Following a contentious United Nations report on Google’s role in Israel’s war in Gaza, the tech giant’s co-founder Sergey Brin called the international forum “transparently antisemitic” in an internal memo, according to a Wednesday report.
Screenshots of Brin’s comments were sent to The Washington Post, which verified their authenticity with a “current member” of the internal forum they were sent to.
Brin’s comments came after a report issued late last month by UN rapporteur on Palestinian rights Francesca Albanese accused Google, and its parent company Alphabet — along with fellow tech giants Microsoft and Amazon — of aiding Israel’s “ongoing genocidal campaign in Gaza” through cloud and artificial intelligence support for the Israeli military and intelligence agencies.
Responding to the UN report, Brin, who is Jewish, said that “throwing around the term genocide in relation to Gaza is deeply offensive to many Jewish people who have suffered actual genocides.”
“I would also be careful citing transparently antisemitic organizations like the UN in relation to these issues,” Brin said in the internal memo, sent to staff at Google’s DeepMind AI division.
While Google did not respond to a request for comment on Brin’s messages, he told the Post that his “comments came in response to an internal discussion that was citing a plainly biased and misleading report.”
Albanese, who authored the UN report accusing Google of aiding Israel’s “genocide” in Gaza, was sanctioned by the US on Wednesday, for “political and economic warfare” against the US and Israel.
The unprecedented move was led by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who said it was made in light of “her illegitimate and shameful efforts to prompt International Criminal Court action against US and Israeli officials, companies, and executives.”
“Albanese’s campaign of political and economic warfare against the United States and Israel will no longer be tolerated. We will always stand by our partners in their right to self-defense,” Rubio wrote on X.
Albanese, an Italian national, regularly accuses Israel of genocide in Gaza and has said that the October 7, 2023, attacks by Hamas must be put in a “context of decades of oppression imposed on the Palestinians.” She has come under harsh criticism from both the Biden and Trump administrations.
Asked to comment on Albanese’s report, a spokesperson for UN Secretary General António Guterres said that while the UN’s Human Rights Council, which holds the mandate for Albanese’s role as Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, does “have a UN logo and UN title in their name,” they operate “fully independently of the Secretary-General.”
“He has no idea what they’re going to do or what they say,” the spokesperson said.
For its part, Google has reportedly been worried that reputation could be harmed by its ties to Israel, specifically the so-called Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion deal signed in 2021 between itself, the Israeli government, and Amazon to provide AI and cloud services that are also used by the IDF.
The government contract with Google and Amazon for the services is for an initial seven years, with an option to extend it for a total of 23 years. After the first seven years, Israel will be able to add other suppliers or halt work with the current ones.
Last May, hundreds of current and former Google employees staged a protest at the tech company’s annual developer conference in Mountain View, California, calling for ties with Israel to be severed over the war against Hamas in Gaza.
The protesters chained themselves together near the entrance to the conference, forcing attendees to be redirected to a different entrance, and carried a large banner reading “Google stop fueling genocide.”
The war in Gaza was sparked by Hamas’s October 7, 2023, onslaught in which terrorists stormed the border and killed some 1,200 people and took 251 hostages. In the ongoing war, in which some 57,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run health ministry. These figures cannot be verified and don’t differentiate between civilians and combatants.
Israel has said it seeks to minimize civilian fatalities and stresses that Hamas uses Gaza’s civilians as human shields, fighting from civilian areas including homes, hospitals, schools, and mosques.
Israel’s toll in the ground offensive against Hamas in Gaza and in military operations along the border with the Strip stands at 450.
The death and destruction in Gaza has led accusations of genocide against Israel in the International Court of Justice, and to the International Criminal Court issuing arrest warrants for its leaders for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Jerusalem categorically rejects these charges, saying it only attacks military targets and that civilian casualties are largely the result of Hamas embedding its military installations and personnel deep within Gaza’s civilian infrastructure.
Jacob Magid contributed to this report.