022, according to the report published by Brown University on April 17.

In December of 2022, the Pentagon awarded Google, Oracle, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft a $9bn contract for a top-secret cloud environment.

US-based companies like Clearview AI, based out of New York City, provide facial recognition software to help Ukraine identify Russian soldiers and officials who have participated in the military invasion. Ukraine was given free access to Clearview AI software starting in 2022.

The same report also shows an increasing role of big tech in the military-industrial complex.

“Although much of the Pentagon’s $886bn budget is spent on conventional weapon systems and goes to well-established defense giants such as Lockheed Martin, RTX, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, Boeing, and BAE Systems, a new political economy is emerging, driven by the imperatives of big tech companies, venture capital (VC), and private equity firms,” the report says.

Often, the introduction of new technologies can come at a terrible human cost if not properly tested and vetted.

“Everybody knows these AI systems will make mistakes… so that there will be wrongful deaths and wrongful assassinations as we’ve seen with so many civilian people in Gaza,” Srinivasan, the UCLA professor, says.