Google Planned to Sponsor IDF Conference That Now Denies Google Was Sponsor

The “IT For IDF” conference in Rishon LeZion, just south of Tel Aviv, brought together tech firms from across the world to support the Israel Defense Forces in Gaza and beyond.

Many of the assembled companies are not household names in the United States, but several multinational firms — like Nokia, Dell, and Canon — were present at July 10 event.

The mission they had gathered to support was clear. Onstage, a brigadier general with the Israeli military gave a presentation that connected the Nakba, the 1967 Arab–Israeli War, the 2006 invasion of Lebanon, the current war on Gaza, and more wars in the decades to come. His call to action splashed across the big screen: “Each generation and its own turn — this is our watch!”

One company, however, was conspicuously absent: Google.

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For the last two years, Google had been a marquee sponsor of IT For IDF — the company is a natural partner for the event, given Google Cloud’s foundational role in Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract aimed at modernizing cloud computing operations across Israeli government that it shares with Amazon.

This year was supposed to be no different and, until just days before the conference started, a Google Cloud logo was displayed alongside other sponsors on the IT For IDF website. Then Google abruptly vanished from the site without explanation.

When asked by a news outlet about the logo’s disappearance, the conference organizers claimed they weren’t aware Google had been on their website and suggested its inclusion was an error. “It’s possible that we used their logo by mistake but they are not a sponsor,” a spokesperson told 404 Media, “as far as I know.”

Google’s own corporate schedule, reviewed by The Intercept, seems to contradict this statement. The document includes upcoming Google events in Israel, and IT For IDF 2024 is on the list. On this internal schedule, Google is explicitly labeled as a co-sponsor of the conference in partnership with CloudEx, an Israeli cloud computing consultancy.

CloudEx CEO Ariel Munafo moonlights as an adviser to the IDF’s Center of Computers and Information Systems, known as Mamram, where he is helping other IDF units build out their cloud computing operations, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Google did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

The apparent about-face on Google’s sponsorship of IT For IDF is just one recent example of companies seeking to distance themselves from Israel’s brutal assault on the Gaza Strip, which has killed nearly 40,000 Palestinians. Though much business has gone on as usual amid the destruction, some companies have, at various times, and to various extents, shifted their business plans in Israel.

Google continues to work with the IDF, as it has for years on the Nimbus contract. The company’s odd vanishing act from a conference focused on a lucrative customer relationship stands as one of the most high-profile examples of what appears to be PR anxiety.

The tech giant has shown some squeamishness over some of Nimbus’s objectives in the past. The project has drawn international criticism and prompted a dissent campaign among Google employees, over 50 of whom were fired in April for protesting the contract. The Israeli government emphasizes Nimbus’s military dimensions, but Google has persistently tried to downplay or outright deny that its contract for Israel includes military work.

Official event photos posted to a public album and reviewed by The Intercept suggest that Google’s connection to the IDF networking event was literally whitewashed before it began. Official photos of a step-and-repeat backdrop for the conference contains all the event’s original sponsors’ logos, sans Google — and includes one square that appears to have been hastily painted over. Neither Google nor People and Computers, the conference’s organizer, responded when asked whose logo was underneath the paint.

The logo of Cisco, which claimed to 404 Media that it was “not a sponsor of this conference,” remained on display.

Even without a presence at the conference, Google loomed over an event dedicated to the prosecution of a war from which it has struggled to distance itself.

One of the event’s big draws was a presentation by Col. Racheli Dembinski of Mamram, on the Israeli military’s use of cloud platforms during the war in Gaza, during which she highlighted the role of Google Cloud, according to Israeli press.

A later talk presented by the “technology lead for Google Cloud Platform and CloudEx” noted that CloudEx’s partnership with Google entailed “working closely on several production cloud-hosted projects” with the Ministry of Defense.

Commit, another cloud computing reseller that was recently named “2024 Google Cloud Sales Partner of the Year for Israel” for its work implementing Project Nimbus, took to the stage to hawk its battlefield management software.

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Google’s insistence that Project Nimbus is peaceful in nature is at odds with the public record. Nimbus training materials published by The Intercept in 2022 cited the Ministry of Defense as a customer. Recent reporting by Wired detailed the project’s connection to the IDF since its inception. When it was announced in 2021, Project Nimbus was touted by the Israeli Finance Ministry as serving the “defense establishment.”

In May, journalist Jack Poulson reported on Google’s long-running collaboration with IDF information technology units like Mamram, noting an intensification in such work since October 7.

Despite all this, Google has routinely refused to discuss the Nimbus work or its humanitarian implications with the press. The company generally responding to inquiries about the project or criticism of its military nature with a boilerplate statement that Nimbus is “not directed at highly sensitive or classified military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services.”

The Intercept revealed in May that Nimbus requires two prominent Israeli weapons manufacturers, Israel Aerospace Industries and Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, to use Google and Amazon cloud computing services in their work.