December19, 2025
Magdala Louis
Lucnise Duquereste
Magdala Louis
Lucnise Duquereste
Trapped
by shuttered schools, few jobs, violence and closed borders, a generation of
Haitians is suffering a devastating mental health crisis.
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — “I don’t
see a future for myself in this country. If I leave Haiti, it’s to save my life
and plan for the future. Otherwise, I wouldn’t leave,” says Maximilien Duclair,
one of many young people struggling to find an income in Haiti’s capital, where
gang violence has forced hundreds of thousands into displacement camps.
Since anti-corruption protests in 2020 and 2021 and the eventual killing of the president, Jovenel Moïse, in July 2021, there has been increasing economic collapse, a political vacuum and regular armed clashes in Haiti. Many activities are paralyzed or reduced, including education and formal employment. With the country’s schools and universities closing intermittently, it has become common for students to lose entire semesters and academic years. This instability has undermined young people’s ability to plan for the future and is increasingly driving them to consider a life elsewhere.
In Port-au-Prince, 28-year-old Chedeline Mathé has been living alone for a year. Orphaned in high school, she has looked after herself from a young age, financing her education through part-time jobs and selling various products. In November 2024, she decided to try to migrate to Mexico and used a travel agency for the difficult journey. But as is often the case, the agency scammed her, stranding her in the Dominican Republic. She survived for several months in hiding before eventually being forced to return to Port-au-Prince. She lost the $5,000 that she had paid the agency — all her savings.
“I just wanted to breathe,” she tells Truthdig, “Here, everything seems stuck.”
More than a solution to economic difficulties, young Haitians like Mathé view migration as an escape from the psychological pressure of the violence and uncertainty.
Some 54% of Haiti’s population is under the age of 25. Apart from the school closures, boys often have to interrupt their education to work and support their families financially. Girls are especially hurt by the education crisis, as their parents often prioritize scarce school funds for their boys. Other young people in many neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince and in several provincial towns live with the constant threat of armed gangs, which also inhibits their ability to plan for the future.
A child born today in Haiti will only be 45% as productive as they could be with full access to education and health care, according to 2020 World Bank figures. This is the most recent data available, and the rate is likely even lower now. More than one-fifth of children are at risk of cognitive and physical limitations, and only 78% of 15-year-olds will survive to the age of 60.
Further, 37.6% of Haitians are living on less than $2.15 a day, and 37% of youths age 15-24 are unemployed. Faced with a high cost of living, many young people are taking the easy way, choosing to join armed groups. Some are forced to join the gangs. Others still hold out, but have to look beyond their country’s borders for hope of a better life.
Beyond the numbers, a feeling of helplessness prevails. Young people find themselves constantly waiting for visas or scholarships, a rare moment of calm, or projects that are slow to materialize. That waiting can trap them in a kind of emotional immobility, where they don’t feel able to move forward.
“We live in the present with no future. I could go further if I left this country,” Mathé says.
The mental health toll mounts
Haitian psychologist Jean Ronald Pétion says he has observed an increase in cases of anxiety, depression and school dropouts directly linked to the country’s chronic instability.
He tells Truthdig that waiting can be used as a deliberate defense mechanism that allows the psyche to strengthen its resilience. However, when the waiting goes on too long, that resilience typically turns into resignation. “From then on, the homeostasis of the psyche is threatened,” he says. Young Haitians may sink into depression or display self-destructive behavior such as addiction to psychotropic substances or aggressiveness, which in turn can make them even more vulnerable.
This conclusion is buttressed by a recent study into the psychological well-being of Haitians. The authors from various U.S. universities concluded the socioeconomic and security crisis in Haiti is leading to chronic distress, anxiety, depression, sleep issues, substance abuse, suicidal ideations, PTSD and physical problems such as insomnia, hypertension and heart conditions.
Pétion believes that, beyond an economic strategy, leaving the country can relieve the intense psychological distress of living in Haiti. However, it also comes with its own set of emotional challenges and uncertainties.
“Migration is both an illusion and a solution,” Pétion says, “It allows people to cope with the anxiety-provoking situations that they are facing at that moment, but it can also lead to despair and regret, especially when there are difficulties integrating into the new country. The most common emotions among those who leave are relief and hope. Yes, it is possible to rebuild your life elsewhere, but it depends on your resilience and ability to adapt.”
Migrants and refugees trying to travel to the U.S. have found that door closed. Roberto Belgarde, 27, a psychology student, applied for the U.S. humanitarian parole program in July 2023. The eldest of four children, he tells Truthdig he had been putting himself and his dreams on the back burner in order to take care of his younger siblings. In February 2024, he was still waiting to hear about his application when attacks in Port-au-Prince forced him to interrupt his studies and flee his home in the capital, to Jeremie, in the west of the country.
When the humanitarian parole program was suspended for Haitians and others in June, he felt like his only hope to leave had been shattered. “Before that, I could see myself somewhere else, resuming my studies and starting to live a normal life again,” he says. “But when I learned that everything was coming to an end, it was as though all my plans for the future were falling apart.”
Other young people don’t migrate because of the risks involved. There are groups that organize migration trips and sell them as paths to hope. However, many journeys end with border guards stopping migrants or migrants being deported. Extortion by authorities, robbery and kidnapping are also common, especially along the route through Central America and Mexico to the U.S. Other journeys turn out to be scams, as Mathé experienced.
Limited relief abroad
Those who do manage to migrate face challenges of their own. Patrick Eliassaint, 34, originally from Lascahobas in the center of the country, fled Haiti amid violence. “When I left, it was a relief. But it was also heartbreaking. I left my family, friends and my 1-year-old son behind,” he says.
In the United States, Eliassaint tells Truthdig he initially managed to build a professional and social life within the local Haitian community. But this all collapsed in June, when the parole program ended.
“Many of my friends lost their jobs or lived in fear of deportation. I was constantly on edge,” he says, describing the stress and anxiety he felt, and how he was eventually forced to return to Haiti out of fear of deportation.
Stéphania Vanessa Marcelin, on the other hand, is now living in Chile. She had to leave Haiti after the devastating 2010 earthquake killed an estimated 220,000 people across the country. Having lost loved ones, facing violence and unable to continue her studies, she relocated to Chile via the Dominican Republic. Migration, she tells Truthdig, opened up new professional opportunities for her but did not free her from difficulties.
She describes a dual challenge of trying to adapt to a new culture, while also wanting to preserve her roots. “Leaving the country is not just a physical departure, it’s an identity crisis,” she says. Far from her homeland, she feels the loss of connection with Haiti. Memories fade, places change and even returning would be complicated. “Once you leave, you remain a migrant for life,” she adds.
Haitians in Chile have created their own communities, but nostalgia and cultural clashes can lead to constant inner conflict, Marcelin says.
Over the past year, deportations of Haitians have increased in many of the countries where they’ve found refuge. Since January 2025, more than 143,000 Haitian migrants have been deported from the Dominican Republic. In the United States, 520,000 Haitian migrants and refugees are now at risk of deportation following the September termination of their temporary protected status.
And yet, despite everything, Haitian youth continue to dream and hope. They are clear that they need safety when migrating, and safety and full rights at home so that ultimately, they don’t have to flee.
December 18, 2025
Michael Kwet
A
man walks through the destruction inflicted by Israel's air and ground
offensive in the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood of Gaza City on Nov. 28, 2025.
(Graphic by Truthdig; images via AP Photo, Adobe Stock)
Last week saw a major development in the fight against Big Tech when
the Irish Council for Civil Liberties launched a complaint against Microsoft
with the European Data Protection Commission for unlawful processing of data by
the Israeli Defense Forces. The case comes in the wake of revelations in August
that, beginning in 2021, the tech behemoth helped develop and supply Microsoft
Azure cloud services that were used by Unit 8200 — Israel’s version of the
National Security Agency — to collect and store data on millions of phone calls
in Gaza per day. Insiders told reporters these calls were used to conduct
lethal military operations against Palestinians.
The reports sent Microsoft into public relations mode. It denied knowledge of Unit 8200’s mobile phone surveillance in Gaza, blocked its access to “certain” (not all) Azure Cloud storage and artificial intelligence services, set up a “Trusted Technology Review” system for employees to raise concerns about human rights abuses and commissioned a legal review by the law firm Covington & Burling.
This flurry of actions was designed to obscure the fact that Microsoft continues to aid and abet genocide, apartheid and settler colonialism. It is crucial, then, to understand how the company moves to protect its image, including the manipulation of “criticism” by major nonprofits such as Human Rights Watch, Electronic Frontier Foundation and others, leaving activists on the ground to pressure for a full end to Microsoft’s business with Israel, and to press for criminal prosecutions and reparations.
Microsoft has been a part of Israel settler-colonialism and apartheid for decades. In 1991, it opened its first research center outside the U.S. in Israel. In 2002, the year of the Jenin massacre, Microsoft scored a $35 million contract that provided services to the Israeli army and defense ministry. Over the years, Microsoft has acquired multiple startups connected to the IDF, and it provides cloud computing services to the Israeli police.
Such a wide range of support for Israeli aggression prompted the BDS Movement website to declare, “Microsoft is perhaps the most complicit tech company in Israel’s illegal apartheid regime and ongoing genocide.”
Despite Israel’s track record of war crimes, unlawful settlement and apartheid over the past century, Microsoft’s top brass has lavished praise on the country. After the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attacks, Nadella decried the “horrific terrorist attacks on Israel,” but has never condemned Israeli aggression, colonization and apartheid spanning the past century.
During Nadella’s 2016 visit to Tel Aviv, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared Israel’s relationship “a marriage made in heaven but recognized here on Earth.”
In other words, Microsoft’s connection to Israel has only strengthened over time, including during its genocidal campaign in Gaza.
For those who watch the company closely, this should come as no surprise. Microsoft services police, prisons, immigration authorities and the military industrial complex across the planet.
For this reason, Microsoft pours immense resources and effort into maintaining a pristine image, perhaps more than any other Big Tech transnational. Recall that in the 1990s, it became known for monopolizing computer operating and web browsing (through its Internet Explorer). This culminated in widely publicized antitrust cases that fizzled out with the emergence of new competitors (Google, Facebook and so on). An over-the-top, bull-headed Steve Ballmer took over as CEO in 2000, and the company floundered for lack of vision. Yet this was temporary. Microsoft launched the Azure cloud in 2010, and in 2014 began rebranding behind the image of a young, hip Indian American, Satya Nadella, as CEO.
During the 2010s, Microsoft also began pumping money into “digital justice” scholars (e.g., danah boyd, Kate Crawford, Tarleton Gillespie) and research institutions (e.g., Data & Society, AI Now, the University of Washington, NYU). In the digital justice community, attention shifted from the Free Software Movement’s focus on public ownership and control of the means of computation and knowledge to the use of Big Data (subsequently rebranded as AI) and shallow identity politics. By the late 2010s, Big Tech’s public image moved from hip and progressive to monopolistic and evil. Yet Microsoft escaped unscathed, thanks in large part to its capture of intellectual circuits. In 2019, The New York Times noted that unlike Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple, Microsoft was “conspicuously absent from most of that criticism.”
With its support for Israeli genocide (in addition to its heavy-handed support for OpenAI), Microsoft’s brand is once again on the line, and it is scrambling to save face. Toward this end, it is deploying a number of tactics.
Microsoft has a “Global Human Rights Statement,” in which it professes a commitment to “serve people,” “advance human dignity” and “respect human rights.” Because genocide is the crime of all crimes, its first rule of damage control is obvious: Deny.
Microsoft is gaslighting the public on so many levels, it’s hard to fathom. Let’s unpack it.
For starters, Israel has long been known to mass-record phone calls in the occupied territories. Given that Nadella met with the commander of Unit 8200, Yossi Sariel, in 2021 to move top-secret intelligence data to Azure, and given that Microsoft engineers helped design the security upon which the mass surveillance system was built with instructions from Unit 8200, it seems unlikely that Microsoft had no knowledge of what the system was for.
But even if Microsoft was truly in the dark about the phone surveillance project, that is beside the larger point that the company provides a wide array of technologies supporting Israeli apartheid, settler colonialism and genocide, all of which have been thoroughly documented by respected sources prior to the August 2025 reports. Smith’s strategy is to evade culpability by narrowing the goalposts: There is no smoking gun to show exactly what Microsoft did and did not know about this one project (mass mobile phone call surveillance), and we will likely never get an answer without a subpoena, if there is a paper trail still on record.
The same strategy was deployed earlier this year in response to reports about general Azure services to the Israeli military (e.g., storage, compute, speech and voice services). This includes a “drastic increase” in the use of Azure and multiple contracts signed between the Israeli military and Microsoft after Oct. 7. In response, Microsoft claims its “internal assessments” and “external review” found “no evidence to date that Microsoft’s Azure and AI technologies have been used to target or harm people in the conflict in Gaza.”
The targeting and harm to Gazans is ostensibly in reference to the use of AI to target and murder alleged Hamas militants and their families, first reported in late 2023. We are still unsure which companies supplied technology in support of these specific programs, but it is highly likely that they utilized technologies provided by multiple Big Tech corporations because Israel does not have the means to handle these AI systems on its own private clouds.
Microsoft was finally forced to acknowledge that its technologies are indeed used for harm in this recent episode simply because a specific Israeli surveillance program of interest was exposed. The company remains silent about other programs listed earlier in this article.
The reaction by Microsoft to cut off some (not all) services to the Israeli military is a narrow response to a broad-based problem artificially narrowed by Microsoft. It beggars belief that Microsoft did not know Israel is guilty of war crimes, gross human rights abuses and, most recently, genocide. Why continue to supply Israel with technology for anything whatsoever?
The additional measures — creating a portal for employees to report human rights abuses and commissioning a legal investigation by Covington & Burling — are also corporate PR. The former will do nothing to curtail abuses, as Microsoft already knows if its clients violate human rights. The latter cannot be trusted, as the same firm already exonerated Microsoft of human rights abuses in the two cases it investigated for its dealings with Israel, including the investigation from earlier this year.
The statement by Smith that Microsoft respects privacy and does not supply technologies for mass surveillance is absurd on its face. As I exposed in The Intercept and Al Jazeera, Microsoft provides cloud-based services that blanket cities and prisons with physical surveillance sensors (e.g., smart camera networks, drones, automatic license plate readers, etc.) and pool massive troves of data about citizens and suspected undocumented immigrants into a centralized repository for real-time alerts, investigations and data analytics. There is nothing else to call this but mass surveillance.
The Irish Council for Civil Liberties’ complaint to the European Data Protection Commission, launched on Dec. 4, is a welcome attempt to create some accountability for Microsoft’s service to Israel. Yet it is narrowly tailored to address violations of Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation, with a request to immediately suspend processing operations in the EU, delete unlawfully collected data stored in EU-based data centers and levy fines for violating the GDPR as a form of civil liability.
The organizations called for Microsoft to terminate the “provision of all products, services, and business activities potentially contributing to Israel’s human rights violations in Gaza,” in addition to an independent investigation and “measures to provide restitution to those harmed.”
It is not clear why these groups did not demand the cessation of all business with Israel (government and business) until a just transition to a democratic state is materialized and reparations delivered to Palestinians. Likewise, major human rights organizations, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Access Now, Human Rights Watch, Fight for the Future and 7amleh, made the narrow demand that Microsoft investigate the matter and “suspend business with Israel” in cases where there is “evidence indicating that business is contributing to grave human rights abuses and international crimes.”
This is a moral failure reflecting the corrupt nature of the nonprofit industrial complex. What more do these organizations need to see? There is a two-year genocide still unfolding that has obliterated the Gaza Strip, an apartheid state and the expansion of settlements in Palestinian territory. Why not heed the calls of BDS and demand Microsoft boycott Israel altogether?
Since anti-corruption protests in 2020 and 2021 and the eventual killing of the president, Jovenel Moïse, in July 2021, there has been increasing economic collapse, a political vacuum and regular armed clashes in Haiti. Many activities are paralyzed or reduced, including education and formal employment. With the country’s schools and universities closing intermittently, it has become common for students to lose entire semesters and academic years. This instability has undermined young people’s ability to plan for the future and is increasingly driving them to consider a life elsewhere.
In Port-au-Prince, 28-year-old Chedeline Mathé has been living alone for a year. Orphaned in high school, she has looked after herself from a young age, financing her education through part-time jobs and selling various products. In November 2024, she decided to try to migrate to Mexico and used a travel agency for the difficult journey. But as is often the case, the agency scammed her, stranding her in the Dominican Republic. She survived for several months in hiding before eventually being forced to return to Port-au-Prince. She lost the $5,000 that she had paid the agency — all her savings.
“I just wanted to breathe,” she tells Truthdig, “Here, everything seems stuck.”
More than a solution to economic difficulties, young Haitians like Mathé view migration as an escape from the psychological pressure of the violence and uncertainty.
Some 54% of Haiti’s population is under the age of 25. Apart from the school closures, boys often have to interrupt their education to work and support their families financially. Girls are especially hurt by the education crisis, as their parents often prioritize scarce school funds for their boys. Other young people in many neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince and in several provincial towns live with the constant threat of armed gangs, which also inhibits their ability to plan for the future.
A child born today in Haiti will only be 45% as productive as they could be with full access to education and health care, according to 2020 World Bank figures. This is the most recent data available, and the rate is likely even lower now. More than one-fifth of children are at risk of cognitive and physical limitations, and only 78% of 15-year-olds will survive to the age of 60.
Further, 37.6% of Haitians are living on less than $2.15 a day, and 37% of youths age 15-24 are unemployed. Faced with a high cost of living, many young people are taking the easy way, choosing to join armed groups. Some are forced to join the gangs. Others still hold out, but have to look beyond their country’s borders for hope of a better life.
Beyond the numbers, a feeling of helplessness prevails. Young people find themselves constantly waiting for visas or scholarships, a rare moment of calm, or projects that are slow to materialize. That waiting can trap them in a kind of emotional immobility, where they don’t feel able to move forward.
“We live in the present with no future. I could go further if I left this country,” Mathé says.
The mental health toll mounts
Haitian psychologist Jean Ronald Pétion says he has observed an increase in cases of anxiety, depression and school dropouts directly linked to the country’s chronic instability.
He tells Truthdig that waiting can be used as a deliberate defense mechanism that allows the psyche to strengthen its resilience. However, when the waiting goes on too long, that resilience typically turns into resignation. “From then on, the homeostasis of the psyche is threatened,” he says. Young Haitians may sink into depression or display self-destructive behavior such as addiction to psychotropic substances or aggressiveness, which in turn can make them even more vulnerable.
This conclusion is buttressed by a recent study into the psychological well-being of Haitians. The authors from various U.S. universities concluded the socioeconomic and security crisis in Haiti is leading to chronic distress, anxiety, depression, sleep issues, substance abuse, suicidal ideations, PTSD and physical problems such as insomnia, hypertension and heart conditions.
Pétion believes that, beyond an economic strategy, leaving the country can relieve the intense psychological distress of living in Haiti. However, it also comes with its own set of emotional challenges and uncertainties.
“Migration is both an illusion and a solution,” Pétion says, “It allows people to cope with the anxiety-provoking situations that they are facing at that moment, but it can also lead to despair and regret, especially when there are difficulties integrating into the new country. The most common emotions among those who leave are relief and hope. Yes, it is possible to rebuild your life elsewhere, but it depends on your resilience and ability to adapt.”
Migrants and refugees trying to travel to the U.S. have found that door closed. Roberto Belgarde, 27, a psychology student, applied for the U.S. humanitarian parole program in July 2023. The eldest of four children, he tells Truthdig he had been putting himself and his dreams on the back burner in order to take care of his younger siblings. In February 2024, he was still waiting to hear about his application when attacks in Port-au-Prince forced him to interrupt his studies and flee his home in the capital, to Jeremie, in the west of the country.
When the humanitarian parole program was suspended for Haitians and others in June, he felt like his only hope to leave had been shattered. “Before that, I could see myself somewhere else, resuming my studies and starting to live a normal life again,” he says. “But when I learned that everything was coming to an end, it was as though all my plans for the future were falling apart.”
Other young people don’t migrate because of the risks involved. There are groups that organize migration trips and sell them as paths to hope. However, many journeys end with border guards stopping migrants or migrants being deported. Extortion by authorities, robbery and kidnapping are also common, especially along the route through Central America and Mexico to the U.S. Other journeys turn out to be scams, as Mathé experienced.
Limited relief abroad
Those who do manage to migrate face challenges of their own. Patrick Eliassaint, 34, originally from Lascahobas in the center of the country, fled Haiti amid violence. “When I left, it was a relief. But it was also heartbreaking. I left my family, friends and my 1-year-old son behind,” he says.
In the United States, Eliassaint tells Truthdig he initially managed to build a professional and social life within the local Haitian community. But this all collapsed in June, when the parole program ended.
“Many of my friends lost their jobs or lived in fear of deportation. I was constantly on edge,” he says, describing the stress and anxiety he felt, and how he was eventually forced to return to Haiti out of fear of deportation.
Stéphania Vanessa Marcelin, on the other hand, is now living in Chile. She had to leave Haiti after the devastating 2010 earthquake killed an estimated 220,000 people across the country. Having lost loved ones, facing violence and unable to continue her studies, she relocated to Chile via the Dominican Republic. Migration, she tells Truthdig, opened up new professional opportunities for her but did not free her from difficulties.
She describes a dual challenge of trying to adapt to a new culture, while also wanting to preserve her roots. “Leaving the country is not just a physical departure, it’s an identity crisis,” she says. Far from her homeland, she feels the loss of connection with Haiti. Memories fade, places change and even returning would be complicated. “Once you leave, you remain a migrant for life,” she adds.
Haitians in Chile have created their own communities, but nostalgia and cultural clashes can lead to constant inner conflict, Marcelin says.
Over the past year, deportations of Haitians have increased in many of the countries where they’ve found refuge. Since January 2025, more than 143,000 Haitian migrants have been deported from the Dominican Republic. In the United States, 520,000 Haitian migrants and refugees are now at risk of deportation following the September termination of their temporary protected status.
And yet, despite everything, Haitian youth continue to dream and hope. They are clear that they need safety when migrating, and safety and full rights at home so that ultimately, they don’t have to flee.
December 18, 2025
Michael Kwet
The tech giant continues to gaslight the public regarding its
function in surveilling and killing Palestinians.
The reports sent Microsoft into public relations mode. It denied knowledge of Unit 8200’s mobile phone surveillance in Gaza, blocked its access to “certain” (not all) Azure Cloud storage and artificial intelligence services, set up a “Trusted Technology Review” system for employees to raise concerns about human rights abuses and commissioned a legal review by the law firm Covington & Burling.
This flurry of actions was designed to obscure the fact that Microsoft continues to aid and abet genocide, apartheid and settler colonialism. It is crucial, then, to understand how the company moves to protect its image, including the manipulation of “criticism” by major nonprofits such as Human Rights Watch, Electronic Frontier Foundation and others, leaving activists on the ground to pressure for a full end to Microsoft’s business with Israel, and to press for criminal prosecutions and reparations.
Microsoft has been a part of Israel settler-colonialism and apartheid for decades. In 1991, it opened its first research center outside the U.S. in Israel. In 2002, the year of the Jenin massacre, Microsoft scored a $35 million contract that provided services to the Israeli army and defense ministry. Over the years, Microsoft has acquired multiple startups connected to the IDF, and it provides cloud computing services to the Israeli police.
Such a wide range of support for Israeli aggression prompted the BDS Movement website to declare, “Microsoft is perhaps the most complicit tech company in Israel’s illegal apartheid regime and ongoing genocide.”
Despite Israel’s track record of war crimes, unlawful settlement and apartheid over the past century, Microsoft’s top brass has lavished praise on the country. After the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attacks, Nadella decried the “horrific terrorist attacks on Israel,” but has never condemned Israeli aggression, colonization and apartheid spanning the past century.
During Nadella’s 2016 visit to Tel Aviv, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared Israel’s relationship “a marriage made in heaven but recognized here on Earth.”
In other words, Microsoft’s connection to Israel has only strengthened over time, including during its genocidal campaign in Gaza.
For those who watch the company closely, this should come as no surprise. Microsoft services police, prisons, immigration authorities and the military industrial complex across the planet.
For this reason, Microsoft pours immense resources and effort into maintaining a pristine image, perhaps more than any other Big Tech transnational. Recall that in the 1990s, it became known for monopolizing computer operating and web browsing (through its Internet Explorer). This culminated in widely publicized antitrust cases that fizzled out with the emergence of new competitors (Google, Facebook and so on). An over-the-top, bull-headed Steve Ballmer took over as CEO in 2000, and the company floundered for lack of vision. Yet this was temporary. Microsoft launched the Azure cloud in 2010, and in 2014 began rebranding behind the image of a young, hip Indian American, Satya Nadella, as CEO.
During the 2010s, Microsoft also began pumping money into “digital justice” scholars (e.g., danah boyd, Kate Crawford, Tarleton Gillespie) and research institutions (e.g., Data & Society, AI Now, the University of Washington, NYU). In the digital justice community, attention shifted from the Free Software Movement’s focus on public ownership and control of the means of computation and knowledge to the use of Big Data (subsequently rebranded as AI) and shallow identity politics. By the late 2010s, Big Tech’s public image moved from hip and progressive to monopolistic and evil. Yet Microsoft escaped unscathed, thanks in large part to its capture of intellectual circuits. In 2019, The New York Times noted that unlike Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple, Microsoft was “conspicuously absent from most of that criticism.”
With its support for Israeli genocide (in addition to its heavy-handed support for OpenAI), Microsoft’s brand is once again on the line, and it is scrambling to save face. Toward this end, it is deploying a number of tactics.
Microsoft has a “Global Human Rights Statement,” in which it professes a commitment to “serve people,” “advance human dignity” and “respect human rights.” Because genocide is the crime of all crimes, its first rule of damage control is obvious: Deny.
Microsoft is gaslighting the public on so many levels, it’s hard to fathom. Let’s unpack it.
For starters, Israel has long been known to mass-record phone calls in the occupied territories. Given that Nadella met with the commander of Unit 8200, Yossi Sariel, in 2021 to move top-secret intelligence data to Azure, and given that Microsoft engineers helped design the security upon which the mass surveillance system was built with instructions from Unit 8200, it seems unlikely that Microsoft had no knowledge of what the system was for.
But even if Microsoft was truly in the dark about the phone surveillance project, that is beside the larger point that the company provides a wide array of technologies supporting Israeli apartheid, settler colonialism and genocide, all of which have been thoroughly documented by respected sources prior to the August 2025 reports. Smith’s strategy is to evade culpability by narrowing the goalposts: There is no smoking gun to show exactly what Microsoft did and did not know about this one project (mass mobile phone call surveillance), and we will likely never get an answer without a subpoena, if there is a paper trail still on record.
The same strategy was deployed earlier this year in response to reports about general Azure services to the Israeli military (e.g., storage, compute, speech and voice services). This includes a “drastic increase” in the use of Azure and multiple contracts signed between the Israeli military and Microsoft after Oct. 7. In response, Microsoft claims its “internal assessments” and “external review” found “no evidence to date that Microsoft’s Azure and AI technologies have been used to target or harm people in the conflict in Gaza.”
The targeting and harm to Gazans is ostensibly in reference to the use of AI to target and murder alleged Hamas militants and their families, first reported in late 2023. We are still unsure which companies supplied technology in support of these specific programs, but it is highly likely that they utilized technologies provided by multiple Big Tech corporations because Israel does not have the means to handle these AI systems on its own private clouds.
Microsoft was finally forced to acknowledge that its technologies are indeed used for harm in this recent episode simply because a specific Israeli surveillance program of interest was exposed. The company remains silent about other programs listed earlier in this article.
The reaction by Microsoft to cut off some (not all) services to the Israeli military is a narrow response to a broad-based problem artificially narrowed by Microsoft. It beggars belief that Microsoft did not know Israel is guilty of war crimes, gross human rights abuses and, most recently, genocide. Why continue to supply Israel with technology for anything whatsoever?
The additional measures — creating a portal for employees to report human rights abuses and commissioning a legal investigation by Covington & Burling — are also corporate PR. The former will do nothing to curtail abuses, as Microsoft already knows if its clients violate human rights. The latter cannot be trusted, as the same firm already exonerated Microsoft of human rights abuses in the two cases it investigated for its dealings with Israel, including the investigation from earlier this year.
The statement by Smith that Microsoft respects privacy and does not supply technologies for mass surveillance is absurd on its face. As I exposed in The Intercept and Al Jazeera, Microsoft provides cloud-based services that blanket cities and prisons with physical surveillance sensors (e.g., smart camera networks, drones, automatic license plate readers, etc.) and pool massive troves of data about citizens and suspected undocumented immigrants into a centralized repository for real-time alerts, investigations and data analytics. There is nothing else to call this but mass surveillance.
The Irish Council for Civil Liberties’ complaint to the European Data Protection Commission, launched on Dec. 4, is a welcome attempt to create some accountability for Microsoft’s service to Israel. Yet it is narrowly tailored to address violations of Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation, with a request to immediately suspend processing operations in the EU, delete unlawfully collected data stored in EU-based data centers and levy fines for violating the GDPR as a form of civil liability.
The organizations called for Microsoft to terminate the “provision of all products, services, and business activities potentially contributing to Israel’s human rights violations in Gaza,” in addition to an independent investigation and “measures to provide restitution to those harmed.”
It is not clear why these groups did not demand the cessation of all business with Israel (government and business) until a just transition to a democratic state is materialized and reparations delivered to Palestinians. Likewise, major human rights organizations, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Access Now, Human Rights Watch, Fight for the Future and 7amleh, made the narrow demand that Microsoft investigate the matter and “suspend business with Israel” in cases where there is “evidence indicating that business is contributing to grave human rights abuses and international crimes.”
This is a moral failure reflecting the corrupt nature of the nonprofit industrial complex. What more do these organizations need to see? There is a two-year genocide still unfolding that has obliterated the Gaza Strip, an apartheid state and the expansion of settlements in Palestinian territory. Why not heed the calls of BDS and demand Microsoft boycott Israel altogether?
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