How Microsoft Became A Hub For Israeli Intelligence

Last week Microsoft admitted providing large amounts of AI and cloud storage services to Israel during its genocide of Gaza, but said an internal investigation found no evidence the IDF “used these services to target or harm Palestinians.”

This is not a serious claim and no one should take it seriously.

Just as Nazi Germany’s crimes could not have been committed without the technology IBM provided to track, round-up and murder Jews, Romani people and the disabled, Israel’s apartheid and genocide of the Palestinians would not be possible without Microsoft.

This week it was also revealed that Microsoft disabled the email account of the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor Karim Khan, impeding the court’s work on executing the arrest warrant for Netanyahu and other senior Israeli leaders.

This is no surprise.

The links between Microsoft and Israel are so long, deep and extensive it can be hard to see where Microsoft ends and the Israeli state begins.

Microsoft employs more than one thousand ex-IDF soldiers and intelligence officers in its offices in Israel, and dozens of ex-IDF in its global headquarters in Redmond, Seattle, and at its offices in Miami, San Francisco, Boston and New York. My investigation, drawing on an extensive list of names provided by a source, has identified well over three hundred former Israeli intelligence personnel who are currently working at Microsoft.

Current Microsoft employees in the US who had significant roles in the IDF include:

• Jonathan Bar Or, a principal security researcher for Microsoft at its Redmond HQ. He spent six and half years in the IDF, leaving in 2015.

• Eitan Shteinberg, a senior manager working on Microsoft’s cloud platform in its downtown Bellevue office. Shteinberg is a dedicated soldier for Israel, spending over a decade in the IDF across numerous stints. He also worked for Israeli arms company Elbit.

• Roy Rubinstein, based in Boston and who leads Microsoft’s data analytics platform Fabric. He spent over nine years in the IDF ‘focused on state of the art technologies for autonomous vehicles and fast paced development for special units.’

• Joseph Berenbilt based in Pennsylvania who works on the Microsoft Azure system implicated in the genocide was ‘an operator in an elite Israeli special operations combat unit.’

The extensive collaboration between Microsoft and Israel, including its employment of at least one thousand Israelis, has been confirmed previously by Israel lobby groups. The full list of ex-IDF I’ve identified working for Microsoft in the US can be found here.

The collaboration is long-standing and over the years Microsoft has been intensely focused on expanding its links to Israel. This focus has resulted in Microsoft buying seventeen Israeli tech companies since the year 2000, all of which were founded by former intelligence officers in the IDF’s spy unit. The company spent billions on these acquisitions, and made the founders, all of whom are digital architects of apartheid, extremely rich in the process. These acquisitions also deliver billions to Israel in tax revenues, keeping an economy reliant on the IDF-to-US-tech-giant pipeline, afloat.

Microsoft’s most recent acquisition of an Israeli start-up was web tracking and analytics company Oribi in 2022, whose founder, Iris Shoor, served in Israeli intelligence from 1999 to 2001.

The full list of companies which, once again, were all founded by former IDF intelligence unit personnel, is below.

• WebAppoint - 2000

• Maximal - 2001

• Peach - 2002

• Pelican - 2003

• Whale Communications - 2006

• Gteko - 2007

• 3DV Systems - 2009

• Aorato (Advanced Threat Analytics) - 2014

• Adallom (Microsoft App Cloud Security) - 2015

• Secure Island Technologies - 2015

• Equivio - 2015

• N-trig - 2015

• Hexadite - 2017

• Cloudyn - 2017

• CyberX - 2020

• Peer5 - 2021

• Oribi - 2022

Also worth an honourable mention is Amdocs, founded in the 1980s by IDF veterans. In 2023 Amdocs signed an agreement with Microsoft to build a new platform for the telecommunications industry. Despite being a multi-billion dollar company, Amdocs is secretive and its executives rarely give interviews. One reason is its shady past. In the early 2000s the company was suspected to be spying on White House and State Department communications, operating essentially as a front for the Mossad. The suspicions were strong enough for US counterintelligence to open an investigation, but they supposedly found no evidence of spying. In any case, Amdocs will be at home working with Microsoft, the collaboration bolstering the connections between Israelis and Israeli-Americans who have served in the IDF.

Given the vast number of former IDF and Israeli spies employed by Microsoft, and given the way we know Israel has used AI and big data in both Gaza and the West Bank, the claim that Microsoft’s services haven’t harmed a single Palestinian is simply not credible.

It was recently reported that the system used by the IDF to manage the population registry and movement of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, called ‘Rolling Stone,’ which is integral to apartheid, is maintained by Microsoft Azure. Other reporting by +972 magazine, an independent outlet based in Israel-Palestine, found that Microsoft employees work closely with units in the Israeli army to develop products and systems, often embedding themselves within the IDF for months at a time. The same outlet also reported that Israel’s top information technology officer, Racheli Dembinsky, when presenting at a conference in Tel Aviv, described AI as providing Israel “very significant operational effectiveness” in Gaza as the logo of Microsoft Azure appeared on a large screen behind her. We also know that Israel relies on big data and AI to churn out lists of names for assassination, and we know, from the daily videos of death and destruction, and from UN bodies working in Gaza, that many of those killed by Israel have been children.

Microsoft employs large numbers of people who quite literally helped build the digital infrastructure underpinning a genocidal apartheid state. Many of these people continue their work to further the goal of ethnic cleansing and Israeli domination of the region, only now as civilians for Microsoft (although in some cases as de facto IDF, embedded in the Israel army).

Far from being harmless, these people are the architects of harm.

Microsoft has helped enable some of the worst crimes against humanity we’ve ever seen. Their claim they’ve exonerated themselves via an internal investigation is laughable and smells of a company in panic mode as the consequences begin to dawn on senior management.

Another clue that many Microsoft employees see their civilian work as advancing a genocidal mission came last year when, a year into the genocide, a giant Israel flag was draped over multiple stories of the Microsoft office in Gav Yam technology park in Beersheba, Israel.

I’m sure many IBM workers in the 1930s and 1940s had Nazi flags on their desks too, also believing in the mission.

We should also bear in mind that while the genocide of Gaza started in October 2023, Israel’s apartheid system predates its final effort at the ethnic cleansing of Gaza by decades. Just as IBM provided Nazi Germany with the ability to track and trace Jews, Microsoft and other tech companies have long worked with Israel to collect and stores huge amounts of data on Palestinians. This data is what then justifies and enables Israel to harass Palestinians at checkpoints, confine Palestinians to Palestinian-only areas, and frequently detain and murder them. This huge collection of data also serves a critical PR purpose, providing Israel with the veneer of sophistication it needs to talk about ‘targeted’ military actions while enacting apartheid, mass detention and mass slaughter.

It’s also likely that Microsoft helped Israel develop the facial recognition technology which it uses to restrict the movement of Palestinians in the West Bank and Jerusalem. In 2012, when talking about the upcoming launch of a new Xbox and video game input device called Kinect, Yoram Ya'akobi, director of Microsoft Israel's Development Center, said “all the face recognition technology being used with Kinect was developed in Israel. If you see an application with face recognition, you know it was made here.”

Microsoft is deeply embedded in the genocidal architecture of the Israeli state, and agents of that state help staff key products and functions. The claim that its services have never been used to target or harm Palestinians doesn’t stand up to the most rudimentary test of intelligence or logic.

When the reckoning comes for Israel, it must come for Microsoft too.

(If you haven’t seen them check out my previous investigations into the links between Israel, the IDF, Google and Meta here and here)