Google Fires Senior Executive After He Acknowledged And Renounced His Antisemitism In Online Manifesto

Google Cloud fired its developer relations vice president after he published a manifesto on LinkedIn about his anti-Semitic past and the Israel-Palestine conflict.

"I wanted to share that today is Amr Awadallah’s last day at Google," Eyal Manor, Google Cloud vice president of engineering and product, said to employees in an internal mail, CNBC reported.

The announcement comes a month after Awadallah published his 10,000-word manifesto that kicked up a storm. Awadallah, who co-founded Cloudera before joining Google in 2019, wrote: "I hated the Jewish people, all the Jewish people! and emphasis here is on the past tense."

An employee told CNBC that frustration with Awadallah's leadership style had already been building and coupled with the post, it became harder for employees to perform effective developer relations. Awadallah was confronted by some of his colleagues at an all-hands meeting that preceded his termination, reported The Verge.

“This has made my job as one of your colleagues much harder. The previous situation has made being a Jewish leader at Google tough. This has made it almost untenable,” a senior colleague commented on Awadallah's LinkedIn post, without explaining what the "previous situation" was.

“I'm unsure why you would write this under your title and company affiliation and it frustrates me. You could simply have done this as a private person,” he added.

Awadallah, an Egyptian-American technology professional well known in the cloud industry, said he belonged to the Jewish ethnic group, citing a 23andMe DNA analysis that he had 0.1 percent Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry. Employees told CNBC that he had previously cited the DNA analysis report to justify his opinions.

"I admire many Jewish people as I shared earlier, but I will also tell you this with unwavering conviction: The Jewish people aren’t any more special than the Christian, Black, Hispanic, White, Muslim, Asian, Arab peoples or any other group of people for that matter," wrote Awadallah in his manifesto. "We are all special, and we need to see all others as special, because, scientifically speaking, we are 99.9% genetically the same, and if we come from the same land within the last 1000 years, we are more like 99.999% the same."

Earlier last month, Google removed Kamau Bobb from his role of diversity head after a blog post from 2007 with anti-Semitic language resurfaced, reported Quartz.

Awadallah took to Twitter to write, "I am still in complete shock. I admire every single person I worked with at Google & truly believed in their mission 'universal information access shall set all of our brains free.'"