TIL that Microsoft is the least Israel-friendly of the big three clouds:
> Among the cloud giants, Microsoft is considered the most vulnerable to anti-Israel protests and allegations of the use made by the Ministry of Defense on Azure, its cloud platforms, since it is the only company among the three major cloud companies that has not signed a special agreement with the Israeli government and the Ministry of Defense. The industry says that Haimovich, who is known as a prominent salesman with the government sector, was appointed country general manager, among other things, due to Microsoft's plans to retain and increase business with the government sector, despite not winning the Nimbus tender.
> In 2021, Israel awarded Amazon and Google the Nimbus cloud tender, encouraging government bodies and public organizations to migrate to these services, at the expense of Microsoft. In return, Amazon and Google pledged to establish service areas in data centers on Israeli soil, in order to avoid exposing security or government data to foreign regulation.
> TIL that Microsoft is the least Israel-friendly of the big three clouds
This is a good thing.
American companies should not be allowing their tech to be used to in the gross ongoing human rights violations in Israel/Gaza/West Bank.
Google and Amazon knew their tech could be used for human rights abuses in Israel (their lawyers warned them so) but ignored that in favour of $$$ per the EFF:
The EFF's mission is to ensure that technology supports freedom, justice, and innovation for all people of the world. That is verbatim off their website. It appears that this perfectly in line with their core mission.
Somewhat hard to be neutral when outgrowths of the Israeli state like the NSO Group and Canary Mission start taking a stand against privacy and free speech
This comment makes it sound like you are trying to belittle people who work at nonprofits to make yourself feel better about putting profits over people.
Yep. These nonprofits have a tendency of being abused for the personal causes of their staff. Clearly this isn’t part of their mission unless you go through some mental gymnastics.
> American companies should not be allowing their tech to be used to in the gross ongoing human rights violations in Israel/Gaza/West Bank.
Fully agreed, but also a hard sell given that America itself does not recognize what is happening there as a genocide.
Something something man understanding depending on his salary.
Americans only give a shit about the price of gas and eggs. Whoever has to die to keep those down is apparently fine with the majority of our population.
> Fully agreed, but also a hard sell given that America itself does not recognize what is happening there as a genocide.
This has nothing to do with a declaration of genocide. Both Amazon and Google respectively have made commitments to not enable human rights violations:
Well clearly they didn't mean much, which is about what I expect from any corporate policy declaration such as. If you believed them anyway, congratulations on having far more faith in corporations than I do.
In what dimension do you mean? Legally? Yes, unless based out of a place with an anti-BDS law. Politically? Sure, it's a bet against those currently in power and for the sentiment in the population. Practically? Yes, they can refuse business and contracts. I suppose they could also put killswitches in their hardware/software, but I wouldn't be a fan of that for digital-rights reasons. Economically? Who knows, the market makes no sense at all currently. They could probably get away with whatever.
When you're doing mass surveilance, including storing every single phone call, of a population of 6 million people, storage needs tend to pile up quite fast.
Israel is essentially fighting wars on multiple fronts at all times. Since they are so small and vulnerable, they have to lean more on intelligence. As a result they have the most advanced intelligence apparatus in the world, far beyond US intelligence for example. Part of their intelligence strategy, clearly, is advanced use of technology & data collection/mining/analytics. So they're gonna end up with a lot of data.
No, it's just a random coin toss. Most of what's happening with rich people becoming psychotic or anti-social is simply greed based. You add money to 70% of the population and they'll turn out to be an asshole.
If Microsoft was given more attention by AIPAC or it's billionaires, it would've been the same.
Watching the rise of fascism in america should really remind everyone that theres far more going on then a single idiot driving far right fascism.
For those that do not know, this is part of the fallout of this Microsoft investigation from 2025 into the misuse of Azure services in Israel for military purposes:
MSFT won't sign non-disclosures, but they have policies regarding not using your data to train their models. Just trust them if you want to use azure -except for that rogue employee part I guess.
Yup. Google and Amazon knew their tech could be used for human rights abuses in Israel (their lawyers warned them so) but Google and Amazon apparently value $$$ more than human rights per this EFF article:
Israel consistently flaunts international law, has been accused of war crimes by the Hague, and the UN has found it most likely has committed and continues to commit genocide in Gaza. So I am not surprised that dealing with the country's Defense apparatus would lead to ethical concerns. Every international company should think twice about doing business with the Israeli government or companies rooted in defense and cybersecurity.
>> Alon Haimovich is leaving after an investigation into alleged unethical use of Azure by the Ministry of Defense, “Globes” has learned. Microsoft Israel has been placed under the management of Microsoft France.
> In September 2025, Microsoft decided to unilaterally terminate the usage agreement with IDF intelligence Unit 8200 after an article published in the UK newspaper "The Guardian," which claimed that the unit was collecting information about Palestinians for the purpose of fighting terrorism
Ok but ... isn't Microsoft forced, by law, to cooperate with the US government and US military? So why is that then not an ethical (or other) issue?
To me this seems inconsistent. The only "necessity" I see is for Microsoft to be penalised by EU laws, which could explain that "investigation" to some extent. But the EU in general is super-weak. They even give data from EU citizens to the US government as-is, without any problem, so I don't quite buy into that explanation. Is there another explanation that makes more sense?
Actually there is a long and storied history of mechanisms created to compel American companies to comply with requests for digital intervention. A good starting point is the concept of the NSL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_security_letter
Technically the government can force some industries to do some things. (and that's just officially. The singer sewing machine company didn't need to be forced into weapons manufacturing) But, that's a wartime measure, if the government forced every steel mill in the country to produce for them, I'm not sure it'd even have to go to the supreme court.
Israel has been leaking US state secrets to China and Russia for decades. Intel and Microsoft both moved core R&D hubs to Israel even after the country had been caught leaking US secrets. Israel is not an ally of the United States, end of story.
~28,000 Gaza children murdered in 2 years by Israeli gov. About 68,000 people are officially confirmed killed. 70% of all casualties are women and children. "Western liberal democracies", especially the US gov, are up to their necks in blood, as usual. Microsoft is no different, its only concern is to avoid legal trouble and uphold the facade of legal obligation, otherwise business as usual with Israeli gov. In any category of violence, the US gov, is the undisputed record holder since WW2 - wars of aggression started, proxy wars started, democracies overthrown, dictatorships established, terrorist groups created, funded and armed, resources plundered, economies impoverished, tens of millions of civilians displaced, maimed and murdered. US citizens have a duty to learn about the actual history of their country, and the elite uni-party mafia criminals in charge of it, not just what is shown to them on CNN, FOX, NYT, WSJ, etc. Read books by Michael Parenti, like, Face of Imperialism, as a starting point.
Well, lets check Mr.Parenti's wikipedia page. "Education and early life", "Career", "Personal life and death", "Works". I wonder what's under works? "Accusations of Bosnian genocide denial"! How fun!
Lots of leftists have those accusations on their page. You can add Noam Chomsky, Edward S. Herman, Peter Handke—even Jeremy Corbyn!
Most of the time it's not so much outright denial but a shifting of the blame towards NATO. I think it's a little unfair to put that in the same category as, say, Holocaust denial.
I don't know what you're experiencing, of course, but I do know from the (entirely different) context of running HN that such blocks can happen for a lot of different reasons and you can't really assess them correctly without, at least, multiple data points. Not sure if it's helpful to say this or not...
Why? Microsoft probably just hasn’t prioritized nimbus participation over their other construction work. They probably haven’t yet constructed the correct subsidiary structure or key sharing agreements that allow them to participate either.
Sooner or later they’ll participate. And then you would have moved your workload for no reason.
The reason cited for this whole fiasco is that some of the Ministry of Defense's genocide work could be performed by servers in the EU, which could expose Microsoft to legal or regulatory issues.
It's not that Microsoft was against this, it's that Microsoft was against themselves getting in trouble for this with the EU.
Well they did put in their contracts with the Israeli government that their services can't be used for mass surveilance which makes them slightly less evil than Google/Amazon.
TIL that Microsoft is the least Israel-friendly of the big three clouds:
> Among the cloud giants, Microsoft is considered the most vulnerable to anti-Israel protests and allegations of the use made by the Ministry of Defense on Azure, its cloud platforms, since it is the only company among the three major cloud companies that has not signed a special agreement with the Israeli government and the Ministry of Defense. The industry says that Haimovich, who is known as a prominent salesman with the government sector, was appointed country general manager, among other things, due to Microsoft's plans to retain and increase business with the government sector, despite not winning the Nimbus tender.
> In 2021, Israel awarded Amazon and Google the Nimbus cloud tender, encouraging government bodies and public organizations to migrate to these services, at the expense of Microsoft. In return, Amazon and Google pledged to establish service areas in data centers on Israeli soil, in order to avoid exposing security or government data to foreign regulation.
> TIL that Microsoft is the least Israel-friendly of the big three clouds
This is a good thing.
American companies should not be allowing their tech to be used to in the gross ongoing human rights violations in Israel/Gaza/West Bank.
Google and Amazon knew their tech could be used for human rights abuses in Israel (their lawyers warned them so) but ignored that in favour of $$$ per the EFF:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/google-and-amazon-ackn...
Thanks for the link, I didn't realize the EFF spent their money on such things. I honestly thought they focused on free speech/privacy/open source.
I'm not trying to argue pro Israel or what not, I just wish they'd focus on their core mission.
The EFF's mission is to ensure that technology supports freedom, justice, and innovation for all people of the world. That is verbatim off their website. It appears that this perfectly in line with their core mission.
Somewhat hard to be neutral when outgrowths of the Israeli state like the NSO Group and Canary Mission start taking a stand against privacy and free speech
Well, reporting the largest abuses of non-free software companies could be seen as a corollary to that.
Every nonprofit is eventually recruited for the omnicause because that's what the people who tend to work at nonprofits want.
This comment makes it sound like you are trying to belittle people who work at nonprofits to make yourself feel better about putting profits over people.
This is the correct answer
Freedom is literally in their name. Can it be more core than that?
Yep. These nonprofits have a tendency of being abused for the personal causes of their staff. Clearly this isn’t part of their mission unless you go through some mental gymnastics.
> American companies should not be allowing their tech to be used to in the gross ongoing human rights violations in Israel/Gaza/West Bank.
Fully agreed, but also a hard sell given that America itself does not recognize what is happening there as a genocide.
Something something man understanding depending on his salary.
Americans only give a shit about the price of gas and eggs. Whoever has to die to keep those down is apparently fine with the majority of our population.
> Fully agreed, but also a hard sell given that America itself does not recognize what is happening there as a genocide.
This has nothing to do with a declaration of genocide. Both Amazon and Google respectively have made commitments to not enable human rights violations:
https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/human-rights/principl...
https://about.google/company-info/human-rights/
Well clearly they didn't mean much, which is about what I expect from any corporate policy declaration such as. If you believed them anyway, congratulations on having far more faith in corporations than I do.
Like... all of us 300 million plus? Thanks dude.
In a practical sense the voting majority of you all demonstrated that, and the rest of you are going along with it.
I agree, water is wet. Got anything else?
> American companies should not be allowing their tech to ...
Do they have a choice?
In what dimension do you mean? Legally? Yes, unless based out of a place with an anti-BDS law. Politically? Sure, it's a bet against those currently in power and for the sentiment in the population. Practically? Yes, they can refuse business and contracts. I suppose they could also put killswitches in their hardware/software, but I wouldn't be a fan of that for digital-rights reasons. Economically? Who knows, the market makes no sense at all currently. They could probably get away with whatever.
I’m kind of confused, in that Israel is not that big in terms of population, about 10 million people; how much data and cloud do they need?
The state of Pennsylvania is 13 million; would MSFT losing PA do them serious financial damage?
When you're doing mass surveilance, including storing every single phone call, of a population of 6 million people, storage needs tend to pile up quite fast.
Israel is essentially fighting wars on multiple fronts at all times. Since they are so small and vulnerable, they have to lean more on intelligence. As a result they have the most advanced intelligence apparatus in the world, far beyond US intelligence for example. Part of their intelligence strategy, clearly, is advanced use of technology & data collection/mining/analytics. So they're gonna end up with a lot of data.
Is it because it is the most "woke"? Weren't they doing land acknowledgments before some big press event?
No, it's just a random coin toss. Most of what's happening with rich people becoming psychotic or anti-social is simply greed based. You add money to 70% of the population and they'll turn out to be an asshole.
If Microsoft was given more attention by AIPAC or it's billionaires, it would've been the same.
Watching the rise of fascism in america should really remind everyone that theres far more going on then a single idiot driving far right fascism.
Being anti-Israel is a bipartisan position in the US among the constituents but not among the representatives (yet)
There's bipartisan consensus among both constituents and representatives. They're just the opposite consensus.
Ehhh, people the on right hate Israel because they are Jewish and people on the left hate Israel because they are the oppressors in the conflict.
Maybe there is some solidarity but rightoids love oppressors and lefties love non-discrimination.
That must explain why the "least" friendly MSFT asked the FBI to spy on employees attending pro-Gaza/anti-genocide protests:
https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/microsof...
Good grief. Let's maybe not parrot out nation state propaganda with zero critical thinking on what's being said.
Of course. Instead let’s call TikTok propaganda “critical thinking”, virtue signal and be content how “smart” and “moral” we are.
For those that do not know, this is part of the fallout of this Microsoft investigation from 2025 into the misuse of Azure services in Israel for military purposes:
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2025/09/microsoft-blo...
MSFT won't sign non-disclosures, but they have policies regarding not using your data to train their models. Just trust them if you want to use azure -except for that rogue employee part I guess.
So Israel is switching to Google and Amazon. Hm.
Yup. Google and Amazon knew their tech could be used for human rights abuses in Israel (their lawyers warned them so) but Google and Amazon apparently value $$$ more than human rights per this EFF article:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/google-and-amazon-ackn...
I wonder if they would provide Hamas resources too to balance it out.
Too little too late.
Israel consistently flaunts international law, has been accused of war crimes by the Hague, and the UN has found it most likely has committed and continues to commit genocide in Gaza. So I am not surprised that dealing with the country's Defense apparatus would lead to ethical concerns. Every international company should think twice about doing business with the Israeli government or companies rooted in defense and cybersecurity.
>> Alon Haimovich is leaving after an investigation into alleged unethical use of Azure by the Ministry of Defense, “Globes” has learned. Microsoft Israel has been placed under the management of Microsoft France.
What exactly did he do?
Allowed 'unethical' usage of Azure services by the Ministry of Defense
(...to occur on servers in the European Union, where Microsoft could get in trouble for it)
> In September 2025, Microsoft decided to unilaterally terminate the usage agreement with IDF intelligence Unit 8200 after an article published in the UK newspaper "The Guardian," which claimed that the unit was collecting information about Palestinians for the purpose of fighting terrorism
Ok but ... isn't Microsoft forced, by law, to cooperate with the US government and US military? So why is that then not an ethical (or other) issue?
To me this seems inconsistent. The only "necessity" I see is for Microsoft to be penalised by EU laws, which could explain that "investigation" to some extent. But the EU in general is super-weak. They even give data from EU citizens to the US government as-is, without any problem, so I don't quite buy into that explanation. Is there another explanation that makes more sense?
> isn't Microsoft forced, by law, to cooperate with the US government and US military?
Microsoft and other cloud companies are not forced to do anything the US government or US military tells them to do. You are just making this up.
Actually there is a long and storied history of mechanisms created to compel American companies to comply with requests for digital intervention. A good starting point is the concept of the NSL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_security_letter
Relevant acts include https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Communications_Priv... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stored_Communications_Act and the more recent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act
Technically the government can force some industries to do some things. (and that's just officially. The singer sewing machine company didn't need to be forced into weapons manufacturing) But, that's a wartime measure, if the government forced every steel mill in the country to produce for them, I'm not sure it'd even have to go to the supreme court.
Israel has been leaking US state secrets to China and Russia for decades. Intel and Microsoft both moved core R&D hubs to Israel even after the country had been caught leaking US secrets. Israel is not an ally of the United States, end of story.
~28,000 Gaza children murdered in 2 years by Israeli gov. About 68,000 people are officially confirmed killed. 70% of all casualties are women and children. "Western liberal democracies", especially the US gov, are up to their necks in blood, as usual. Microsoft is no different, its only concern is to avoid legal trouble and uphold the facade of legal obligation, otherwise business as usual with Israeli gov. In any category of violence, the US gov, is the undisputed record holder since WW2 - wars of aggression started, proxy wars started, democracies overthrown, dictatorships established, terrorist groups created, funded and armed, resources plundered, economies impoverished, tens of millions of civilians displaced, maimed and murdered. US citizens have a duty to learn about the actual history of their country, and the elite uni-party mafia criminals in charge of it, not just what is shown to them on CNN, FOX, NYT, WSJ, etc. Read books by Michael Parenti, like, Face of Imperialism, as a starting point.
Well, lets check Mr.Parenti's wikipedia page. "Education and early life", "Career", "Personal life and death", "Works". I wonder what's under works? "Accusations of Bosnian genocide denial"! How fun!
Lots of leftists have those accusations on their page. You can add Noam Chomsky, Edward S. Herman, Peter Handke—even Jeremy Corbyn!
Most of the time it's not so much outright denial but a shifting of the blame towards NATO. I think it's a little unfair to put that in the same category as, say, Holocaust denial.
Lovely, but in character, to see a .co.il 403-block a broad swath of the world.
I don't know what you're experiencing, of course, but I do know from the (entirely different) context of running HN that such blocks can happen for a lot of different reasons and you can't really assess them correctly without, at least, multiple data points. Not sure if it's helpful to say this or not...
Okay, now I will be supporting Azure products and will try to bring them into my workplace over AWS/Google Cloud.
Why? Microsoft probably just hasn’t prioritized nimbus participation over their other construction work. They probably haven’t yet constructed the correct subsidiary structure or key sharing agreements that allow them to participate either.
Sooner or later they’ll participate. And then you would have moved your workload for no reason.
I wouldn't be so sure. The departure of these guys only opens new room for less 'pro-ethics' corpos to replace them.
The reason cited for this whole fiasco is that some of the Ministry of Defense's genocide work could be performed by servers in the EU, which could expose Microsoft to legal or regulatory issues.
It's not that Microsoft was against this, it's that Microsoft was against themselves getting in trouble for this with the EU.
Well they did put in their contracts with the Israeli government that their services can't be used for mass surveilance which makes them slightly less evil than Google/Amazon.