The ongoing Israeli assault on Gaza has triggered tense, at times hostile, reckonings across American tech companies over their role in the killing. Since October 7, tech workers have agitated for greater transparency about their employers’ work for the Israeli military and at times vehemently protested those contracts.
IBM, which has worked with the Israeli military since the 1960s, is no exception: For months after the war’s start, workers repeatedly pressed company leadership — including its chief executive — to divulge and limit its role in the Israeli offensive that has so far killed over 40,000 Palestinians. For many workers, the question of where IBM might draw the line with foreign governments is particularly fraught given the company’s grim track record of selling computers and services to both apartheid South Africa and Nazi Germany.
On June 6, CEO Arvind Krishna addressed these concerns in a livestreamed video Q&A session.
For IBM workers worried about where the company draws the line, his response has sparked only greater consternation.
According to records of the presentation reviewed by The Intercept, Krishna told employees that IBM’s foreign business wouldn’t be shaped by the company’s own values or humanitarian guidelines.
Rather, Krishna explained, when working for governments, IBM believes the customer is always right:
We try to operate with the principles that are encouraged by the governments of the countries we are in. We are a U.S. headquarter company. So, what does the U.S. federal government want to do on international relations? That helps guide a lot of what we do. We operate in many countries. We operate in Israel, but we also operate in Saudi Arabia. What do those countries want us to do? And what is it they consider to be correct behavior?
For IBM employees worried that business interests would override ethical considerations, this answer provided little reassurance. It also echoed, intentionally or not, the company’s defense when workers had protested IBM’s sale of computer services to apartheid South Africa. According to Kwame Afoh, an IBM employee who organized against the company’s South African ventures in the 1970s, the company’s go-to internal rationale was “We don’t set foreign policy but rather we follow the lead of the U.S. government in foreign business dealings.”
Krishna continued by claiming IBM would not help build weapons — not because doing so is morally wrong, but because the company doesn’t have a system of judging right from wrong. “We will not work on offensive weapons programs,” Krishna explained. “Why? I am not taking any kind of moral or ethical judgment. I think that should be on each country who does those. The reason we don’t is, we do not have the internal guardrails to decide whether the technology applies in a good way or unethical way for offensive weapons.”
Though it may not build weapons itself, IBM has long helped run the military that carries them. In 2020, the company split a roughly $275 million contract to build data centers that would handle Israeli military logistics, including “combat equipment,” according to Israeli outlet TheMarker. That same year, an executive with IBM subsidiary Red Hat told an Israeli business publication “we see ourselves as partners of the IDF.”
IBM did not respond to a request for comment.
Some IBM employees who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity say they were unnerved or upset by their CEO’s remarks, including one who described them as “predictably shameful.” This person said that while some were glad Krishna had even broached the topic of IBM and Israel, “the responses I heard in one-on-one discussions were overwhelmingly dissatisfied or outraged.” Another IBM worker characterized Krishna’s comments as an “excuse for him to hide behind the US government’s choices in a business sense,” adding that “with the track record that IBM has with taking part in genocidal government projects, it certainly doesn’t help his case in any valuable moral way whatsoever.”
The company’s stance from its closed-doors staff discussion is markedly different than its public claims. Like its major rivals, IBM says its business practices are constrained by various human rights commitments, principles that in theory ask the company to avoid harm in the pursuit of profit. When operating in a foreign country, such commitments ostensibly prevent a company like IBM from simply asking “What do those countries want us to do?” as Krishna put it.
But like its competitors, IBM’s human rights language is generally feel-good verbiage that gestures at ethical guidelines without spelling any of them out. “Our definition of corporate responsibility includes environmental responsibility, as well as social concerns for our workforce, clients, business partners, and the communities where we operate,” the company’s “human rights principles” page states. “IBM has a strong culture of ethics and integrity.”
The only substance to be found here is in reference to third-party human rights frameworks, namely those issued by the United Nations. IBM says its “corporate responsibility standards” are “informed by” the U.N. Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, which asks its adherents to “prevent or mitigate adverse human rights impacts that are directly linked to their operations, products or services by their business relationships, even if they have not contributed to those impacts.”
These guidelines, endorsed by the U.N. Human Rights Council in 2011, stress that “Some operating environments, such as conflict-affected areas, may increase the risks of enterprises being complicit in gross human rights abuses committed by other actors (security forces, for example).” The document further notes that such conflict zone abuses may create corporate liability before the International Criminal Court, which in April charged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with crimes against humanity stemming from the Gaza assault. Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, which also sell technology services to the Israeli military, similarly say they subscribe to the voluntarily, nonbinding U.N. guidelines.