Google employees demand Palestine support in letter to CEO
mashable.com
mashable.com
> The letter penned by an unofficial Google group calling themselves the Jewish Diaspora in Tech accuses the official Jewish ERG ... of silencing voices critical of Israel's current military strategy and historical combative relationship with Palestinians. "We object to the conflation of Israel with the Jewish people," the Jewish Diaspora in Tech leaders wrote in their letter.
So 250 signatures out of ~2.5k Jews is order-of-magnitude 10% of the Jews people employed at Google.
So if they were literally all Jewish, which they probably aren't, this still doesn't really tell us what Jews at Google think. Even if we do care what Jewish Googlers think. There is nothing here.
I don't envy Google leadership here, though they may have to partially blame themselves:
"This new internal political divide at Google sheds a spotlight on a long-standing diversity effort: designated employee resource groups (ERG) intended to celebrate employees with marginalized identities. But in today's climate, these groups may be sparking more political controversy than Google ever expected. "
I mean you start organize people around their ethnic/etc. identities, and as a result you may deepen the divides and raise the tensions. Reminds the situation of Indian caste system which was really formalized and strengthened by the British.
Whatever caste system is today there in India, it was before arrival of Europeans as well, but little more flexible compared to the strict categorisation they did.
People sarcastically call them Yafei Nefesh (יפי נפש), "beautiful souls".
I don't know if it's proverbial Jewish self-hatred or plain stupidity.
That law ... is a Palestinian law.
https://www.dw.com/en/us-palestinian-jailed-for-life-over-se...
Besides. It's not like Israel recognises Palestine as a state and consequently it's justice system.(even tho making people stateless goes against human rights.)
It is very much not about allowing a new state to spring up in the middle of an existing country. Especially not when rockets are involved.
Most of the world recognises Palestine as a state. Israel does not and is making it disappear thus making these people stateless. It could annex these people's land with or without without recognising Palestine and hand em citizenship in the process but that's generally not the case.
>in contrast to most EU countries these days I might add, who are doing this, which shows once again just how empty human rights really are
I find this a bit unrelated but am curious non the less. I haven't heard of this so can you provide examples? (Ones not being fought in court atm) The cases i've heard had all had a non-eu citizenship.
>It is very much not about allowing a new state to spring up in the middle of an existing country.
I suspect you are being wilfully obtuse when you ignore nothing is springing up out of nowhere and the borders of said existing country have been constantly shifting to grow. It sounds like you're talking about the creation of Israel if anything which is probably too far back to be worth discussing much.
https://www.dw.com/en/revoking-citizenship-how-it-works-acro...
Generally this is done with (of course alleged) terrorism as an excuse, although this does not seem to be the case in practice. In Belgium, there were two cases where citizenship was stripped, one involving an orphan and one involving lying to the state unemployment agency about owning foreign "property" (a shack, not rented out ...) In both cases, I find it very hard to believe either person had anything remotely to do with terrorism, yet that's what happened anyway.
The second "big" cause of revoking citizenship is people who acquired more than one citizenship (and aren't rich, then there is no problem ...) and don't "do their utmost to cancel their previous citizenship".
> I suspect you are being wilfully obtuse when you ignore nothing is springing up out of no
Sorry. I realise now that "springing up" is indeed not the correct term for the Israel-Palestine situation. That wording can be much improved. I'm saying that the legislation is about states depriving their own citizens of citizenship, and doesn't apply to the semi-almost-but-not-entirely 2 state situation in Israel.
Likewise there is nothing in this legislation that prevents property from being confiscated.
Is this self-hatred? I'd say it simply being human.
Why don't these 250,000+ per year employees live on 50,000 per year and donate the rest?
So they are doing to others what was done to them, and yet if anyone speaks "hh", that person us called a Holocaust denier. Ignoring the Holocaust they are engaged in TODAY. Yesterday or a day before, some actress was shamed by official Israel account when she spoke for Palestine cause. What? What kind of bs is this?
The lesson of the 20th century was "you won't demonize, oppress, chase away or murder a population" but it seems about half of the people got their brains overfitted and what they've learned is just "you won't demonize, oppress, chase away or murder the Jews, but with everybody else is just fine".
Israel helped nurture the Hamas of today to deal with the PLO/Fatah but regardless of whether they expected it to become what it did they won't bomb it out of existence.
I need to ask you, how about a bully takes over your home, throws you out on the street and cries self defense if you fight back. What do you do? I am asking you in particular.
So assume Hamas winds down operations today, will IDF stop their bombings, stop settlements? Stop murdering children? Stop violating UN resolutions on war crimes and crimes against humanity and their expansion plan into occupied territories? Will Israel give back Palestinians the land they forcefully took from them since 1947?
Where does Hamas even come into the picture you baffoon
The Palestinian's interests is into keeping and nurturing a strong resistance until there is a real support from the USA for a reasonable peace process.
Relative pain. The same amount of money has far more substantial effects on an individual than Google. You could live in complete squalor for amounts that Google might not even notice missing.
Ability to contribute. Even the bulk of the salary of 250 Google employees pales in comparison to Google's budget for this kind of thing. Getting Google to act could easily end with a large total contribution.
Time. Presumably these 250 people have not been living on 50k a year with the intention to find some cause to throw literally all of their savings at. It may well take a year for them to contribute as much as you're suggesting.
Public perception. Google doing a thing is not at all the same as a group of Google employees doing a thing. One would be far more influential than the other.
Other corporations. Once Google does a thing, it is far easier for other corporations to follow suit. Not only is it simply easier to sell - I mean Google did it, it can't be that bad of an idea right? - it's more than possible that Google taking a stand would apply pressure to other corporations to do the same. They wouldn't want to be morally inferior to Google now would they?
So, off the top of my head... yeah there's more than a few good reasons for trying to move Google like this. And who says none of these people haven't donated what money they could currently afford to? I don't know how we'd even know that.
I'd note too that on the individual level, the risk calculus shifts. There is a good case for earmarking charity money (allowing use of it for personal emergencies) and leaving them in your own investments and dedicating them upon death, rather than committing them immediately to your favorite cause of the day.
I'm not saying palestinians aren't in need of humanitarian aid, they are. And I'm not saying Israel is the good guy here - they are most certainly not.
But viewing the conflict in such a dichotomous way (good vs. bad) is driving both sides away from an agreed upon resolution to the conflict.
There's no end to it, just like there's no end to the pretend tolerance and pretend generosity by using other peoples' money for ideas they have no desire to contribute to, but are forced to at gunpoint and prison threat (taxation).