A group of current and former Microsoft employees, as well as members of the Seattle community and pro-Palestinian protesters, set up a “Liberated Zone” encampment in Microsoft’s East Campus Plaza earlier today, which they renamed to “The Martyred Palestinian Children’s Plaza.”
An announcement shared by No Azure for Apartheid, an organization calling for Microsoft to end “its direct and indirect complicity in Israeli apartheid and genocide,” said the move came in response to Microsoft’s ongoing partnership with the Israeli military and its ongoing assault on Gaza.
No Azure for Apartheid said the encampment represented “the biggest escalation” against Microsoft yet, noting that it follows a detailed report into the Israeli military’s alleged use of Microsoft technology to collect and store millions of telephone calls and text messages from Gaza and the West Bank—data the report claims has been used to blackmail and jail Palestinians, and assist with the selection of bombing targets in Gaza.
Protesters in the plaza also set up tents and negotiating tables, and have called for Microsoft executives to “come to the table.” Instead, however, a Microsoft spokesperson said the protesters “were asked to leave, and they left.” No Azure for Apartheid confirmed that protesters “were dispersed by police to public property under threat of arrest.”
Following the occupation of the plaza, No Azure for Apartheid also shared a manifesto calling for a Worker Intifada—”an uprising of workers who refuse to have their labor exploited for genocide.”
“In Anas Al-Sharif’s will and last message to us, he called on us to ‘not to let chains silence [us], nor borders restrain [us]’,” Microsoft employee and No Azure for Apartheid organizer Nisreen Jaradat said in a statement. “Microsoft is the most complicit digital arms manufacturer in Israel’s genocide of Gaza, and Microsoft workers are refusing to contribute even a second more of our labor to the Holocaust of our time.”
Anas Al-Sharif was a Palestinian journalist for Al Jazeera who was killed along with four other journalists and two others in an Israeli airstrike. The Israeli military subsequently confirmed that it had specifically targeted Al-Sharif, alleging that he was a Hamas fighter; multiple outlets including the BBC, The Economist, and The Guardian have said the Israeli military has not provided evidence to support the claim. Al Jazeera itself also explicitly rejected the allegation, calling Al-Sharif “one of Gaza’s bravest journalists” in its condemnation of the killing.
No Azure for Apartheid said in a message posted to Instagram that the evidence of Microsoft’s support of the Israeli military is “insurmountable,” and that actions against it will continue until it severs ties, provides evidence for “legal investigations against Israel,” and pays reparations to the Palestinian people.
“Let us be clear: there can be no business as usual while Gaza is starved, bombed, and surveilled by Israel and its complicit enablers,” the group said.
“The escalations will continue until these demands are met, for as long as Microsoft is invested in the economy of occupation and genocide. The Worker Intifada will make it costly to continue to do business with the murderous Zionist regime. Workers and community members will show up to escalate, confront, and disrupt in every place, at every moment, announced and unannounced.”