GOOGLE has announced a $32 billion deal to acquire Wiz, an Israeli cloud security company founded by former operatives of Unit 8200, the Israeli military’s elite signals intelligence division.
Civil liberties organisations have condemned the use of Silicon Valley’s technologies in Israeli war crimes.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) criticised the reported use of these services in ‘detentions, killings, and the systematic oppression of journalists, healthcare workers, aid workers, and ordinary families’.
The deal will serve as a massive injection of cash into the Israeli economy, which has been under intense pressure due to the military’s ongoing wars in Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria.
Wiz employs around 1,800 staff, the majority based in Israel, and under the terms of the deal, they will collectively receive $1.5 billion.
According to the Times of Israel, the estimated $4 billion in tax revenue generated for the Israeli state is equivalent to 0.6% of the country’s GDP.
Analysts say this will directly help the Israeli government continue financing its war, relieving pressure to impose new taxes or cut spending to offset ballooning defence and civilian costs.
In March, credit agency Moody’s downgraded Israel’s rating for a second time, warning of long-term damage to the economy due to the conflict.
It identified Israel’s high-tech sector as particularly vulnerable, noting that it serves as a key contributor to both economic growth and government tax receipts.
‘Uncertainty over Israel’s longer-term security and economic growth prospects are much higher than is typical, with risks to the high-tech sector particularly relevant,’ Moody’s said.
Google’s purchase, then, functions as a de facto bailout of Israel’s war
economy.
It comes alongside the company’s plans to lease over 60,000 square metres of office space in Tel Aviv’s ToHa2 Tower — at a cost of over $300 million across ten years.
These investments have been announced even as international scrutiny intensifies over Israel’s conduct in Gaza, where its genocidal crimes have been extensively documented.
If approved, this will be the largest acquisition of an Israeli firm in history, further entrenching the ties between Silicon Valley and Israel’s military-intelligence complex amid its ongoing genocidal campaign in Gaza and escalating regional warfare.
In its statement, Google claimed that ‘organisations of all sizes — from start-ups and large enterprises to governments and public sector organisations — can use Wiz to protect everything they build and run in the cloud’.
Wiz will be absorbed into Google Cloud, but its services will also remain available across other major platforms, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Oracle Cloud.
What Google’s announcement failed to mention was the military pedigree of Wiz’s four co-founders: Assaf Rappaport, Yinon Costica, Ami Luttwak, and Roy Reznik.
All are alumni of Unit 8200, the Israeli military’s cyber-intelligence arm notorious for conducting mass surveillance, cyberwarfare, and targeted assassinations.
The unit plays a central role in Israel’s wars on Gaza and Lebanon, and has been repeatedly accused by former members of engaging in the blanket surveillance of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories to facilitate what whistleblowers described as ‘political persecution’ and extrajudicial killings — often using speculative or overly broad interpretations of intercepted data.
The role of Unit 8200 extends beyond the battlefield.
It has become a recruitment pipeline into the tech industry, with many of its veterans founding or staffing companies later bought out by major US firms.
NSO Group, developer of the Pegasus spyware used to hack journalists, dissidents and human rights activists globally, was also founded by Unit 8200 alumni.
As reported last year, ‘while Unit 8200 alumni once talked about their service in hushed tones, they now tout it in press releases to attract clients and investment money for their start-ups’.
The latest Google deal comes on the heels of several similar acquisitions by Silicon Valley firms since the start of Israel’s war on Gaza.
In late 2023, Palo Alto Networks acquired Dig Security and Talon CyberSecurity — both founded by Unit 8200 veterans — for nearly $1 billion, just weeks after the bombardment of Gaza resumed.
Observers warn that this growing integration of Israeli military-linked personnel into US tech firms carries immense ethical and security risks.
Paul Biggar, a software engineer and founder of Tech for Palestine, stated: ‘Basically the entire Israeli tech industry is funded by US venture capitalists.
‘It’s a very common situation that you see acquisitions of Israeli firms by Silicon Valley, where the senior people in these firms have formerly served in Unit 8200. It gets them a voice internally.’
On the Wiz deal specifically, he added: ‘Wiz should not be trusted, because it takes all user data and runs it through an Israeli company run by former intelligence officials.’
A researcher tracking the penetration of US tech by Israeli military and intelligence networks told US-based Drop Site news that they had identified over 1,400 individuals — current or former members of Unit 8200, Israeli Military Intelligence, and the IDF Cyber Defence Directorate — working in companies including Cisco, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Intel, and Google, in engineering and leadership roles.
Many of these individuals remain reservists, serving active roles in the Israeli military while embedded in critical positions in Western tech firms with offices in Israel, the US, and Europe.
Although US political discourse often focuses on the threat of Chinese infiltration into tech infrastructure, similar scrutiny is rarely applied to Israel.
Yet, according to US intelligence assessments, Israel ranks among the top counter-intelligence threats, behind China, Russia and Iran.
A 2018 Politico report highlighted increasing alarm among FBI officials about espionage threats in Silicon Valley, including concerns that individuals with military or national ties could be coerced into compromising activities.
Experts warn that these risks are particularly acute when tech employees are either current reservists or have strong institutional loyalties to foreign states.
Within Google itself, workers have been resisting their employer’s complicity.
The company has come under fire for Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion joint contract with Amazon providing advanced cloud, AI, facial recognition, image analysis, and sentiment detection tools to the Israeli military.
Internal dissent led to sit-ins at several offices, with Google responding by firing dozens of staff affiliated with the ‘No Tech for Apartheid’ campaign.
The acquisition of Wiz will only deepen the alignment between Big Tech and Israel’s military machinery. Hossam Nasr, a former Microsoft employee dismissed for holding a vigil and now an organiser with the No Azure for Apartheid campaign, called the timing of the deal telling: ‘For the biggest acquisition of an Israeli cybersecurity company to come at this moment is a big “mask-off” moment for Google and Big Tech,’ he said.
‘You are going to have former Unit 8200 agents getting access to Google technology and data. And I do not trust Google to not allow it to be used for nefarious purposes.’
