Amazon Fires Palestinian Worker For Speaking Out Against Company's Participation In Genocide

On Monday, after a five-week long suspension, Amazon fired Palestinian tech worker Ahmed Shahrour. I’ll give you one guess as to why!

As The Burner reported last month, Shahrour sent a letter to Amazon executives and his coworkers condemning the company’s role in the genocide of his people through Project Nimbus, a 2021 deal in which Israel paid Amazon Web Services and Google $1.2 billion to provide cloud services for the Israeli military and government. Shahrour called his firing a “blatant act of retaliation designed to silence dissent from Palestinian voices within Amazon and shield Amazon's collaboration in the genocide from internal scrutiny.” 

In an email to Shahrour, Amazon said taking a stand against Project Nimbus violated company policy — but Shahrour’s concerns of suppression of pro-Palestinian workers and aiding in genocide did not violate company policy. 

Amazon said Shahrour’s statement against genocide violated three company policies. First, the company said his statements violated Amazon’s Standards of Conduct because his statements were intended to “threaten, intimidate, coerce, or interfere with senior leaders or fellow associates.”  

I could tease a part just how threatening Shahrour’s letter came across (not at all), but by the stated standard, any action or statement that attempted to change the direction of the company would be grounds for termination. 

Shahrour wrote in a press release, the policy “demands workers to stay silent and not challenge Amazon’s leadership and Amazon’s collaboration in grave human rights violations to maintain workplace harmony.”

Second, Amazon accused Shahrour of violating the company’s Acceptable Use Policy, saying he "misused" company resources by posting non-work-related messages about the “Israel-Palestine conflict” across more than 300 Slack channels during work hours. From a previous interview with Shahrour, the volume of Slack messages may be greater than usual, but many of these Slack channels are social or affinity groups that talk about things other than work at all hours of the day. 

And finally, Amazon accused Shahrour of violating the company’s Written Communication policy multiple times, including “failure to exercise good judgment concerning whether and how to communicate in writing; failure to avoid contentious matters in written communication; and violations of the special email requirements.”

Shahrour called the company “hypocritical” for “equat[ing] ‘contentious’ political debate with the uncontentious universal crime of a genocide.”

But the “Worker Intifada” doesn’t stop at Shahrour’s firing. Tech workers in the Seattle-area and around the country are keeping the pressure up. Tech giants may think it can silence dissent with a termination email. But as the Worker Intifada spreads, so does a truth too dangerous for any HR policy to contain: that complicity in genocide is a choice — and workers everywhere are starting to refuse it.