As Apple gears up for one of the biggest launches in its history — its first foldable iPhone Duo, hitting stores October 23rd— former employees are asking you to say no to blood tech.

Apple is deeply embedded in Israel, says Tariq Ra’ouf, a Palestinian writer who worked for more than a decade in Apple retail before he was fired in 2024 for speaking out against the company’s silence on Gaza. He joins Rania Khalek and Zoe Alexandra to break down Apple’s ties to Tel Aviv, including its extensive R&D centers in Israel and its $2 billion purchase of an AI startup founded by Unit 8200 veterans. He also explains the systemic discipline faced by pro-Palestine Apple workers — fired for wearing keffiyehs while the company matched employee donations to Friends of the IDF — and warns that having Israeli military intelligence veterans integrated into the supply chain of the world’s most popular devices should terrify every consumer.

Ra’ouf also lays out how the minerals in your iPhone connect the company to genocide in Congo, why organizers are calling for pickets at Apple stores on launch day – and how customers and workers can and should get involved.

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Rough transcript follows:
[Host:] Apple is gearing up for one of the biggest launches in its history, as I’m sure many have heard, with the iPhone Duo. It’s the company’s first foldable phone, which is hitting stores later this month with a starting price of $2,000, which is just wild. But a group of former Apple employees is asking you to skip the line. Their message is: “Say no to blood tech.” Behind that sleek branding about privacy, human rights, and inclusion, Apple is deeply embedded in Israel. It employs around 2,000 people there across R&D centers in Haifa, Herzliya, and Jerusalem, where Israeli engineers help build the chips inside your MacBook. Israel actually hosts Apple’s second-largest R&D facilities outside the U.S., so that’s no joke. And in January, in the middle of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, Apple bought the Israeli AI startup Q.ai for close to $2 billion. I think that’s the second-biggest acquisition in Apple’s history. It’s a company whose founders include veterans of Israeli military intelligence—basically, a bunch of spies. For years, Apple’s employee donation program matched gifts to groups like Friends of the IDF and organizations funding illegal settlements in the West Bank. Activists say the minerals inside your iPhone are tied to the war in Congo. We’ll get into that, too.

Meanwhile, Apple workers who spoke out for Palestine say they were the ones who got punished. They were disciplined for wearing keffiyehs or Palestine pins on the shop floor, and in some cases they were fired. Our next guest is one of them. Zaid Rauf is a Palestinian writer who spent more than a decade at Apple Retail before he was fired in 2024 for speaking out against the company’s silence on Gaza. He’s lost 49 members of his family in the Gaza genocide, and he’s now a leading organizer with Apple’s Against Apartheid, which is calling for pickets at Apple stores on iPhone Duo launch day, among other things. Zaid, welcome to BT Live. It’s really a pleasure to have you on.

[Guest:] Hi. Thank you so much for having me. I’ve been screaming about Apple Zionism for years, so it’s nice to have people listen.

[Host:] Well, scream as loud as you want over here. We have so many questions for you. As I mentioned in the introduction, you spent over a decade at Apple. After October 7, as we’re about to reach the three-year anniversary, you spent months pushing the company internally on Gaza before you were fired in July 2024. Walk us through what you were raising internally that got you fired. And, if you can, please expand a bit on Apple’s complicity in the Israeli death machine.

[Guest:] On October 9, Tim Cook sent an email to the entire company with a headline saying “Israel,” refusing to acknowledge Palestinians or even pretend that we existed in any capacity. His heart went out to all the victims in Israel, but not to any of the victims in Palestine. That made me really upset. I sent him an email begging him to say something about the Palestinians within the company. I was really naive, thinking, “Man, this guy just doesn’t know. He has to treat us equitably,” right?

I got a message from my manager saying he’d read my email. I was like, “Great. Oh my gosh, this is amazing. Is he going to make a statement? Is there anything?” Nothing happened. He remained completely silent. After that experience, a few comrades and I decided to write an open letter demanding that Apple at least treat its Palestinian employees as equitably as it treats its Israeli employees, which I don’t think is a hard ask. We had over 400 current and former Apple employees sign that letter. Again, still no response, still nothing.

So we decided to create Apple’s Against Apartheid, which is dedicated to creating campaigns to educate people. We understand that if they’re not going to do anything internally, what’s required is external pressure and education, because people don’t understand just how deep Apple’s ties to Israel are.

To answer your question about its complicity: your introduction was spot on. Apple’s second-largest R&D center is in Israel. It was the first R&D center the company opened outside California. Apple has massive ties to the Israeli military unit 8200. A bunch of former Israeli spies who worked in Unit 8200 are involved. For people who don’t know what Unit 8200 is, it’s Israel’s IDF tech unit. They’re responsible for planning things like the pager attack in Lebanon. Apple has employees who served in Unit 8200 currently working at its R&D centers in Israel. Apple silicon chips—the M1 chips, the newly designed C1 modem, and the N1 chip for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth—are all currently designed by Israel. It’s a little outrageous to believe Apple thinks it can get away with staying so silent on Israel and Palestine, knowing how deeply complicit it is in all the violence Israel has perpetrated against the Palestinian people.

[Host:] As part of the advocacy you were doing within and outside Apple, hundreds of employees signed a letter in 2024 saying coworkers were being disciplined or fired for things like wearing keffiyehs, Palestine pins, or bracelets, while other causes were openly celebrated in stores. How systematic is this discipline faced by employees who speak up for Palestine? Is it individual managers who overreact and over-enforce, or is there a companywide line on what Palestinian identity is allowed to look like at Apple?

[Guest:] It’s so systemic. It goes all the way down to the attire rules—what you can wear at work. In 2024, they banned scarves because they didn’t want people wearing keffiyehs. They say you can’t wear a Palestine pin, a Palestinian flag pin, or even a bracelet, even though nothing in the handbook says you can’t wear a pin. They’ll say that to you because it’s a Palestine pin.

There was a comrade who had a Palestinian flag in his Slack icon, and a manager reached out to him: “Hey, you have to change your flag. It’s breaking policy.” The employee asked, “Okay, well, what policy am I breaking?” The manager said, “I’ll let you know when I find it.”

In November 2023, there was a Muslim Apple Slack channel, because the company has multiple diversity-group Slack channels. Zionists were coming into the Muslim Apple Slack channel and mass-reporting anything that mentioned Gaza or the genocide. Those messages were removed without Muslim employees being told why. They would come in and harass the Muslim employees. The Muslim employees weren’t going into the Jewish Apple Slack channel and doing the same thing. They were minding their own business and asking these people to leave them alone.

Instead of moderating and punishing the people who were harassing others, Apple closed down the Muslim Apple Slack channel, along with the Jewish Apple Slack channel, for over a year. The company refused to listen to Muslim employees begging for empathy, asking to be heard, and asking it to say something about the incredible losses the Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim communities were facing.

[Host:] That’s wild. In contrast, let’s talk about how Apple treats its Israeli employees and those who support Israel. I mentioned Apple’s matching program, which lets employees route company money to groups like Friends of the IDF and settlement-funding organizations. This year, Apple also spent close to $2 billion on the Israeli AI company Q.ai, whose founders come out of Unit 8200, as you mentioned. What does that tell us about where Apple stands when it comes to Israelis, and about the feelings people who support them are allowed to express and the material support they’re allowed to give to the Israeli military?

[Guest:] It’s so racist and dehumanizing that Israeli employees at the company are allowed to express any sort of genocidal view or racist rhetoric they want on their Slack channels or within company offices, and they don’t get reprimanded nearly as much as Palestinians or pro-Palestinian employees who talk about the empathy and grief they experience.

There are so many cases of Zionist employees harassing Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian employees, but so few cases of those Zionists actually getting reprimanded, fired, or facing any sort of repercussions for their racism. The viewpoint within the company is so inherently Zionist that anytime you send an email advocating for our people and educating people about Zionism and the harm it has done to Palestinians, managers and others will call you antisemitic because you’re being anti-Israel. That’s the company’s line: if you are anti-Israel, you are antisemitic. They’re really good at marketing themselves as a company that claims to care about the world, so few people are seeing the racism at hand.

[Host:] Really shocking stuff. October 23 is when the iPhone Duo is set to drop, and you and other activists are calling on people to picket Apple stores that day instead of lining up for these bizarre smart flip phones. You’re also tying Palestine to Congo, the minerals in every iPhone, and the violence perpetuated in Congo to physically make the iPhone. Why link those two genocides? What are you demanding from Apple? And what can Apple customers or workers watching right now do to support this campaign?

[Guest:] We started working with Congolese activists because we recognized that we’re going through the same struggle: imperialism, colonialism, and white supremacy. People are taking over our lands to take over the resources. Specifically, we’re working with Team Congo and Friends of the Congo to educate people about what’s going on and the depth of the ways Apple’s business practices—and the tech industry’s business practices generally—are negatively affecting the Congolese people.

We’ve reached a point where you can’t expect Apple to pass off the responsibility of ensuring that minerals are ethically sourced to third parties, because everyone who has studied these things can tell you they are not ethically sourced and that the communities mining these minerals are suffering. Apple is one of the tech companies with the ability to change its business and sourcing practices and teach the tech industry what it looks like to mine ethically. It has the power, money, and resources to do so.

Our demands when we ask people to picket Apple stores on the 23rd are that the company research, report, and remediate all the harms its business practices have on marginalized communities, publicly report its findings, and create a meaningful plan to remediate the harm. We want Apple to listen to the community. We have people ready to speak with Apple executives and tell them exactly how harmful its business practices are and how it can help the communities that are literally pleading for its empathy.

We want Apple to get out of the occupation. It has offices in occupied Jerusalem, and on its job website it lists those offices as being in Israel, which is against international law. We want the company to close its offices in occupied territory. Most importantly, we want it to clean up its supply chain and not abandon Congo. It needs to do better because it has the power to do so.

[Host:] I want to pull out a thread of something you mentioned earlier, when we were talking about the ways Apple is complicit in the Israeli death machine. You talked about the Unit 8200 Israeli military intelligence people staffing these R&D facilities in Israel for Apple. Obviously, we should all be very upset about the complicity of Apple and other tech companies in the genocide in Gaza. But having Israeli employees tied to the Israeli military and spy apparatus so integrated into the supply chain of a widely used device by people all over the world is quite frightening.

When you think about what you mentioned—the pager attacks—nothing like that has ever happened in history. It was like a terrorist attack, where a country infiltrated the supply chain to booby-trap electronic devices. I wanted to ask you to expand on why it’s so devastating and scary to have a country whose government is full of genocidal lunatics, willing to do things no other government in history has done to get its way, so integrated into a massive global tech company that builds our phones and computers.

[Guest:] It’s terrifying. The public should be worried, and there should be mass concern over the fact that Apple is filled with Israeli spies—spies who worked in Unit 8200 and worked on… I mean, the fact that Unit 8200 was behind Pegasus—sorry, that it was behind the Lebanon bombings—is so concerning. Then you have employees from the same unit at tech companies.

One thing I need to make clear: Netanyahu was on 60 Minutes, right? He brought out his little iPhone. He was like, “You see this device? We can penetrate any one of these devices.” People like to think that Apple is so secure and so ironclad compared to Android or Google. Pegasus was Israeli-made. The same people who made the Pegasus software made the software and hardware that you’re holding in your hand. Who’s to say? Then you have Netanyahu saying that they can penetrate any one of these devices. Are you joking? They’re basically telling you to your face that they have the ability to hack you whenever they want.

The whole thing in Lebanon is truly terrifying. If Apple wants to control any of this narrative, it has to distance itself from the apartheid ethnostate of Israel—the state that is committing a genocide and blew up a bunch of pagers. That took years; it wasn’t something they just did. Who’s to say these new phones, with an M1, C1, or N1 chip, won’t blow up in your face? There should be mass concern over the safety of these products because of their links to Israel.

[Host:] Well, Zaid, I really appreciate you coming on. I guess the last thing I could ask is: Can you remind people how they can get involved in learning more about this campaign or being a part of it?

[Guest:] Of course. If you’re interested in picketing your local Apple store, we’ve made it really easy. We’ve created flyers, chat lists, and posters. We’ve made it simple for you to print what you want, go to your local Apple store, and make some noise. Just go to applesagainstapartheid.com. You’ll find the resources and fact sheets. Follow us on Instagram if you want to stay updated whenever we add more resources. Stay up to date, because for as long as Apple has links to Israel, we’ll always be here to protest them.

[Host:] Thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate you.

[Guest:] Thank you very much. Have a good one.