Google executive fired after blog post admits anti-Semitism

Google parted ways with an executive on Thursday, following a LinkedIn blog he posted in June, where he confessed to being anti-Semitic in his past, news sites reported.

Amr Awadallah was vice president of developer relations for Google Cloud. He joined the company in 2019. Israel’s vice president of engineering and products for Google Cloud, Eyal Manor, sent an email, viewed by CNBC, to employees on Thursday, stating that “today is Amr Awadallah’s last day at Google “.

In his 10,000-word blog titled “We Are One,” Awadallah confessed to hating Jews, although he noted that he no longer did. He also listed the Jews he knows and described as “good people”, discussed at length the origins of his anti-Semitism, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Zionism and his dream of “United States of Jerusalem”.

“I hated the Jewish people, all the Jewish people,” Awadallah wrote. “Since I was young, the only story I heard from everyone around me was that the Jewish people are here to kill us all,” he added. Awadallah was born in Egypt and explained that as a child he absorbed his anti-Semitism of “widespread anger against the many Palestinians slaughtered in the 1948 Nakba and the many Egyptians killed during Israel’s occupation of Sinai.”

In Awadallah’s blog, he mentioned how the Jewish name of Mendel Rosenblum, who was his research advisor for his doctoral thesis, made him “very cautious” about his work with him. “Over the years, I have come to know Mendel as the most humble, ethical, intelligent and humanistic person I have ever met. He was my first Jewish angel,” Awadallah wrote.

“Until recently, I was still an anti-Zionist. I believed Zionism was super evil,” Awadallah wrote. “Zionism, as far as I understand it, is the need to have a safe home where Jews will no longer be persecuted as they were in the past. This is such a respectable goal – how can anyone there including myself, can he oppose it because? ”said the Egyptian-American on his blog LinkedIn.

In his blog, Awadallah also claimed that former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “twisted Zionism into fascism”.

“Zionism is such a pure goal, until it is twisted to promote security at the expense of humanity, which Benjamin Netanyahu clearly does,” he said.

According to CNBC, Google employees confronted Awadallah on his blog during a meeting on Wednesday, expressing unease. When confronted, Awadallah doubled down on the message, insisting that they had misunderstood him.

Daniel Golding, a Jewish Google employee, said: “On the one hand, I am thankful that you no longer hate my children. On the other hand, it made my job as one of your colleagues much more difficult, ”he wrote.

Amar Awadallah commented on his dismissal on Twitter, saying he was “in shock”.