[noworriesnate]

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.

[bhouston]

> 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...

[ApolloFortyNine]

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.

[sdellis]

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.

[4MOAisgoodenuf]

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

[Qem]

> I honestly thought they focused on free speech/privacy/open source.

Pointing complicity with a regime that killed over 260 journalists[1] has a very strong focus and serves well free speech.

[1] https://english.elpais.com/international/2026-04-24/israel-h...

[anon84873628]

Well, reporting the largest abuses of non-free software companies could be seen as a corollary to that.

[throawayonthe]

this... is their core mission

[starefossen]

Freedom is literally in their name. Can it be more core than that?

[planteur]

Unless I'm missing something, it literally is not?

[SilverElfin]

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.

[yodsanklai]

> American companies should not be allowing their tech to ...

Do they have a choice?

[idle_zealot]

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.

[shrubble]

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?

[j_maffe]

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.

[raxxorraxor]

Plus most other governments buying the tech as well, I don't think the domestic market has much relevancy here.

[0xbadcafebee]

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.

[pcthrowaway]

> As a result they have the most advanced intelligence apparatus in the world, far beyond US intelligence for example

I think if you're going to concoct some kind of per-capita metric of intelligence capabilities, you're likely correct. But their intelligence industry pales in size relative to that of the U.S. and couldn't exist as it does without support from the U.S. and American companies (as we've seen with Lavender and Nimbus). American companies providing services they would otherwise have to develop in-house certainly contributes to their capacity for conducting what most would consider black-hat activities, including gathering intelligence on Americans and goings-on in the U.S., sometimes even of American politicians, in order to manipulate the American political environment to their favour.

I'm not aware of U.S. big tech providing such extensive services to any other country whose behaviour is so similar to that of the officially designated American foreign adversaries

[za3faran]

They're mass surveilling the vulnerable Palestinians they're genociding, and now turning their eyes toward Lebanon and Syria.

[raxxorraxor]

Which is mostly on Lebanon and Syria, because they are the aggressors here. Or in case of Lebanon the largest militant group known to exist. Perhaps they aren't the largest any more since the latest war, but they are still formidable.

[za3faran]

No they're not the aggressors. Let's stop with the victim blaming.

[raxxorraxor]

Hezbollah is an Iranian supported schiite fundamentalist militant group effectively controlling the south of Lebanon. Syria declared war on Israel right after its founding and it rejected multiple peace offerings since. They are anything but victims.

[jameshilliard]

> They're mass surveilling the vulnerable Palestinians

This is mostly so that they can more accurately target Palestinian terrorist/militant groups that hide behind civilians(which is of course a war crime).

> now turning their eyes toward Lebanon and Syria

The Oct 7th attacks likely happened because they weren't keeping a close enough watch over Palestinians in Gaza and were overly focused on threats from Lebanon and Syria. Ultimately Israel's failure to monitor threats coming from Gaza greatly increased Palestinian civilian casualties due to a successful attack resulting in a much stronger Israeli response than a failed attack would have. Israel always considered Hezbollah to be a much bigger threat than Hamas so that's where they put most of their resources.

[rbanffy]

> This is mostly so that they can more accurately target Palestinian terrorist/militant groups that hide behind civilians(which is of course a war crime).

The mass casualties of children are a strong indicator that the targeting is not accurate. Government officials and elected representatives have repeatedly advocated for the assassination of all Palestinians.

[urikaduri]

Why would you need surveilance in a genocide? Seems contradictory.

[tdeck]

So there was no surveillance during the Holocaust then?

[rbanffy]

I think the main difference is that the nazis built entire factories and supply chains to more effectively use their limited resources, while Israel, being funded largely by the US, has no such constraints and can use military equipment to, to use an American figure of language, shoot fish in a barrel.

What the Israeli government is doing is, at best, unconscionable.

[shimman]

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.