133 Apple employees demand the company to stop funding Israeli Occupation (Photo: Getty Images)
133 Apple employees demand company to stop funding Israeli Occupation
A group of Apple shareholders and current and former employees are publicly calling for the company to cease funding illegal “Israeli” settlements and the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF).
The letter, which was publically launched on Thursday, is the latest dissent from within Apple, expanding on a recent campaign known as Apples4Ceasefire. This letter urged the company to remove multiple organizations from its donation platforms that support West Bank settlements.
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The organizations listed include Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, HaYovel Inc, One Israel Fund, the Jewish National Fund (JNF), and IsraelGives.
The letter was signed by 133 verified people who work or formerly worked at Apple.
In the past fifteen years, US-based non-profit organizations have directed substantial funds, totaling hundreds of millions of dollars, to settler groups in “Israel”, with a significant portion allocated between 2009 and 2013 alone, amounting to USD 220 million.
Efforts to address the issue of US funding for illegal “Israeli” settlements in the occupied West Bank have been ongoing, with rights groups and lawmakers pushing for action.
In New York, assembly member Zohran Mamdani introduced the "Not On Our Dime Act," aiming to prevent not-for-profit corporations from providing unauthorized support to “Israeli” settlement activity if passed into law.
Recent months have seen the US imposing sanctions on several “Israeli” settler groups, severing their ties to the American financial market.
This development coincides with a growing movement among tech workers in the US, urging their companies to divest from “Israel's” occupation of Palestinian territories. More recently, there have been calls to divest from “Israel's” actions in Gaza.
In April, Google made headlines when it fired dozens of employees who participated in a demonstration against the company's involvement in Project Nimbus, a controversial cloud-computing and Artificial Intelligence (AI) contract with the Israeli Occupation.
Similarly, nearly 300 current and former Apple employees signed an open letter in April, accusing the company of unjustly terminating workers who expressed support for Palestine.
Additionally, earlier in June, a former Meta engineer filed a lawsuit against the company for discrimination and wrongful termination, alleging that Meta fired him for attempting to address bugs causing the suppression of Palestinian content.
