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There are still words

A tribute to Mohamed Al-Zaqzooq


10/09/2025

Mohamed Al-Zaqzooq is writer in Gaza who, like everyone else in the strip, is being tormented by the ongoing genocide. This essay is a tribute to him. It is a meditation on the use of words—in literature alongside as other forms—in conditions as catastrophic as in Gaza. It is also an exercise of generating hope and reigning in the agony and the despair that the genocide creates.

I first encountered Mohamed Al-Zaqzooq, a 35-year-old writer from Khan-Younis, in October 2024 at the Palestinian liberatory bookfair in Frankfurt am Main on a screen in a pre-recorded interview. The interview was conducted in Arabic by a Palestinian diasporic activist named Batool. I followed it through the English subtitles.

The conversation starts with Batool expressing an insecurity: “I stayed up all night to figure out how to start the conversation. I thought I should ask, ‘How are you?’ But it is not even appropriate to ask someone in Gaza such a question.” Mohamed responds: “I totally understand this confusion. This confusion also exists among us, for the people experiencing the war here, inside Gaza. We don’t even know how to ask each other, ‘How are you doing?’” He then affirms that he is very glad about the ability to have a conversation.

The conversation that follows is indeed one of the most remarkable ones that I have witnessed. It moves swiftly between practical considerations of survival in the genocide and theoretical discussions of literature, consciousness and pain. Mohamed explains that his mission is to write stories of the everyday struggles of the people. His writing is “biased towards the people and their daily suffering, their relationships and the meanings they create…Their life, their concerns, their thoughts and fears”. He clarifies that this bias includes himself, as he is also part of the people, their suffering, their fear. The stories are full of important details that are important to the stories’ protagonists. He argues that such stories are no less significant in conveying the truth of what is happening than the aggregate summaries and news reports.

A great example of his literature is his short story Burning Books in Gaza, which was published in The Berlin Review in December 2024 in English and German. It is a bitter but sweet story about a father in hunger-ridden Gaza who, having managed to secure a bag of flour, contemplates burning a few of his treasured books to make fire in a clay oven to bake bread, because there are no other means by which to do so. He finally decides against it and, despite many odds, he finds some cardboard to make fire. The story has a happy ending, in the limited and grim scope that one day’s struggle to provide food for a family is successful.

The grimness of this story’s happy ending is haunted by later texts that Mohamed wrote when Israel’s starvation efforts had taken even fuller force. He published the following on July 24, 2025 as an update on his GoFundMe page:

Hunger is not simply the absence of food. It is a brutal sensation that gnaws at the body slowly, consuming the soul as it does the flesh. It begins as a small emptiness in the stomach—a fleeting cramp one can tolerate—but gradually, it transforms into an inner beast that growls in the chest and pounds mercilessly at the walls of the stomach. In the long hours of hunger, the stomach begins to contract, curling in on itself. A constant wave of nausea sets in, accompanied by a dull, heavy pain that pulls at you from the inside. Your head spins, your limbs tremble, and everything around you becomes dull, distant, and unimportant. Thoughts blur together. Concentration becomes a lost luxury. Hunger is not a single pain—it is a chain of suffering: headaches, dizziness, loss of speech, mood swings, and then emotional numbness. You feel your body betray you, abandoning you piece by piece, while your heart swings between fear for your loved ones and the helplessness of not being able to give them what they need. It is a slow death. There is no blood, no noise—but it is devastating. Heavy. It feels as though you are being erased from life in silence, left only to gaze into the faces of your hungry children, unable to break this deadly stillness. Hunger is not just deprivation—it is the stripping away of dignity, the unraveling of a person from within. Nothing lays you bare like hunger does.

What cruelty to inflict this to someone on purpose. What cruelty upon cruelty upon cruelty with yet no end in sight!

In his interview with Batool, Mohamed explains that writing the stories of the everyday struggles is important because it gives form to the loss, the emotions and the sufferings of the people.

Why is focusing on the numerical facts a bad thing? Because it can also be transmitted to the consciousness of the people of Gaza. And that’s what’s even more painful than the meaning of the numbers. My biggest concern is that the Gazans also listen to the news, just like you all. Imagine, when 30 people get murdered in a day, we say: “Thank God, today there are practically no martyrs, that’s nothing.” And that is disastrous and outrageous, and it creeps into people’s consciousness. That’s why it’s crucial that we keep trying to pay attention to these details. To take note of our narrative, to be careful in our dialogue, and how we hold on to our ability to feel the pain, how we process the pain and that the depth of the pain and the successive hits don’t weaken us and make us lose this feeling, because once we do, we lose a crucial feature of our relationship with life. And this loss affects how we express ourselves and intensifies the continuous agony that we experience.

These ideas influenced me in how I spoke and wrote about the genocide. They affirmed and developed my belief that writing stories, crafting speeches, and ordinary acts of speaking truthfully to one another are important forms of struggle against the numbness, the isolation and the disablement of agonizing despair.

It took me six months to have the good sense to let Mohamed know what his interview meant to me. Through his GoFundMe page, I found a way to contact him. Contrary to all the false whispers (“I cannot fathom what he is living through, so what could I have to say to him?” and “He is an accomplished writer, I am a Nobody from the audience, so what could I have to say to him?”), he responded with happiness, gratitude and a memory from Berlin. He had visited Berlin in September 2022, and getting mail from Berlin brought back the memory of this visit. An invitation and acceptance of a friendship ensued and materialized in an ongoing e-mail exchange.

Mohamed wrote to me in August 2025: “There is one thing I’m still holding on to: the ability to write. I believe it’s the only existential reason I have — to keep writing, and to give this hard, painful story to the world and to the generations yet to c ome.” I told him how generous I found his concerns for the world and for generations yet to come. I added that I understood that this generosity is bound up with this thing called hope. Mohamed replied: “Yes—writing is my lifeline. It gives me hope and turns the struggle into something with meaning. Writing explains the pain and helps me understand what I am living.”

At the end of August, I was slouching on the couch, phone in hand, and began to write an e-mail to Mohamed. But my mind was blank when I tried to think of something to write that would be even in the slightest bit comforting. So I read through Mohamed’s old messages and looked at his pictures from his visit to Berlin again. I noticed that in his picture in front of the Reichstag, he is standing just at the place where Palestine protest camps have set up tents. I shared this observation with him. The next day I read his reply:

Reading your message brought back my memories from about three years ago, in those places and in the moment when the photo was taken. It was a moment of wonder, and maybe also shock, for a young man leaving Gaza for the first time after thirty years of never going out, to see the big open world full of colors.

I remember I was amazed, happy, and afraid at the same time. Now, as I read your words, I don’t think it is just a coincidence that today there is solidarity and human action in the same place where I once stood.

Now I am in the peak of despair, searching again for a place, while options are disappearing and the geography becomes narrower day by day.

This essay is for you, dear Mohamed. May your imagination be nourished when you experience that there are more readers here in Berlin and elsewhere who engage with your stories. May this essay prepare a welcoming community for your next visit. May the truthfulness and the clarity of your words embolden and inspire those here who fight for Germany to finally quit arming and otherwise bolstering  Israel. And if some of the readers of this article can support Mohamed and his family financially, this would be highly appreciated too.

Red Flag:  No, East Germany wasn’t socialist—and neither is “democratic socialism”

In his weekly column, Nathaniel Flakin critiques controversial statement by Die Linke’s Heidi Reichinnek


A mural depicting a socialist utopia: two smiling people with symbols of science and advancement swirling around them.

Heidi Reichinnek of Die Linke is more popular among people under 45 than chancellor Friedrich Merz. Admittedly, that’s a low bar to clear—but the 37-year-old politician with the Rosa Luxemburg tattoo, co-chair of the Left Party’s parliamentary group, rocks Tiktok with passionate speeches against the Far Right.

What kind of system does she want? In an interview with Stern magazine, she was asked about the German Democratic Republic, better known as East Germany, and answered:  “What we had in the GDR wasn’t socialism. At least not the kind my party envisions.”

Every single right-wing influencer in Germany responded:  socialism can only mean a repressive dictatorship. Following a famous method, let’s define what socialism is not, in order to figure out what it is. 

Definitely not socialism

Reichinnek says she is for “democratic socialism.” She calls that a “utopia” (literally:  a non-place), but a “first step” would be “to bring public services back into public ownership,” including “housing, transportation, health care, and education,” alongside a “redistribution of wealth.” She does not mention what any further steps would be, but she explicitly rejects “nationalizing everything.”

What Reichinnek is describing is more or less what West German capitalism looked like in the 1970s, before the neoliberal offensive. Prior to the age of privatizations, public services were mostly run by the state. Reichinnek simultaneously defends the Basic Law, which guarantees private property. So even in the golden age of the “social market economy,” the means of production were still monopolized by a handful of Nazi billionaires. 

Just like “democratic socialists” Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the other side of the Atlantic, Die Linke envisions “socialism” as capitalism with more protections for workers. The problem is that such a regulated capitalism is inherently precarious—it’s only possible when capitalism is growing and the ruling class is forced to make concessions.

As we’ve seen for the last 50 years, competition between nation-states forces them to claw these concessions back. The only way to win lasting improvements for working people is to break out of this system by expropriating the bourgeoisie. Society’s wealth should be under democratic control—not the exclusive property of a few oligarchs who inherited billions from war criminals. Anything less is not democratic and not socialist. As Rosa Luxemburg put it:

“What was considered equality and democracy until now:  parliaments, national assemblies, equal ballots, was a pack of lies! Full power in the hands of the working masses, as a weapon for smashing capitalism to pieces — this is the only true equality, this is the only true democracy!”

Also not socialism

The GDR, in contrast, did nationalize just about everything. So was it socialist? Also not. Because socialism—which Marx described as a “first” or “lower” phase of communism—is not simply about state ownership. Socialism refers to a society in which the working class holds political power; as workers increasingly administer their own lives and society as a whole, class divisions and the state wither away.

The GDR existed for just over 40 years, and in that time, the state did anything but wither; the Ministry for State Security grew incessantly, and surveilled, harassed, and imprisoned workers and young people they considered to be “enemy-negative forces.” This wasn’t just an insult to human dignity—it was also an enormous waste of resources.

With a planned economy, and without the need to constantly generate profits, the GDR made accomplishments that sound fantastical today. They completely eliminated homelessness and allowed 90 percent of women to join the work force:  the highest rate recorded by any country ever. They came up with innovations like near-unbreakable glasses and hyperefficient prefab concrete housing. Yet a privileged bureaucracy, obsessed with control, produced constant inefficiencies and alienated workers from what was supposed to be “their” system.

In a recent video, the YouTuber Fabian Lehr rebuts Reichinnek and argues that the GDR was socialism, because despite any and all shortcomings, East Germany’s economic base was socialist. The history of German capitalism shows that the very same bourgeoisie can rule via an imperial monarchy, a bourgeois democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a different bourgeois democracy. But this is because capitalism needs a state with a certain autonomy.

Under a planned economy, no division exists between the political and economic spheres. “The economy” does not act like a mythical force hovering above society—it is subject to conscious planning. So decisions about who will produce what for whom are directly political. That’s why it is no secondary question if the working class is directly exercising power or not.

Lehr points to the GDR’s accomplishments, but offers no explanation for why millions of people wanted to leave this supposedly socialist society—or more generally, why productivity growth remained far lower than in the West. As Leon Trotsky argued in the 1930s, socialism must increase human productivity, or it has no historical justification. And one irony seems to escape him:  due to his long association with Trotskyism, comrade Lehr could have easily faced a long prison sentence in the GDR, as did many communists with similarly “problematic” backgrounds. This does not speak for a particularly civilized society. 

Real socialism

Socialism is fundamentally different from both Die Linke’s magically reformed capitalism, but also different from the GDR’s bureaucratically planned economy. A society can only be described as socialist if it meets Marx’s criteria of evolving towards the abolition of classes and the state. It’s a dialectical category defined not by an abstract checklist, but development and contradictions.

A planned economy needs broad, constant democracy to function. There is no other way to accurately judge what producers can do and what consumers need. By suppressing all criticism, Stalinist states like the GDR denied themselves the possibility of good planning.

There is a lot more in Reichinnek’s interview to criticize. As a “small step,” she thinks Die Linke should form coalition governments alongside the SPD and the Greens, “to achieve what is achievable at a given point in time.” In Berlin, we have seen what this looks like:  “left-wing” ministers privatizing public housing, deporting thousands of immigrants, and cutting wages for public sector workers. Small steps indeed! Recently, we saw leading members of Die Linke voting to give €500 billion to the German army.

Rosa Luxemburg, whose face is tattooed on Reichinnek’s arm, rejected the idea that reforms to capitalism were the “first steps” toward socialism:

“[P]eople who pronounce themselves in favour of the method of legislative reform in place and in contradistinction to the conquest of political power and social revolution, do not really choose a more tranquil, calmer and slower road to the same goal, but a different goal.”

And while Reichinnek emphasizes her goal of joining government coalitions, Rosa Luxemburg took the opposite view:

“[T]he role of [a socialist party] in bourgeois society is essentially that of an opposition party. It can only enter on scene as a government party on the ruins of bourgeois society.”

Red Flag is a weekly opinion column on Berlin politics that Nathaniel has been writing since 2020. After moving through different homes, it now appears at The Left Berlin.

11 September 1973: Putsch in Chile—the other 9/11

This week in working class history


In September 1970, Salvador Allende was elected president of Chile, on the back of a wave of strikes and land occupations. His victory inspired wider social movements: workers took over factories, peasants seized the land, and indigenous Mapuches demanded recognition. This grassroots mobilisation led to the establishment of Cordones Industriales – workers’ councils that coordinated militant action across different factories and workplaces. Allende was pushed into nationalising some industries, including the mines and some banks

In response, US President Nixon ordered a trade embargo. The CIA-backed truck drivers’ union organised strikes that disrupted the delivery of vital goods – though since most drivers owned their own trucks, this was more a bosses’ strike than a genuine workers’ action. In June 1973, a tank regiment surrounded the presidential palace. Allende’s response was to compromise and to attempt to negotiate with the bosses and the military. He agreed not to interfere with Chile’s army or police. In August, he invited General Augusto Pinochet into his cabinet.

In September, the Chilean military, led by Pinochet, staged a coup. Political parties were shut down, and Pinochet’s opponents were rounded up and tortured. 30,000 were killed, including Allende, and more than 3,000 “disappeared”. 12,000 Leftists were rounded up and sent to the national football stadium. One of them was the singer Victor Jara. Before they killed Jara, soldiers pulled his nails out, chopped his hands off, then told him to play his guitar: “Let’s hear you sing Venceremos now.”

Organised and financed by the CIA – which had cabled its Santiago station that “It is firm and continuing policy that Allende be overthrown by a coup” – Pinochet’s regime, working with the “Chicago Boys”, became a testing ground for the monetarist policies later adopted by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. This involved privatisation, unemployment, and massive attacks on workers’ rights. Pinochet’s US-backed economic programme was the forerunner to today’s austerity politics.

What are the lessons of Chile? On the one hand, Allende’s fate justifies St-Just’s statement: “Those who make revolutions by halves dig their own graves”. The rich and powerful will not hand over power without a fight. But Chile also showed the power of our side. When the truck owners went on strike, local committees were set up to distribute food and other essential goods. Workers organised production for need not profit. Before it was crushed, the Chilean uprising showed what a better society could look like.

Together for Gaza: Stop the genocide

Why you should join the Zusammen für Gaza demonstration on September 27th


The discourse on Gaza among the political and media elites of this country is finally beginning to shift. Increasing numbers of politicians and journalists are actually starting to use the word “genocide” and calling for an end to all arms shipments to Israel as well as sanctions of some kind. But it seems clear that we need pressure from below to ensure that this shift moves much more quickly and decisively to ensure real action. One of the best ways to do just that is by organizing mass demonstrations. 

Berlin is home to the largest Palestinian community in any city outside the Arab world. At least an estimated 30,000 Palestinians live here, 200,000 in Germany as a whole. Yet it has been incredibly difficult to organize large demonstrations in this city, for several reasons.

The primary reason for this is the outrageous behavior of the police at virtually every single demonstration. Even before 2023, the Berlin police had been notorious for the exceptional brutality against Palestinian protests in particular, with full support of nearly the entire political and media establishment.

Attending a demonstration means risking arbitrary police violence and detainment or arrest, leading to criminal charges. Many Palestinians with an unsure status are understandably not able to risk this, because of the consequences that might have for themselves and their families. There have been several cases of deportations and jobs lost.

The level of violence actually seems to be increasing with each new demonstration: the case of Kitty O’Brien now gone viral is just one of many. This is all compounded by the arbitrary restrictions placed on these demonstrations, which are often stopped by the police up to the point of banning them entirely. But the major reason for the fact that the demonstrations in Berlin and Germany in general have been so tiny has been the failure to mobilize the wider community.

The largest demonstration to date was the United 4 Gaza demonstration in June organized by Abed Hassan and Amin Rjoob with the backing of the heart of the Palestinian movement in Berlin. An estimated 70,000 attended. Even the attendance at successful demonstrations like United 4 Gaza remains ridiculously low in comparison to the demonstrations in New York, London, Madrid, Sydney, or elsewhere around the world. Recently in The Hague, 100,000 people were on the streets demanding an end to the genocide: the equivalent here would be 500,000 people.

It is important to remember that Berlin has seen protests of that size before: Against the Iraq War in 2003, over 500,000 people marched on the streets of Berlin alone, the largest demonstration in the history of the Federal Republic. Considering the polls that suggest a large majority of Germans diverge starkly in their opinions from the genocidal line of the government, it is imperative to find a way to mobilize at least a significant number of them to achieve something comparable to the demonstrations of 2003. 

A major contributing factor that has prevented a mass mobilization similar to that found in other countries was the egregious failure of all human rights groups and the Linke to get behind the demonstrations in the first place. In fact, the German branches of organizations like Fridays for Future and Amnesty International famously distanced themselves from the international organizations for condemning the genocide in Gaza.

This has been changing over the past year: much too late, and not with sufficient soul-searching that should accompany their change of stance. Other NGOs like medico international have, on the other hand, from the very start been supportive of the cause of stopping the genocide and advocating Palestinian liberation, although initially not on the streets. 

Finally—and far too late—several NGOs, including Amnesty International and medico international, and several private individuals organized a rally in February 2025 (For a Just Peace in Palestine and Israel) in front of the Bundeskanzleramt. This was still couched in extremely “moderate” language under the slogan “Ceasefire now.” It was an incredibly frustrating event, organized with minimum Palestinian participation and conflicted with another major demonstration at the same time. The turnout was anything but what it should have been: perhaps rightfully so, since the wording was so drenched in relativizing both-sidesism.

But the situation now is very different. Some of the same individuals, NGOs (including Amnesty and medico), and most importantly the party the Linke have announced a demonstration “Zusammen für Gaza—Stoppt den Genozid” (Together for Gaza—Stop the Genocide). They have been joined by several Palestinian activists and politicians. The demonstration starts at Alexanderplatz on Saturday, September 27th, and leads to the Bundestag, where it will be followed by a rally/concert in the evening.

This time, the tenor is decidedly different. That the word genocide is mentioned at all is already an amazing step forward in the context of this country. The wording of the call to demonstrate has clearly been chosen very carefully to create the broadest possible coalition to exert the most pressure to end the German support for genocide in Gaza, certainly the most pressing issue for activists here at the moment. This is necessary when organizing a large demonstration.

But this time, some things are new. Ramsis Kilani, who is listed first among the list of “initial supporters” published on the protest’s website, eloquently points out in an Instagram reel, that there are many things to criticize here, but the demands also go farther than anything that we’ve seen from this spectrum up to now.

Of course, the core of the movement has demands that go much farther, down to the root of the problem, Zionist settler colonialism. But we should bring this criticism to the demonstration itself. It is precisely what we have been pushing on the streets and in social media that has led these organizations to change their position.

We need to continue that process: and we can do that most effectively by using this opportunity to show our dissent at the demonstration itself, and make the best possible use of the resources they have made available to turn this event into the largest demonstration for Palestine that Germany has ever seen. We are not only calling for a stop to the genocide and German support for it, but also to promote Palestinian liberation. 

So while it is absolutely crucial to continue pushing NGOs, and most importantly the Linke, in the right direction, a boycott of this demonstration—or, worse, a counter demonstration—would only be destructive to the cause we are all fighting for.

Yes, it is incredibly frustrating. The Linke general secretary Janis Ehling recently gave a useless interview, ostensibly in support of the demonstration while undermining it at the same time. Attacks from within the party (like Bodo Ramelow’s insidious interview where he claims that saying that IDF kills kids is equivalent to the myth that “Jews eat children.” More than anything, this interview exposes Ramelow’s own antisemitism). The list goes on.

The failures of some people supporting the demo has made it very difficult to write this article at all. But if we are to have any hope that the movement to stop this genocide will grow and become more effective in this country, it is vital to seize this opportunity and make the demonstration ours. Please go to the website https://www.zusammen-fuer-gaza.de and sign up as a supporter, and of course please attend if you can. 

Microsoft’s dark cloud

Microsoft provides mass surveillance capabilities to Israel and helping to target Palestinians


09/09/2025

When we talk about the damage done by the tech industry, the same names keep popping up: Elon Musk, Facebook, Amazon, OpenAI, etc. But there’s one ancient evil that we tend to give a pass to. Microsoft is often seen as old-fashioned, even harmless – your grandpa’s megacorp so to speak. 

Yet Microsoft remains one of the most powerful and destructive companies in the world—and it is directly complicit in the ongoing genocide in Palestine.

Microsoft helps the IDF to target Palestinians

In early August, a joint investigation by The Guardian, +972 Magazine, and Local Call, revealed that Microsoft has developed a customized version of its Azure cloud platform specifically for Israel’s military surveillance agency, Unit 8200. 

Unit 8200 hosts vast amounts of data using Azure for its surveillance apparatus. This cloud-based system stores intercepted Palestinian phone calls. Leaked documents reviewed by The Guardian show that, as of July 2025, the equivalent of 200 million hours of audio were stored on Microsoft servers in the Netherlands. More data is stored on servers in Ireland and Israel.

According to Israeli intelligence sources, this Azure-hosted data was used to help plan lethal airstrikes in Gaza and guide arrests and other operations in the West Bank.

In response to these accusations, Microsoft has played innocent, despite launching two external inquiries into the allegations. After the first inquiry, Microsoft announced in May that it had found no evidence the Israeli military had violated its terms of service. A second inquiry was launched in August after senior Microsoft executives raised concerns about their Israel-based employees. In other words: what if some Israeli employees have been more loyal to their government than to their employer?

Despite this internal finger pointing, it seems clear that Microsoft must have known what its system would be used for. According to an intelligence source interviewed by The Guardian:  

“Technically, they’re not supposed to be told exactly what it is, but you don’t have to be a genius to figure it out,” the source noted. “You tell [Microsoft] we don’t have any more space on the servers, that it’s audio files. It’s pretty clear what it is.”

In a June report,  the UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine stated that Microsoft’s servers “ensure data sovereignty and provide a shield from accountability, under favourable contracts with minimal restrictions or oversight.” 

Speaking at a conference titled “IT for IDF”, an Israeli colonel described cloud technology as “a weapon.” Netanyahu himself has said that the relationship between Israel and Microsoft is “a marriage made in heaven, but recognized here on earth.” 

No Azure for Apartheid

No Azure for Apartheid is a Microsoft-worker campaign group opposing the company’s complicity in the genocide. The group has criticised the latest inquiry as “as yet another tactic to delay the immediate cessation of ties with the Israeli military”. 

Members of the group have organized several protests in recent weeks. They briefly occupied Microsoft east campus in Redmond on the 19th of August. A few days later, the group used kayaks to protest outside the waterfront homes of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and President Brad Smith. 

On the 26th, five Microsoft workers were arrested at another sit-in at the company’s headquarters. Two workers – Riki Fameli and Anna Hattle – were then fired. Previously, Microsoft has fired two members of No Azure for Apartheid – Abdo Mohamed and Hossam Nasr – for organizing another vigil. 

Reports confirm the company has asked the FBI for help tracking workers and activists. Internal emails reviewed by Bloomberg show that Microsoft went as far as flagging employees and former employees involved with No Azure for Apartheid by name.  

In an article on Medium, No Azure for Apartheid has listed the many ways in which Microsoft technology is either directly or indirectly used to power the genocide in Gaza. This includes, amongst other things, Microsoft’s ties to members of the so-called “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” (GHF). UN experts have said that the GHF “is an utterly disturbing example of how humanitarian relief can be exploited for covert military and geopolitical agendas in serious breach of international law”. 

Microsoft is gutting the game industry 

Microsoft is not only complicit in genocide, it is harmful on many more levels. The company has laid off thousands of workers in several rounds: 6,000 in May, 9,000 announced in July, 10,000 back in 2023… the list goes on. While this is in no way comparable with the murder of Palestinians, it is hard to understate how many people lost their jobs and how damaging these layoffs have been. 

The layoffs have arguably not received much coverage in the mainstream press. Perhaps this is because a large portion of those affected work in the gaming industry and there is still a widespread assumption that making games is not a “real” job. Yet gaming is the largest cultural industry in the world.  Such mass layoffs—combined with the closure of many studios—are already wreaking havoc.

Why is this happening ? The short version is: 1. Microsoft purchases a host of game studios to create a sort of Netflix for games, 2. Netflix for games is an unprofitable idea, 3. Microsoft decides to pivot to AI (because which tech company doesn’t?), 4. people get sacked. 

The mass layoffs and complicity in genocide are linked, and the fightback by some Microsoft-owned game studios is making that evident. In August, Arkane Lyon published a letter calling out Microsoft’s complicity in the genocide, after initially delaying due to the layoffs. 

“Our concern was that the open letter would be muted by the layoffs news,” Arkane told Game File. “Since then, it has been very difficult to find the correct timing, knowing that the situation in Gaza was deteriorating rapidly.”

The letter demands, amongst other things “Termination of all ongoing or future contract with Israeli Occupation Forces” and Microsoft “Disclosing all ties to the Israeli military”.

Other game developers have canceled ports of their game for the Xbox.

What can you do?

So, Microsoft is bad. According to BDS, it is “perhaps the most complicit tech company in Israel’s illegal apartheid regime and ongoing genocide”.

But what can we do to fight it? 

Calling for a full Microsoft boycott would be hypocritical on my part. After all, I’m writing this article on a Windows machine. For many people, switching to another operating system is either too costly or too difficult to be a realistic option. But Microsoft is more than just its operating system—the company offers a wide range of products, including games.

Among other things here’s what you can do:

  • Stop buying Xbox products and cancel your Game Pass Subscription.
  • Stop buying Microsoft hardware such as Surface laptops, keyboards, or controllers.
  • Avoid using Microsoft software (Bing, Edge, Windows, Office)  as much as possible. If the Windows operating system is difficult to avoid for many people, products like Bing, Edge, or Office can easily be replaced by other, free alternatives. 
  • Sign this petition.