I know lots of googlers-- many hadn't heard about this as well.

I also think many googlers are opposed to Google's military contracts with Israel, but likely don't know this is happening.

what’s very funny is i made this comment well after the thread was flagged and removed from the front page, it garnered a bunch of upvotes, but then hours after it suddenly gets a spike of downvotes.

I see this trend a lot on this site whenever saying anything even slightly derogatory about google. Might be a fun side project to work on to quantify this.