According to Ryan Grim at Drop Site News, “The BDS National Committee (BNC) has decided to make Microsoft a ‘priority target’ to pressure the company to end its support for Israel’s war effort, after revelations that its AI and cloud services have been heavily used in the genocidal assault.”
If you have taken the boycott, divest and sanction pledge, the BNC is asking you to do a couple of relatively small but hopefully impactful things to hit Microsoft where it hurts the most:
1. Cancel your Xbox Game Pass subscription
2. Boycott Candy Crush, Minecraft, and Call of Duty—flagship videogame franchises owned by Microsoft
3. Boycott all Microsoft Gaming products, including Xbox-branded consoles, headsets, accessories, and all games published by Microsoft-owned publishing labels (such as Xbox Game Studios, Activision, Bethesda and Blizzard)
But what if you already own an Xbox? Ideally, don’t play on it, but barring that, simply not buying any more games or in-game items works as well, along with canceling Xbox Game Pass and no longer playing any Microsoft-owned game.
BDS is a nonviolent movement dedicated to stopping international support for the state of Israel’s crimes against Palestinians, including its decades-long apartheid and the most recent genocidal pogrom against the millions of captive Palestinians in the Gaza Strip since October 2023. It works by targeting select companies and institutions who collaborate with the Israeli state, asking consumers to boycott those companies’ products, demanding that those companies and institutions divest from Israel, and putting pressure on governments to place sanctions on Israel for their crimes. As far as why the BDS movement is now targeting Microsoft, we have this, from Grim’s piece:
[Former Microsoft employee] Hossam Nasr said that Microsoft had effectively become a weapons manufacturer. “As we’ve learned more about the deadly blood-stained partnership between Microsoft and the genocidal Israeli military, there’s been a growing recognition that cloud and AI provided by Microsoft is as essential to Israel’s destruction in Gaza as physical munitions,” said Nasr. “Put simply, cloud and AI are the weapons of the twenty-first century, and Microsoft is effectively a weapons manufacturer powering a genocidal apartheid regime. We must treat it as such.”
Xbox Game Pass is a massive subscription service, and the primary way a lot of people get access to interesting new titles. It’s personally been the catalyst for a lot of the reviews I’ve written here. But losing out on a little convenience, canceling Game Pass, and turning my Xbox off for a while, is nothing compared to what Palestinians have lost in the last 18 months. If Microsoft ever decides to stop providing Azure to Israel, I can theoretically resubscribe and get back to playing; the Gazan families Microsoft has helped destroy can’t be so easily put back together.
It’s easy to write off boycotts and other forms of consumerism-driven activism as ineffectual, self-serving and focused on individualism as opposed to collective struggle. But actions like the Tesla Takedown protests and BDS have been proven to have an appreciable effect on the companies and institutions they target. And especially with movements like BDS, they are specifically organized in such a way that they help people all over the world easily show their solidarity with Palestinians. So, for my part, I’ll be participating in this boycott of Microsoft. And I hope you will as well.
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