By Jeff Smith
Griid
About 4 years ago, organizers with Grand Rapids Rapid Response to ICE held a protest at an Amazon Distribution Center in Walker, Michigan. Amazon and one of its subsidiaries Palantir were providing tech support and data to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to track down and deport immigrants. The protest in 2019, involved a blockade and shut down the ability of Amazon drivers to make delivers for about 2 hours.
Activists and organizers have now discovered that Amazon works with the State of Israel. According to a recent action done by organizers in Puget Sound, Washington, which also produced research, as was reported on It’s Going Down:
Amazon supplies the tech infrastructure for Israel’s Project Nimbus via a 1.2 billion dollar contract to both Amazon and Google to provide cloud infrastructure, machine learning and artificial intelligence for both governance and military capabilities to prop up the apartheid state and ultimately more efficiently engage in ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Palestinian people.
This research is supported by the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Campaign (BDS), which states:
In 2021, while apartheid Israel was carrying out yet another massacre in Gaza and pushing Palestinian families from their homes in Jerusalem, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud signed a $1.22 billion contract to provide cloud technology, called Project Nimbus, to the Israeli government and military. Through this contract, the two companies are enabling apartheid and entrenching the oppression of Palestinians. They are supporting more surveillance, more military assaults, more home demolitions, more checkpoints and racist population databases- essentially supporting the ongoing Nakba of Palestinians, 75 years and counting.
Thus, the amazon Distribution Center, of which there are now two in the Greater Grand Rapids Area, could also be targets of a campaign in solidarity with the Palestinians. Check out the international BDS Campaign to see what other organized efforts there are to boycott or divest from corporations that are profiting from the Israeli assault on Gaza and the ongoing Israeli occupation.
[…]
“Amazon and one of its subsidiaries Palantir were providing tech support and data to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to track down and deport immigrants.” Immigrants that were legal and went through the process or illegals? As in 12,000 in one day last week? Would love clarification.