Nearly 400 current and former Apple employees worldwide have signed an open letter calling on CEO Tim Cook to speak up for Palestinian lives. The letter says Cook has failed to extend the same public sympathy for the deaths of Palestinians as he has for Israelis. 

The letter’s release on March 27 came after several months of tension at various Apple locations over Israel’s complete siege, massacres, and bombing of Gaza. On Oct. 9, Cook sent a letter to Apple employees expressing his grief for people who lost their lives or loved ones in the Oct. 7 attack but never released a similar public statement of support for Palestinians. Some employees also allege they were fired from Apple because they publicly displayed support for Palestine.

“Our credo states that all people are welcome, and emphasizes that we want to leave the world better than we found it,” the letter says. “However, our actions in the last few months have shown us that executive leadership has no intention of making the world a better place for Palestinians and that they are wholly unwelcome within Apple.”

Most workers who signed the letter work in retail stores, but the letter also includes signatories in product management and software development. 

Tariq Ra’ouf, an Apple technical expert at a Seattle retail store and one of the main organizers of the “Apples4Ceasefire” letter, said Apple employees started the campaign out of frustration regarding how pro-Palestinian speech was being treated at Apple and the general pro-Israel sentiment at the company. Ra’ouf said he was told he couldn’t wear his Palestinian flag pin because customers could perceive it as political solicitation. 

“There has just been a lot of anti-Palestinian behavior, telling people that wearing a keffiyeh is creating a harmful environment,” Ra’ouf said. “I started the campaign just to get eyes on all that.”

Madly Laaibah Espinoza, a former operational specialist at an Apple store in Chicago who is of Palestinian heritage, said she was fired after several months of wearing a keffiyeh, a traditional Palestinian scarf. Espinoza said she started wearing a keffiyeh to work after checking the dress code, which does not prohibit wearing scarves, and getting permission from her manager.

A few weeks later, she said her manager asked her to stop wearing the keffiyeh because it was a political symbol and she was creating a hostile work environment. Espinoza said she pushed back and said it was unfair and discriminatory that she was being targeted for expressing her Palestinian heritage, and continued to wear Palestinian-themed accessories. She received two disciplinary actions against her, including an attendance violation and a misconduct violation for “violating business policy” through her clothing and accessory choices. She was ultimately fired with the written reason being attendance, even though she said her attendance had considerably improved.

“My store leader told me, ‘you broke policy,’ and she listed multiple dates of me wearing a Palestinian flag [and] wearing a bracelet that said ‘Save Gaza,’ and then ever since then, I had a check-in with a manager every week for my attendance,” Espinoza said. “By the end of February, they said, ‘we are recommending you for termination because you didn’t pass the attendance.’”

An Apple technical specialist with Palestinian heritage in Illinois—who asked to be kept anonymous to avoid retaliation—said that, while he has not directly faced issues at work, he has seen coworkers reprimanded for wearing Palestinian-related jewelry and even shoes the color of the Palestinian flag. He said he wants management to remain neutral on the Israel-Palestine issue, which he said it failed to do when Tim Cook sent his email on Oct. 7.

“I definitely feel support amongst my peers that are at my level or a little higher, but once you get to management and above, that’s when you definitely feel the difference in support,” he said. 

Tech workers across the country have long been speaking out for Palestinian liberation. In May 2021, as the Israeli military forcibly displaced Palestinians from East Jerusalem, Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services executives signed a $1.2 billion contract for Project Nimbus, a cloud computing project for the Israeli government and military. The No Tech for Apartheid campaign organized against the project, launching a petition with more than 90,000 signatures asking Amazon and Google to stop doing business with the Israeli government and interrupting Google Israel managing director Barak Regev at a tech conference in New York. 

Tech workers have continued to organize in response to the ongoing bombardment of Gaza. When an Israeli airstrike killed Mai Ubeid, a young software engineer in Gaza and former intern at a firm that was part of the Google for Startups accelerator program, members of the No Tech for Apartheid campaign held a vigil for Ubeid in New York. Activists have also organized protests, letter-writing campaigns, and other actions to get tech workers to push back against their companies for supporting Israeli apartheid. 

No Tech for Apartheid is also pushing back against what they say is disparate treatment of pro-Palestinian workers compared to Israeli workers expressing their views on the conflict. In an open letter, Muslim, Palestinian, Arab, and anti-Zionist Jewish Google employees alleged that Google managers had allowed employees to make dehumanizing comments about Palestinians on Google platforms while reporting staff who expressed sympathy with the Palestinian people. In one case, the letter alleges that Arab and Muslim employees were told to stop making comments in support of Palestinians or references to Israeli occupation under the guise of being “respectful in the workplace.”

While workers have the legal right to unionize or otherwise join together to advance their interests as employees, employers are largely not prohibited from disciplining employees for expressing political views. Some states, like New York, prohibit discrimination for participating in political activities outside of work, but private employers are usually allowed to regulate the display of political symbolism while workers are on the clock.

At the same time, workers argue that Apple positions itself as a company that promotes inclusivity and racial justice. To do that, their letter says that Apple needs to “innovate socially just as we do technically.” Ra’ouf said this means that Apple should be the first corporation to embrace and support the Palestinian right to self-determination or stop or slow its work in Israel until the ongoing violence ends. 

“People in the tech industry are beginning to recognize the extent of the racism and the apartheid and the genocide that’s happening in Israel,” Ra’ouf said. “What’s happening is you are seeing all the tech workers wake up and realize, ‘this is wrong; we don’t want to be part of this.’”