Oracle Corporation announced that “Oracle stands with Israel” on the front page of their website alongside an image of the State of Israel’s flag, a pledge of total support for the country’s government and defense establishment, all ending with “#istandwithisrael.” Oracle commits most of their direct support to Magen David Adom (MDA), an emergency response organization in Israel and Israeli-occupied areas, which human rights watchdog groups have long criticized.
The homepage promises that the corporation “will match our employee contributions — with no limit — to this vital organization,” a commitment on top of the $1 million that Oracle donated in October 2023.
However, the corporation’s financial commitment to the State of Israel began before October.
In 2021, Oracle became the first multinational tech company to offer cloud services in Israel when they established a $319 million underground center in Jerusalem hosting military, government, banking, and business data. Later that year, other tech giants Google and Amazon followed suit with specialized cloud services for the Israeli government and military.
In January 2024, Oracle CEO Safra Catz visited with right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to discuss plans for a second Oracle cloud center in the country. Catz has a history of collaboration with far-right leadership, as she served on Donald Trump’s presidential transition advisory team in 2016, a partnership that has since led to multi-million dollar deals between Oracle and the United States government. Oracle now hosts heavily guarded information for the U.S. Air Force, the Department of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the Pentagon.
St. Olaf’s decision to adopt Oracle follows a larger trend toward corporate outsourcing in higher academia. Carleton College recently moved away from The Hub, their internal information system, to the external data management provider Workday. This process has incited protests in the student body.
Using Oracle as an executive information system makes St. Olaf an outlier among the corporation’s typical customers, which are primarily other tech giants — often companies with direct financial investment in Israel. For instance, Philips has acquired Israeli medical startups for over $300 million; Cisco holds nearly $7 billion in Israeli investments; and Intel plans to establish a $25-billion-chip-manufacturing plant in the state of Israel. These investments, like Google and Amazon’s military data services, indicate a significant increase in American corporations’ invested interest in Israel since 2020.
In January, three months into Israel’s invasion of Gaza, Catz clarified the ideology behind this interest in an interview with CTech stating that “America in particular loves a winner. And Israel is a winner. It always has been. And it’s going to be again. And that’s going to end all of this. You’ll see.”
Xander Fuhrer