Kernow Damo

A Single Vote Just Shattered Microsoft’s Israel Bet


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Microsoft is facing investor pressure from Norway and regulator pressure in Ireland for it's Israel links, so will they be held to account? Right, so Microsoft has spent years telling the world it’s the sensible one in Big Tech, the adult in the room, the company that doesn’t get itself dragged into political mud fights because it’s too busy selling trust and responsibility by the terabyte. Yet here it is, knee-deep in a surveillance scandal tied to an occupation the world is now calling out in the strongest terms, and suddenly all that corporate calm looks like a very expensive illusion. When the biggest sovereign wealth fund on Earth is voting against your own chief executive because you can’t explain what you’ve been doing with Israeli military data, you’re not managing a risk anymore — you’re managing fallout. And the thing Microsoft never imagined could happen to them is exactly what’s happening: the politics they thought they could ignore has turned around, pulled the evidence out of their own cloud, and asked them to explain why they ever thought neutrality covered any of this. Right, so Microsoft has spent years cultivating this image of corporate stability, the big name, the reassuring brand, the sort of company that can stand above the chaos of the tech sector because it doesn’t make reckless bets, it doesn’t chase controversy, and it doesn’t let itself get dragged into the kind of geopolitical mess that ends careers. Yet here it is, watching the consequences pile up because it decided to embed itself in Israel’s digital security apparatus and pretend that the politics wouldn’t follow them home. That was the mistake. The politics always follows you home. You don’t get to power the infrastructure of an occupation, you don’t get to process the communications of an entire population under military rule, and you don’t get to maintain the architecture of state surveillance without eventually finding yourself answering questions that no corporation wants to answer. Microsoft is now in that position, and the thing that makes the whole situation remarkable is that they walked into it thinking their size would protect them.

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Kernow DamoBy Damien Willey