The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

In a stunning and massive development, tech giant Microsoft has announced that it is terminating parts of the Israeli military’s access to proprietary technology that it was using to conduct mass surveillance and targeting of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

As The Guardian reported last week, “Microsoft told Israeli officials late last week that Unit 8200, the military’s elite spy agency, had violated the company’s terms of service by storing the vast trove of surveillance data in its Azure cloud platform, sources familiar with the situation said.

“The decision to cut off Unit 8200’s ability to use some of its technology results directly from an investigation published by The Guardian last month. It revealed how Azure was being used to store and process the trove of Palestinian communications in a mass surveillance program. The project began after a meeting in 2021 between Microsoft’s Chief Executive Satya Nadella and the unit’s then-Commander Yossi Sariel.

In response to the investigation, Microsoft ordered an urgent external inquiry to review its relationship with Unit 8200. Its initial findings have now led the company to cancel the unit’s access to some of its cloud storage and AI services.”

Now, as a journalist, I have to underline the fact that this major policy shift from Microsoft would not have happened without the investigative co-reporting by my colleagues at The Guardian, the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine, and the Hebrew-language outlet Local Call. But they were by no means the only forces pressuring Microsoft and exposing the company’s technological and financial complicity in Israel’s genocide and apartheid system in occupied Palestine.

As Real News viewers and listeners know, we have been extensively covering the tech worker-led revolt from within Microsoft and the grassroots movement to pressure Microsoft to divest from genocide. For more than a year, under the banner of the No Azure for Apartheid movement, current and former tech workers, along with community members and supporters, have been organizing to expose and put an end to Microsoft’s ties to the Israeli war machine and taking actions to disrupt business as usual at Microsoft until their demands were met.

Those actions included setting up a liberated zone encampment on Microsoft’s global headquarters last month, which I was on the ground reporting on for The Real News, and conducting a sit-in in Microsoft President Brad Smith’s executive office.

Microsoft responded to those actions by calling the cops and by firing the employees involved. Just about every single Microsoft worker that I’ve interviewed about this in the past two months has been fired.

Today on The Real News, we are speaking with three of those fired Microsoft workers and members of the No Azure for Apartheid movement.

Welcome to you all. Thank you so much for speaking with us today. First, I want to go around the table and ask if y’all could introduce yourselves to people watching and give us your initial reactions to this news from Microsoft. In terms of the movement’s struggle to get Microsoft to divest from genocide, as y’all have been repeatedly demanding, what does this news mean and what does it not mean?

Nisreen Jaradat:

Hi, so my name is Nisreen Jaradat. I am a former Microsoft worker. I was fired at the end of August after I participated in the Liberation Zone encampments and rallies. I think that this news is evidence that no target, no matter how big is unmovable. Microsoft is the second largest corporation in the world. It is the second largest tech company in the world. And the fact that the exposure of Microsoft complicity by journalists and by activists internally and externally, and the sustained pressure that has been put on Microsoft forced it to cut off some services is evidence that direct action works and that no target is unmovable. I will say though that this is by no means victory. I’ve seen some outlets reporting that Microsoft is all good. Now we can just move on with our lives. No, we can’t. This decision only cuts off a few services to a single military unit and we will not stop organizing.

We will not stop protesting until all of our demands are met, which includes cutting off all of Azure services and contracts with the Israeli government and military materially. What does this mean for Palestinians on the ground in the West Bank? This really doesn’t mean much. A starving Palestinian child cannot eat a disabled Azure service, and we need to keep that in mind as we’re organizing to ground ourselves, which is what do we need to do for Palestine right now? And until Microsoft fully divests, we’re going to continue. We won’t stop, we won’t rest and we will keep organizing.

Julius Shan:

My name is Julius Shan and I’ve been a tech worker at Microsoft for almost five years. I was fired the same day that nazarre was fired for also taking part in the Liberated zone protests and also having been suspended twice for sending out mass emails across the company, talking about Microsoft’s complicity and genocide. So like Nareen said, this is a small but unprecedented win in our movement against Microsoft. It is disabling, again, just a small subset of services that Microsoft provides to the Israeli military and the Israeli government. There are still more than 635 subscriptions that Microsoft supplies to the Israeli military. And what this means is that Microsoft continues to support Israel, it continues to support their military, and it still stands behind the Israeli genocide at this point. The services that Microsoft cut off were moved over to Amazon Web Services sometime in August.

And so what this means is that the provider of these technologies that enable Israel’s mass surveillance and the creation of lists against Palestinians is now just in the hands of another major American tech corporation. So what this means is that we will not stop escalating, we will not stop mobilizing. We will not stop until all of our demands are met. We will remind Microsoft that there is no moral, legal or ethical way to continue business with an entity that is committing genocide and committing ethnic cleansing. We can see this all televised on our phones every single day, every single hour, every day that goes by a classroom full of children in Gaza is killed by the Israeli military. So we will not stop until Palestine is free. We will not stop escalating. And this shows that direct action does have impact on these enormous entities. These companies are worth trillions of dollars and what a group of tens of activists and community organizers is able to do in collaboration with the news provided by The Guardian nine seven two Mag and local call shows us how our collective forces together are incredibly powerful in forcing the hand of something as powerful as Microsoft. And until Palestine is free, we will not stop.

Anna Hattle:

Hi, my name is Anna Hattle and I worked at Microsoft for five years before being terminated a few weeks ago after sitting in at the Microsoft President Brad Smith’s office. I’m also an organizer with the no Azure for Apartheid campaign, as my friends have already named. It’s clear that the news this week is significant and also that it doesn’t actually dismantle the infrastructure that Microsoft is providing to continue enabling the genocide. So we’ve named that Microsoft has decided to cut services to a small subset of the services that they provide to unit 8,200 and to the Israeli military, but they actually haven’t disclosed the details of which services they’re cutting and we can’t even be sure that this will actually prevent them from continuing to use Microsoft technology to do what they’re doing. So it’s important to acknowledge that this doesn’t have the full extent of the material impact that we’re looking for and to stop the genocide in Palestine.

It is not there. And at the same, it is significant because as the Guardian named it is actually the first time that a US tech company has suspended services to the Israeli military, even if it’s a portion of them after the genocide began. This is really significant because even though again, Microsoft is maintaining their relationship explicitly with the Israeli military, and that’s something that they named that we’re continuing to have that customer relationship with them and that the suspension does not affect that they are actually antagonizing the IMOD and forcing, forcing unit 8,200 to take measures to move elsewhere. And this kind of opens up a new pathway because as we know, a lot of players in the tech industry and in industries in general, they move in lockstep. These corporations, they strategize together and a lot of times they won’t make moves until a different corporation makes a move first. In this case, Microsoft has now made itself the first company to make this move, which opens up the possibilities for so many other corporations and entities to consider what it would mean to cut ties with some aspect of the Israeli military. And that is something that is really significant.

Maximillian Alvarez:

It is very significant indeed. And I mean we were sort of talking before we got recording here that I mean we were all a bit shocked. You just don’t expect to see any semblance of good news these days or organizing victories, but they’re out there and we are trying to show y’all out real news viewers and listeners that they are happening. Regular people like you are taking decisive action and changing history by doing so. And I wanted to sort of ask you guys, obviously in the Guardian report that they have a vested interest in lifting up the role of their reporting with 9 7 2 magazine and Local Call. And again, all credit really should go to them for the reporting that they did and the role that that has played in this larger movement. But I want to give you all a chance to talk about the role that you have played in this. How much would you attribute this decision to the pressure that tech workers like yourselves have been putting on Microsoft even long before the Guardian report came out this summer?

Nisreen Jaradat:

Yeah, I think I want to answer your question in two parts. So the first one is that this is not the first exposure that the Guardian has done when it comes to Microsoft. It’s just the first one that they’ve publicly taken seriously. I recall last year the Guardian also nine seven two magazine in local call published a really exposing joint investigation that indicated that let the Israeli military’s usage of AI and storage and compute technology and had increased exponentially throughout this genocide. They also revealed that Microsoft workers themselves from the Microsoft Israel subsidiary were on the grounds in Israeli military basis designing surveillance technology. That was all reported on by The Guardian by nine seven two and by local call a few months later, the Associated Press came out with another article saying that Microsoft AI was being used by the Israeli military for transcription, for translation, for searching through intercepted calls, text messages, and audio files. That was all reported on by the Associated Press in February of this year.

And so the only real difference in the new article that’s come out by the Guardian is the scale of that mass surveillance and naming Satya by name. That was the main difference. However, articles have been reporting about Microsoft complicity for a very long time. The biggest change that we’ve seen is the degree of our escalations, right? So when we started the NoJa Apartheid campaign, we started with our own investigation and our own white paper release that compiled a lot of public information and we had a petition from that time. Our protests have gotten more and more escalatory. We started doing more creative things like interrupting the 50th anniversary Microsoft build responsible AI conferences. And then finally, as you saw in August, well not finally, but most recently we had the encampments and the sit-in in Brad Smith’s office. So while the reporting is extremely important, and I don’t want to discredit that, I also want to attribute to the fact that collective action I think is really the main driver in this decision making, the collective action of workers.

And we don’t just see this at Microsoft, we’ve seen this from dock workers all over the world who are refusing to accept shipments of weapons that go to the Israeli military and therefore influencing either their company or their government’s positions on that. We see that with academic workers who are striking in support of the student in default. It’s really obvious and it’s getting more and more obvious every day that workers don’t have to just accept the status quo. They don’t have to accept being accessories to the crime of genocide. Workers can and should and have a responsibility to push back on that and revolt in all of the ways that they can.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Julius, what about you? I

Julius Shan:

Think that was a fantastic answer that Nareen put together. And like she said, this isn’t the first piece of reporting that’s come out regarding Microsoft and Azure’s extent of involvement in providing the technology infrastructure that enables Israel’s genocide, right? We’ve heard all the way back since I think it was January or February in this year that AP News and 9 7 2 together reported Microsoft’s storage and AI usage being utilized very heavily by the Israeli military. And so I think what has been happening over the year has indeed been a culmination of a lot of internal and external organizing, both from workers and from the community. As we’ve seen no Azure for apartheid. Our movement continues to grow, our petition continues to grow, and as our numbers overall gain strength, I think that’s given more and more workers a voice inside of the company. It’s given community workers more visibility and transparency into what Microsoft is doing, especially for people who live around the Seattle area.

Microsoft is such a big part of the community that makes up people’s lives there. It’s one of the major employers in that area. And to see Microsoft then call in three separate county police departments in the Washington State Police on its own workers and community members, it really showed I think the people in the area just how violent Microsoft is willing to get to suppress any bad news about what it’s doing with the Israeli military. And I think the reporting galvanized us as a group to go after Microsoft even further as we learned more and more about how deeply complicit this company is and just how many heinous war crimes they are empowering. And so by forcing ourselves, well, by organizing our group and taking part in these on-campus protests and the sit-in, I think we really created a lot of pressure on Microsoft in August to address why were these people taking this action?

Why were these people going? To the extent of going onto on-campus protests of going into Brad Smith’s office and conducting a sit-in and by forcing them to address this, I think we have helped to turn up the heat on Microsoft and really point out that the public is watching everything that they’re doing. The public is becoming more and more informed about the extent to which Microsoft technology is being used to power the genocide against the Palestinian people, and as popular support changes in favor of the Palestinian people in the United States. I think this really goes to show just how by having the community and having real people organize around this cause around halting Microsoft’s support of Israel, I think it shows that the community together exerts a lot of strength in this regard with the power of journalism as well.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Anna, anything you want to add to that?

Anna Hattle:

Yes, I’d love to add that I think we all know that the moves that Microsoft is making now is not coming out of the goodness of their hearts or the goodwill of the executives. We’re all very clear on that. I want to also emphasize that the information that the Guardian has reported on and the general points about Microsoft’s complicity have actually been concerns that people have been raising for over two years within the company internally and externally. And the impression that Microsoft is trying to give that they didn’t know that these things were happening until the guardian reported on it is false. And the work that they did is so important. And part of it is because the folks there have the platform and the credibility and the audience to convey that information to the public in a way that Microsoft can no longer deny and suppress.

And between that reporting and also support from people in groups all over the world that have added their voices to ours, to workers in the campaign and to generally pressure Microsoft, that’s all come together to create the situation for them in which they’ve been forced to respond. But I think it’s also really important that all of this general pressure, which can happen from so many different fronts, when it’s exerted behind a direct point that chooses a specific target for its pressure, I think that’s when it becomes really effective and to what my friends already named, I think it’s those pointed actions that we’ve seen really get results from Microsoft. So in the past, for example, when we sent our petition from workers, which now has 2,100 signatures to executives, they released the report of the results of the first investigation that same day and after our sit-in at the president’s office, he had the press conference a few hours later.

And I think it’s very clear that they’re responding kind of directly to the pressure from the campaign. And it’s also very clear to us that they’re invested in hiding the fact that it is direct pressure from the campaign and protests that led to this change because they don’t want to give the impression that collective action works, that direct action works because that would encourage and ferment exactly the kind of actions that are going to result in change, and both for themselves and probably for the industry at, they don’t want us to know that, and they want to give the impression that they were already doing this, that it’s just about this high level, these high level changes and machinations that are out of workers’ control. And we need to remember that that’s not true and that it is actually worker organizing and they’re trying to prevent all of us from realizing that we have collective power and continuing to exert it.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I want to ask a personal question to you three. Reading this news now, do you feel it was worth it losing your jobs to see this result? And would it have been worth it even if Microsoft didn’t make this decision?

Nisreen Jaradat:

Yes and yes. So as a Microsoft worker, my work unintentionally but definitely in some capacity did contribute to the genocide of my people in Palestine. And to even attempt to atone for that, it would be worth it to give up every comfort that I have because none of the comforts that can be taken away from us for organizing even compares to what’s happening right now in the Rezi, which is genocide. So yes, losing my job was a trivial price to pay in the overall struggle for a free Palestine.

Julius Shan:

Likewise, yes, it was worth losing my job, and yes, it would’ve been worth it even if Microsoft did not choose to cut this subset of services. And losing my job is nothing at all compared to what Palestinians are forced into experiencing at the hand of Israel, powered by Microsoft. My job likeness res was also being a small but unintentional part in contributing to this genocide. In some ways, it is liberating to have had the decision made for me to cut off my ability to even taint myself with that blood money and my job as a privilege to even have the people in Palestine right now have no ability to really hold down a job the way we do. We are so, so lucky to have had the comfort and privilege to work in our little air conditioned tech offices while our technology is being used to plan the mass assassination of thousands of Palestinians, of hundreds of thousands of them.

And even if Microsoft did not make the decision, did not choose to cut off the subset of services that it did to unit 8,200, I think that it still shows to the world and whoever’s watching the media that this is where Microsoft’s value stands. Microsoft does not stand behind voices of its own workers who ask it to stop supporting genocide, as numerous outlets have clearly reported. Microsoft is absolutely supporting the Israeli military through hundreds of technology subscriptions, and by eliminating us, they’re really showing that it’s untenable to them to have people speak out against this. It’s showing to the world that Microsoft does not want people who support Palestine inside of the company making change. It wants to continue to be able to whitewash itself and wash its hands of blood. And so this firing of us and the stories being told about Microsoft, whether that is the mass surveillance or the uses of storage, or how Microsoft and open AI tools are being used by the Israeli military to commit genocide and even the police brutality on our own community, my job loss is just a small spec in that overall story, but it helps drive what we have all been saying, which is that Microsoft is deeply complicit in this genocide.

And losing this job helps to tell that story. It shows the world that they are guilty. They wouldn’t have done this if they weren’t guilty.

Anna Hattle:

I would have to agree that it was a hundred percent worth it to lose my job, and I would do it even. I mean, I chose to do that before even this news came out. So I would absolutely do it again. And I think that we see often that when you take action that has impact, repression follows, and a lot of times that repression is some evidence that what you’re doing poses enough of a threat to what you’re fighting, that they have to escalate their repression. So frankly, if I wasn’t fired, I think I would realize that I need to be doing more and in order to leverage the privilege that I have to meet my responsibility to do something about my complicity in genocide.

Maximillian Alvarez:

So I only have you three for a few more minutes, and with those minutes I want to ask what comes next for the no Azure for Apartheid movement, the broader tech worker movement against genocide. I mean, when I was there reporting on the encampment just feet away from you guys and your coworkers, I was very struck by the banners calling for a global worker Intifada, right? And I want to ask, with the few minutes we have left, what comes next for that effort and what can workers, unions and people of conscience around the country and around the world, what can they learn from your movement that they could be applying in their workplaces, in their communities?

Nisreen Jaradat:

Well, I would say that while this result is very vindicating, it is by no means victory and materially for the NoJa for Apartheid campaign, I don’t think much has changed. I think that until our demands are met, we’re going to continue protesting and escalating in always announced and unannounced, and that Microsoft should expect these escalations to continue until they fully divest and meet all of our demands. I would say that throughout labor struggles in history, one thing we always see is that collective action and collective voice is really what drives change. And so any advice I could give or have learned from other labor struggles before me is to come together and keep each other safe and get organized. That’s it.

Julius Shan:

I also think that no measure for apartheid, nothing really has changed for us. Our demands still aren’t met. We demand that IOF is all completely cut off from Azure. We want all of our ties with the Israeli military get disclosed. We want Microsoft to call for a ceasefire and we want them to protect employees and upload the free speech. And so far, none of those demands have met. And so we will continue escalating, we will continue protesting until Microsoft meets those demands. And for organizing at large, I echo a lot of what Nareen has said, which is that there is a lot of safety and strength in coming together as a community. I think before I joined Noad Azure for apartheid, I was a scared individual. I was angry. I was grieving on my own about what my work was contributing to. But by joining this movement and becoming a part of it and seeing this really surreal new world where every single person in this movement was aligned on their moral values, it gave me a lot of strength.

And I think it gave me the strength to use my voice. It gave us our strength to use our voices together, whether anonymously or not. And so I think the takeaway is that community organizing does work. Microsoft responded to our pressure as a community, as an organization that they would not have responded to if these were still just individuals trying to speak their own mind. And so for those out there who are looking to challenge their company, whether you are at Microsoft or at Amazon or Palantir or any number of the other major tech corporations that are complicit in genocide or oppression in any country, whether that’s in Palestine or in the United States or anywhere else in the world, there is power in using your voice and finding other people and building your organization. Being together as a community is what gives us strength. It gives us so much more power. It multiplies the strength of our voices together when we are together.

Anna Hattle:

Add on to that. I think that Microsoft has handed us a small concession that is totally insufficient, but what they have shown us is that our pressure is working and that pressure in general can have an impact. And so for our campaign and for hopefully workers all over the world, it’s clear that now is the time more than ever to increase that pressure and to increase the level of collective action that we’re taking because they’ve shown us that they’ve shown us their weakness, and they’ve shown us their willingness to move. And so now we know that our real goals are within reach. I think I also just want to communicate to other workers that sometimes the thing that’s limiting us is our own imagination and our own limits on what we think we can achieve with the number of people that we have and the resources at our disposal.

And sometimes I think we limit ourselves and we think that our goals are something that we can achieve and we act accordingly. But I think if we do what we need to meet this moment and we reach beyond what the people above us have tried to restrict us to and to make us believe that we’re capable of, we know that we can do so much more. And this is evidence of that. So I hope that this is the start, honestly, of a domino effect and that this concession from Microsoft is the first domino to fall, and that we see workers rise up everywhere and force entities everywhere to divest, to cut ties and end their complicity in genocide.