Hundreds of Amazon employees implore the company to support Palestinians
By Lauren Markoe May 27, 2021
More than 500 Amazon employees have signed a letter asking company leaders to sever any business with the Israeli Defense Forces and to reject any definition of antisemitism that implies that criticism of Israel or Zionism is antisemitic.
The open letter is one of several that employees of American tech giants, including Google and Apple, have released during and after the latest fighting between Israel and Hamas. Palestinians and their allies have taken heart in the growing support in the U.S. from within the corporate world and the Democrat party, where progressives have pushed for conditions on American aid to Israel.
In the letter, the Amazon employees ask CEO Jeff Bezos, incoming CEO Andy Jassy — who is Jewish — and the executive team to “acknowledge the continued assault upon Palestinians’ basic human rights under an illegal occupation, as evidenced and witnessed by the United Nations and human rights organizations …”
The employees also write that their opposition to the Israeli occupation is not a stance against Jews. “Antisemitism has no place in our cause. Our narrative is a stance against a state continuing to perpetuate … colonial violence against an indigenous people: the Palestinians.”
The employees also ask the company to recognize the suffering of Palestinians and to create a relief fund to support Palestinian human rights organizations. “Amazon employs Palestinians in Tel Aviv and Haifa offices and around the world. Ignoring the suffering faced by Palestinians and their families at home erases our Palestinian coworkers.”
A similar letter from Google employees, published last week, was signed “Jewish Googlers, allies, and external supporters.” Nearly 1,000 Apple employees last week asked CEO Tim Cook to publicly condemn violence against Palestinians.
Both Google and Amazon recently won a $1.2 billion contract to provide cloud services to the Israeli military and other government agencies.
Amazon officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Forward.
Seattle-based Amazon employs nearly 1.3 million people worldwide.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
