A Marriage Made in Hell: An Introduction to Microsoft’s Complicity in Apartheid and Genocide

by No Azure For Apartheid

“Microsoft is as much an Israeli company as an American company” — Steve Ballmer, Former CEO, Microsoft

Executive summary

The purpose of this primer is to publicly expose Microsoft’s complicity in Israeli apartheid and genocide against the people of Palestine, and to connect technology workers to the No Azure for Apartheid campaign.

Introduction

We are No Azure for Apartheid, a group of technology workers within Microsoft and its subsidiaries seeking to expose and condemn the specific technologies complicit in the ongoing apartheid and genocide in Gaza, the West Bank, and Palestine as a whole. We are part of the broader No Tech for Apartheid movement, which began with opposing Project Nimbus at Google and Amazon. With Microsoft leading advances in AI technology, we, as Microsoft employees, are morally obligated to guide the ethics and lasting ramifications of these technologies for the future.

We will not write code that kills.

Why should a Microsoft employee read this?

Our work is currently being used by the Israeli state to wreak unfathomable destruction on Palestinian life. As producers of powerful technologies that are frequently misused to serve the interests of unethical government entities, we bear the unique responsibility of ensuring that our code is used for good.

To quote a 2018 open letter from Microsoft employees to CEO Satya Nadella on the company’s contract with ICE [1]: “As the people who build the technologies that Microsoft profits from, we refuse to be complicit.”

How big tech supports genocide

Big tech is inextricably connected to Israel’s tech industry, where experimental technology is battle-tested on Palestinians throughout Israel’s brutal military campaigns, then sold to other countries. Technology plays a pivotal part in the current ongoing genocide, where, for the last eight months, the so-called Israel Defense Forces–more aptly known as the Israel Occupation Forces (IOF)–has been deploying never-before-seen weaponry on the besieged Gaza Strip.

Since 1948, Israel has established and continues to maintain a system of apartheid in historic Palestine. According to a 2022 report by Amnesty International, this system of apartheid is defined by four pillars: fragmentation into domains of control; dispossession of land and property; segregation; and deprivation of economic and social rights [2]. Today, each of these pillars are fundamentally reliant on technology developed and maintained by the Israeli state in collaboration with major public and private big tech companies, including Microsoft.

Automated apartheid: Facial recognition and biometric surveillance

In Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel, the Israeli government relies on digital surveillance tools to monitor and limit Palestinian movement, maintain repression of dissent, and protect expanding illegal Jewish-only settlements that are established through the violent dispossession of Palestinian lands and resources. Only Palestinians are subject to such restrictions. Israelis are free to travel as they wish.

A 2023 Amnesty International report describes the brutal reality of surveillance in the West Bank: surveillance towers featuring multiple camera attachments, ambient noise detection devices with long-range cameras placed throughout residential neighborhoods, checkpoints equipped with facial recognition cameras, cameras on buildings capable of three axes of rotation, and cameras that can peer into homes through windows and doors [3]. In all of these surveillance scenarios, Palestinians are denied any right to consent to, or refuse, the collection of their biometric data. For Palestinians, privacy is a luxury they cannot afford.

In the Occupied West Bank alone, there are:

• 565 movement obstacles

Palestinians cannot access employment, education, healthcare, or other essential daily activities without securing travel permits, traversing security checkpoints, and cooperating with Israel’s biometric surveillance infrastructure [4].

• 700,000 illegal settlers on watch

As illegal settlements continue to encroach on Palestinian communities, the Israeli occupation’s need to surveil dispossessed Palestinians, and bar them from their homes and their lands, has only intensified [5].

Wolf Pack and Mabat 2000

Wolf Pack is a collection of software tools that enables the Israeli military to collect and reference a vast trove of biometric data–collated with personal data–exclusively on Palestinians. Databases used by Wolf Pack contain photos of Palestinians, as well as their name, address, family members, photos, and “any information that might otherwise be collected by the Civil Administration” [6].

The Wolf Pack tool set includes:

Blue Wolf

• A facial recognition app used by Israeli soldiers at temporary checkpoints to capture photos of Palestinians’ faces and match them to database images, or upload them to biometric databases.
• Enables Israeli forces to carry out “intelligence mapping raids” [7], where soldiers raid Palestinian homes with “no suspicion and without any wrongdoing among occupants, in order to map the characteristics of the occupants and the building” [8].

Red Wolf

• A surveillance app that cross-references photos of Palestinians at checkpoints against a database, which is then expanded with the biometric data collected [9].

White Wolf

• A smartphone app used by illegal Israeli settlers to access confidential data about Palestinian workers [10].

Mabat 2000

• A surveillance program featuring over 1,000 CCTV cameras in streets and alleyways connected across East Jerusalem, another site of illegal settlement expansion, where the cameras broadcast live-feeds of residents’ movements to the police 24 hours a day [11].
• Footage can then be uploaded to remote servers for analysis and as training data for facial recognition algorithms.

Corsight and Google Photos

As Israel’s 2023 genocidal assault on Gaza became a full ground invasion, the IOF started using a set of facial recognition surveillance technology provided by Israeli company Corsight, as well as Google Photos, to collect and catalog the faces of Palestinians without their knowledge or consent [12], resulting in mass arrests and torture incidents throughout Gaza. Palestinian journalists continue to valiantly chronicle these tech-enabled injustices, but despite their brave work, given the scale of mass devastation, there’s no telling how much harm these technologies are capable of causing.

Automated genocide: “The emphasis is on damage, not on accuracy”

To date, there are over 35,300 confirmed killed, most of them women and children, in addition to 79,200 injured, more than 10,000 missing, and at least 1.6 million displaced in Rafah as a result of Israel’s unrelenting bombardment and invasion of the besieged Gaza Strip [13]. Through a deliberate policy of starvation and blocking of much-needed aid, famine and lack of clean water, aided and abetted by the U.S., has killed even countless more [14]. Evidence of the indiscriminate and disproportionate nature of the onslaught has been overwhelming and continues to amass. This is in addition to the Israeli government’s own admission that “the emphasis is on damage, not on accuracy” [15].

New reporting by +972 Magazine, The Guardian, and Local Call has exposed how Israel uses AI to scale up its ability to inflict broad devastation across Gaza [16]. Some known systems include:

The Gospel: “Mass assassination factory”

• Habsora (“The Gospel”) is an AI system used by the IOF to generate infrastructure targets, such as buildings, at a rate that “far exceeds what was previously possible” [17].
• Over the course of Israel’s 51-day assault on Gaza in 2014, Israeli forces attacked 5,000 to 6,000 targets. In the first 35 days of Israel’s most recent 2023 assault on Gaza, the IOF attacked 15,000 targets, nearly a threefold increase [18].

Lavender and “Where’s Daddy?”

• Lavender is an AI system that produces lists of Palestinians to be targeted for assassination by the IOF. Targets generated by the system undergo little or no review. Instead, they’re blindly accepted as orders to be followed. While training the system, the IOF has chosen to adopt loose and widely inclusive definitions of who constitutes a “militant” [19].
• Lavender treats nearly every Gazan as a potential target, using information about the majority of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents to assign each a score ranging from 1 to 100, indicating how likely they are to belong to a resistance group [20].
• Lavender “clocked as many as 37,000 Palestinians as suspected militants — and their homes — for possible air strikes.” At least 10% of targets are known false positives [21].
• Surveilance systems automatically link individuals to family homes. Software, including a system called “Where’s Daddy?”, tracks individuals as they arrive at their homes, then cues the military to carry out the bombing [22].
• Israel chooses to bomb suspected “militants” when inside civilian households from which no military activity took place, where they’re likely to be with family, among children, or surrounded by other residents [23].
• Fatalities were highly concentrated within families. In the early weeks of the war, 6,120 fatalities belonged to only 1,340 families, many of which were completely wiped out while in their homes [24].

Ultimately, Israel uses these AI systems to assume the responsibility of sufficiently incriminating its targets–and to forgo all human accountability for targeting decisions, and for deaths.

Microsoft’s long-standing complicity

The Israeli military industrial complex is an unchecked source of ethics-bending technology that has directly harmed hundreds of thousands of civilians in Gaza and beyond. Yet despite these war crimes [25], Microsoft maintains strong ties to the Israeli state through its collaboration with the IOF, government ministries, a prison system known for systematic torture and abuse, and Israel’s “Startup Nation”–all of which are complicit in violating international law.

This partnership matters so much, in fact, that every Microsoft CEO since Bill Gates, including Satya Nadella, has met with Prime Minister Netanyahu to further their commitments to working with Israel. Netanyahu has even explicitly stated that Israel and Microsoft are “a marriage made in heaven, but recognized here on Earth” [26].

Cloud and software services

Software partnerships with the IOF

In 2002, Microsoft participated in the largest software deal in Israel at the time. For $35 million, the deal provided the Israeli government with easy access to software services for any purpose they see fit. Within the contract, Microsoft agreed to provide “unlimited products’’ to the IOF and the Israeli Ministry of Defense (IMOD), and to “broadly exchange ‘knowledge’ with the army” [27]. To this day, Microsoft still continues to benefit from this partnership.

Project Nimbus

In May 2021, Google and Amazon won the bid for Project Nimbus, a shared $1.2 billion dollar contract to be the sole cloud providers to the Israeli government and military. Microsoft also bid on the project with the assumption that they would win it, thanks to their long-standing relationship with the IOF and IMOD. When they lost the bid, they were astonished–so much so that the company appealed in court, only to mysteriously withdraw [28].

Although contractually, Israel has shifted cloud providers from Microsoft to Google and Amazon, the physical transition has been a much more complicated and lengthy process, with government employees reluctant to make the transition [29], which is why the Israeli government granted extensions to the Department of Defense and other departments to continue using Azure and working with Microsoft. As of 2023, “joint projects with Google and Amazon franchises are being done sparingly” [30], while Microsoft’s business relationship with the state continues to flourish.

Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS) and the Israel Prison Service (IPS)

For Microsoft, Israel’s extensive prison system is a lucrative opportunity. Since 2017, the company has been providing Microsoft Cloud Services (MCS) software consulting services, year over year, to the Israel Prison Service (IPS), where Palestinians who are charged in military courts face a 99.9% conviction rate–and where over 10,000 Palestinans in the occupied West Bank have been held without trial since October 7 [31].

In 2021, Microsoft signed a $211,000 contract to provide similar consulting services to the IPS for the following year [32]. Similar carceral products and services are being exported to repressive governments around the world, and even used by police forces in major American cities like New York, LA, D.C., and Seattle [33].

To quote directly from Microsoft News: “Digital transformation makes it possible to consider prison as a business” [34].

Partnerships with Israeli defense

Azure and Elbit Systems

Elbit Systems is one of the largest Israeli defense firms providing military technology, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), and surveillance systems to the IOF. In 2022, Elbit Systems announced that their new military simulation software, OneSim, would run on Azure [35]. As a part of a $107 million contract, OneSim will be used in advanced IOF training centers to mimic real-life “battle scenarios” for tank crews.

The Palestinian grassroots campaign Stop the Wall has called for a complete divestment and boycott of Elbit Systems for its complicity in enforcing The Apartheid Wall, a physical structure built by Israel to imprison Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, illegal under international law [36]. The campaign has successfully encouraged divestments from Elbit across public and private funds within Europe, the U.S., and Australia, even going so far as to force Elbit to sell its factory in Oldham, UK [37]. Most recently, Japan’s top trading giant, Itochu Corporation, announced that it was no longer partnering with Elbit for its complicity in genocide [38].

Azure and Palantir

Founded in 2003 by right-wing venture capitalist Peter Thiel, controversial data mining company Palantir cooperates with government intelligence agencies, including the CIA, the FBI, the Pentagon, and ICE, by supplying them with private user data under the guise of national defense. In a recent contract, Palantir sold an AI targeting platform, powered by intelligence collected on Palestinians, to the Israeli state. Palantir CEO Alex Karp openly and plainly admits that the product is “used on occasion to kill people” [39].

Palantir has partnered with Microsoft to make their services available on Azure via the Azure Marketplace [40].

Investments in Israeli startups

Since 2014, Microsoft has invested millions of dollars into Israeli startups specializing in defense technology [41]. Although Microsoft expertly brands these partnerships as purely entrepreneurial, this narrative, and these investments, blindly ignore the Israeli startup community’s deep roots to the IOF, and to the sinister, violent truths behind their “innovations.”

AnyVision

AnyVision is an IOF-born startup that services governments around the world with AI-powered surveillance technology using Palestinians in the West Bank as their test subjects. In 2020, Microsoft faced internal and external pressure from employees and human rights groups for their investments in AnyVision, which went against Microsoft’s ethical standards for facial recognition technology [42]. This pressure successfully forced M12, Microsoft’s venture capital fund, to pull out of the $74 million investment [43].

Although Microsoft pulled out as an investor of AnyVision, AnyVision, now rebranded as Oosto, still exists today and continues to flourish thanks to its AI Computer Vision technology. AnyVision is still featured on the Azure Marketplace.

Azure and “Al Munasiq”

“Al Munasiq,” also known as “The Coordinator,” is an app launched during the COVID-19 pandemic that intrusively surveils Palestinian mobile devices on behalf of the IOF. The app is used by the Israeli Civil Administration (ICA) to manage permits for Palestinians traveling into Israel for reasons such as work or medical needs. By the end of 2021, over half a million Palestinians were forced to use the app and gave the following information and access to the Israeli army:

• Name, ID, phone number, and phone IP address
• Geographic location of their mobile device
• Access to all files stored on the device
• Access to the camera
• Consent to the extraction of data from the mobile device
• Consent that extracted data can be stored by the Israeli army
• Consent to share any information on the device with third parties

The app is currently running on Azure [44].

Microsoft’s investment in G42

Recently, Microsoft has made headlines for investing $1.5 billion in G42, a UAE-based artificial intelligence firm that has established a joint venture with state-owned Israeli defense company Rafael Advanced Defense Systems [45]. The joint venture, Presight AI, calls for an R&D site in Israel, solidifying Microsoft’s ongoing presence in the region [46].

Presight AI develops an AI data interpretation and analytics software called TAQ, which the G42 website calls as a “world-class computer vision, omni-analytics platform” [47]. Given Rafael’s close ties to the IOF [48], as well as the IOF’s long history of abusing computer vision technology in surveillance and warfare, Microsoft risks finding itself in the position of funding yet another company that violates Microsoft’s ethical standards for facial recognition technology.

Additional collaborations

Microsoft’s warmongering contracts and investments are only part of the long list of ways in which the company has proven itself to be complicit:

• In 1991, Microsoft opened its first R&D center in Israel and has expanded to multiple locations since, employing nearly 3,000 workers [49].
• Since the mid-90s, Microsoft has partnered with Check Point, an Israeli cybersecurity giant with strong personal and professional ties to the IOF, the Israeli government, and Tel Aviv University [50].
• In 2018, Microsoft signed a $480 million contract with the U.S. Army, stipulating that the Israeli military would be given a portion of the headsets [51].
• In 2021, Microsoft sent “mentors’’ to a 24-hour IOF “hackathon” where software engineers developed “creative solutions for military operations” [52].
• In November 2023, Microsoft announced that they would be providing free Azure AI services to Israeli defense startups at Y Combinator, a startup program that actively silences its Arab and Palestinian founders [53].
• In April 2024, Microsoft announced that it would provide Copilot AI services to advertisers by partnering with Axel Springer, a German media enterprise that runs Zionist ads, including property listings that are located in the illegal settlements [54].
• In May 2024, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was an angel investor for Apex, an Israeli cybersecurity startup that aims to “[protect] the rapid use of AI tools,” during their $7 million seed round [55].
• Microsoft provides free training courses for members of the Israeli military, including AI courses for command-level officers in the Israeli “Military fighting methods and innovation” unit [56].
• Microsoft has collaborated with Ariel University, an Israeli university built on illegal settlements in the West Bank, by providing free software services and offering Microsoft Certified Solutions Associate courses to students [57]. Palestinians living nearby are not allowed to enter the university [58].

Our responsibility

As technology workers, we are hyper aware of the fact that our work–especially with the advancement of AI and cloud technologies–has the potential to enable any company and any organization to make our world much, much worse. The products and services we build are now being used and distributed around the globe to surveil, censor, or destroy.

Technology is not neutral and it never has been. Algorithms, by default, are built on data discrimination [59]–and they are being exploited by powerful state interests worldwide. In 2017, the U.S. Department of Defense received widespread criticism from Google and Amazon workers for using AI to find and surveil human targets [60] for the purpose of drone strikes. And in 2018, whistleblowers leaked Google’s development of a censored search tool [61] that could block online users in China from accessing pro-democracy content.

This is not the first time Microsoft employees are raising their voices and demanding to be heard. On several occasions, technology workers at Microsoft have exposed and protested Microsoft’s unethical use of their work:

• In 2018, more than 300 Microsoft employees called on Microsoft to cancel their contract with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) [62], leading to a public statement from Satya Nadella.
• In 2019, more than 100 Microsoft employees signed an open letter calling for an end to Microsoft’s contract to build HoloLens AR tech [63] for the U.S. military.
• In 2020, Palestinian activists and Microsoft employees demanded that the company cut ties with AnyVision [64] for secretly surveilling Palestinians in the West Bank, which ultimately led to Microsoft publicly divesting from the project.
• By November 2023, over 1,000 Microsoft employees signed an internal letter demanding support for a ceasefire in Gaza.

The No Azure for Apartheid campaign follows in the footsteps of these previous initiatives. It is unconscionable for us to remain silent any longer.

Overview of No Tech for Apartheid (NOTA)

NOTA, a targeted Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign [65] launched by Google and Amazon workers, demands that Google and Amazon drop Project Nimbus, their $1.2 billion cloud computing contract with the Israeli government and military.

Though NOTA was formally established in 2021 [66], tech workers have been organizing boycott and divestment campaigns against apartheid for decades. In 1970, the Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement (PRWM), a Black-led grassroots movement, challenged their employers’ involvement in selling photo ID and passbook equipment to apartheid South Africa by launching the very first anti-apartheid boycott of a U.S. company [67]. In 1978, IBM Workers United, an independent grassroots organization, campaigned to get IBM to stop selling their computer systems [68], which were used to maintain an apartheid population registration system, to the South African government.

Inspired by these anti-apartheid movements, a broad coalition of over 170 Palestinian organizations across civil society, the BDS National Committee (BNC), founded the BDS pressure campaign. The main demands of this international, non-violent solidarity movement are:

1. An end to Israel’s occupation of all Arab lands and dismantling the illegal apartheid Wall.
2. Recognizing the fundamental rights and full equality of Palestinian citizens in Israel.
3. The right for Palestinian refugees to return to their homes.

Since the launch of the NOTA campaign, tech workers have been organizing and building worker power through internal and external pressure tools, including petitions, coordinated mass actions, public pressure in the media, shareholder resolutions, and others. We, at No Azure for Apartheid, were inspired to start our own campaign. We share NOTA’s guiding mission and principles as a BDS campaign, as well as NOTA’s vision of expanding tech worker power and participation in the struggle for a free Palestine.

Next steps

As this primer illustrates, Microsoft’s complicity in Israel’s apartheid regime and ongoing genocide runs deep, yet the full extent of Microsoft’s complicity may still lay well beyond the confines of the information presented in this writing. Because so little of this information is shared with the public, we don’t know what we don’t know about the extent to which the Israeli military and government runs on Azure. What we do know is that our findings illustrate a prolonged and extensive pattern of complicity, and they are just the tip of the iceberg.

As a Microsoft employee, vendor, or tech worker, you are uniquely positioned to enact change. Moreover, you’re entitled to be informed about and have a say in how your code is used. Can you stay silent while your work being used to power and enable a genocide?

We invite you to join us at the No Azure for Apartheid campaign.

Our demands are:

1. IOF off Azure: End Microsoft’s complicity in Israeli genocide and apartheid by terminating all Azure contracts and partnerships with the Israeli military and government.
2. Disclose all ties: Make all ties to the Israeli state, military, and tech industry publicly known, including weapons manufacturers and contractors. Conduct a transparent and independent audit of Microsoft’s technology contracts, services, and investments, and ensure Microsoft products and services are not being used to violate the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights [69], the Geneva Convention and their Additional Protocols [70], or Microsoft’s own Global Human Rights Statement [71], in Palestine or elsewhere.
3. Call for a ceasefire: Honor the demands of the over 1,000 employees [72] who signed an earlier petition calling on Microsoft’s leadership to publicly endorse an immediate, permanent ceasefire.
4. Protect employees and uphold free speech: Ensure the safety of Palestinian, Arab, Muslim and allied employees by protecting pro-Palestinian speech, actions, and fundraising initiatives on internal company platforms.

It bears repeating: We refuse to be complicit.

Join us, alongside students, teachers, activists, cultural workers, healthcare workers, and trade unions, alongside the International Court of Justice, alongside ordinary people in the streets and Palestinians worldwide, in building a new future, another world, where Palestine is free–from the river to the sea.

Rise up with us and say: No Tech for Apartheid! No Azure for Apartheid! IOF Off Azure!

Microsoft Employees:

• Click here to read and sign the internal petition

For updates, follow @noazureforapartheid on Instagram

This primer was published by No Tech For Apartheid on behalf of Microsoft workers with the new No Azure For Apartheid Campaign.