Stockholders in Alphabet, the parent company of Google, voted this month to defeat a proposal by supporters of the Boycott, Divest & Sanctions economic war on Israel to reassess the company’s role in Israel’s Nimbus Project.
Google won the Israeli government tender for the project to transfer government IT infrastructure to cloud-based data centers about 15 months ago.
In the proposal presented by Gabriel Schubiner, a Google employee and lead activist with the “No Tech for Apartheid” BDS campaign, the board of Alphabet was asked to issue a report reassessing its role in the $1.2 billion project because of “policies regarding military and militarized policing agencies.” really focused on the company’s involvement with Israel via the Nimbus Project.
Schubiner, who focused on the company’s involvement with Israel via the Nimbus Project, claimed families in the Palestinian Authority “live. . .in fear of assault or being forced out of their homes. The Project Nimbus contract will further enable Israel’s oppressive tactics and discrimination against Palestinians.”
The Alphabet board of directors advised shareholders to vote against it and indeed they did, overwhelmingly defeating it by a margin of nearly 10 times the votes supporting it.
The proposal was rejected in a vote of 544,653,039 to 55,031,799, with 3,825,111 abstentions, with each Class A common stock worth one vote, and Class B common stock worth 10 votes.
Last November, Google Cloud was in the process of planning to build a fourth data center in the Sharon region near Moshav Beit Yehoshua, Globes reported. The land for three such centers was already leased by Google in Petach Tikva, Modi’in and Moshav Bnei Zion.
Nimbus Project terms require a distance of 25 kilometers (15 miles) between each data center.
