Microsoft Israel chief leaves amid ethical controversy(en.globes.co.il) |
Microsoft Israel chief leaves amid ethical controversy(en.globes.co.il) |
> Among the cloud giants, Microsoft is considered the most vulnerable to anti-Israel protests and allegations of the use made by the Ministry of Defense on Azure, its cloud platforms, since it is the only company among the three major cloud companies that has not signed a special agreement with the Israeli government and the Ministry of Defense. The industry says that Haimovich, who is known as a prominent salesman with the government sector, was appointed country general manager, among other things, due to Microsoft's plans to retain and increase business with the government sector, despite not winning the Nimbus tender.
> In 2021, Israel awarded Amazon and Google the Nimbus cloud tender, encouraging government bodies and public organizations to migrate to these services, at the expense of Microsoft. In return, Amazon and Google pledged to establish service areas in data centers on Israeli soil, in order to avoid exposing security or government data to foreign regulation.
This is a good thing.
American companies should not be allowing their tech to be used to in the gross ongoing human rights violations in Israel/Gaza/West Bank.
Google and Amazon knew their tech could be used for human rights abuses in Israel (their lawyers warned them so) but ignored that in favour of $$$ per the EFF:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/google-and-amazon-ackn...
I'm not trying to argue pro Israel or what not, I just wish they'd focus on their core mission.
Do they have a choice?
The state of Pennsylvania is 13 million; would MSFT losing PA do them serious financial damage?
https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/microsof...
Good grief. Let's maybe not parrot out nation state propaganda with zero critical thinking on what's being said.
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2025/09/microsoft-blo...
https://openletter.earth/apple-cease-funding-for-illegal-set...
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/google-and-amazon-ackn...
Ok but ... isn't Microsoft forced, by law, to cooperate with the US government and US military? So why is that then not an ethical (or other) issue?
To me this seems inconsistent. The only "necessity" I see is for Microsoft to be penalised by EU laws, which could explain that "investigation" to some extent. But the EU in general is super-weak. They even give data from EU citizens to the US government as-is, without any problem, so I don't quite buy into that explanation. Is there another explanation that makes more sense?
Microsoft and other cloud companies are not forced to do anything the US government or US military tells them to do. You are just making this up.
Relevant acts include https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Communications_Priv... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stored_Communications_Act and the more recent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act
(...to occur on servers in the European Union, where Microsoft could get in trouble for it)
Sooner or later they’ll participate. And then you would have moved your workload for no reason.
It's not that Microsoft was against this, it's that Microsoft was against themselves getting in trouble for this with the EU.
Pointing complicity with a regime that killed over 260 journalists[1] has a very strong focus and serves well free speech.
[1] https://english.elpais.com/international/2026-04-24/israel-h...
I think if you're going to concoct some kind of per-capita metric of intelligence capabilities, you're likely correct. But their intelligence industry pales in size relative to that of the U.S. and couldn't exist as it does without support from the U.S. and American companies (as we've seen with Lavender and Nimbus). American companies providing services they would otherwise have to develop in-house certainly contributes to their capacity for conducting what most would consider black-hat activities, including gathering intelligence on Americans and goings-on in the U.S., sometimes even of American politicians, in order to manipulate the American political environment to their favour.
I'm not aware of U.S. big tech providing such extensive services to any other country whose behaviour is so similar to that of the officially designated American foreign adversaries
This is mostly so that they can more accurately target Palestinian terrorist/militant groups that hide behind civilians(which is of course a war crime).
> now turning their eyes toward Lebanon and Syria
The Oct 7th attacks likely happened because they weren't keeping a close enough watch over Palestinians in Gaza and were overly focused on threats from Lebanon and Syria. Ultimately Israel's failure to monitor threats coming from Gaza greatly increased Palestinian civilian casualties due to a successful attack resulting in a much stronger Israeli response than a failed attack would have. Israel always considered Hezbollah to be a much bigger threat than Hamas so that's where they put most of their resources.
The mass casualties of children are a strong indicator that the targeting is not accurate. Government officials and elected representatives have repeatedly advocated for the assassination of all Palestinians.
Israel occupied parts of Lebanon due to attacks by PLO terrorists prior to Hezbollah being founded. Israel did not invade Lebanon prior to being attacked.
What the Israeli government is doing is, at best, unconscionable.
There is no excuse for that, they are what they themselves claim to be and no, they don't fight for anyone's freedom and are an extension of Iranian foreign policy.
Israelis aren't invaders for that matter. Most were expelled from surrounding countries, Syria and Lebanon included. They have no claim or reason, just terror. Their security interest in Syria and Lebanon are fully justified.
The invader terror regime is exposed, no justification for their crimes or interest in so called (greater israel): https://www.reddit.com/r/israelexposed
They published allegations from a questionable source with no evidence. I think most people would agree that "Israel trains dogs to rape on command" is rather absurd and implausible on its face.
So where is this evidence that you say exists?
There is no evidence that this is in any way a deliberate Israeli policy, obviously collateral damage is going to be an issue when the enemy(Hamas) hides amongst civilians and doesn't wear military uniforms.
Are we forgetting that the israelis literally dressed up as women (covered themselves entirely) to commit war crimes in a hospital?
The first article just shows a sliver of the crimes they commit, documented by a western source. I found an article that talks about how similar crimes with dogs raping prisoners was done in Chile, so it's not far fetched at all that the israelis are doing the same.