BDS Calls for a Boycott of Xbox Due to Microsoft’s Partnership with Israel

By Grace Benfell | April 9, 2025 | 1:06pm

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Video Games Features Xbox

BDS Calls for a Boycott of Xbox Due to Microsoft’s Partnership with Israel

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On April 3 the international Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement called for a boycott of Xbox. BDS is a deliberate campaign to exert pressure on Israel to end its occupation of Palestine, which was launched in 2005 by Palestinian civil society groups. The call to boycott Xbox targets a key part of Israel’s military infrastructure: The AI and Cloud services upon which the Israeli military relies to plan and execute attacks. In our unfocused and outrage-heavy age, it is easy for consumer boycotts to feel unfocused, concentrated more on alleviating senses of individual guilt rather than ending collective systems of exploitation. In contrast, the Xbox boycott is sharp, honed, and ready to make a difference.

For the unfamiliar, the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions National Committee (BNC) organizes nonviolent campaigns against institutions that enable Israeli apartheid. It advocates for boycotting, divesting from, and sanctioning Israel and entities complicit in its apartheid state and genocidal war. The group has launched campaigns against HP, Carrefour, and Chevron, among many others.

This new campaign focuses on Xbox and encourages consumers to take the following actions (taken directly from the BNC website):

1. Cancel Xbox Game Pass subscription
2. Uninstall and boycott key games owned by the company such as Minecraft, Call of Duty, Candy Crush, etc.
3. Boycott Microsoft’s game products and the Xbox platform and hardware

The ambitions of the campaign go beyond the consumer level. The BNC encourages students and faculty to pressure their universities to cut ties with the tech giant and protest career fairs and other events where Microsoft has a presence. Citizens can push their local governments and institutions, such as pride festivals or job fairs, to end affiliation with Microsoft. In broad terms, the campaign seeks to undermine Microsoft’s ubiquity in public life and to draw attention to its enablement of atrocity.

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So, why this campaign? And why now?

The tech company’s friendly relationship with Israel was well known, but recent reports have unveiled the full extent of their partnership. A joint investigation between The Guardian, Israeli-Palestinian publication +972, Hebrew-language outlet Local Call, and Dropsite News revealed that Microsoft deepened its relationship with the Israeli military after the Hamas attacks on October 7 (thanks to Rock Paper Shotgun for pointing this out). As the Israeli military escalated its bombardment of Gaza, it used Microsoft’s AI platform, Azure, to plan air strikes. Israel’s police force used Microsoft’s Cloud service for its prisons. Israel’s air strikes, bombardment, and shootings have killed an estimated 100,000 Palestinians, and Microsoft’s Cloud and AI services reportedly helped them do it. The BDS movement’s “company complicity profile” is a grim list of Microsoft’s links to Israel’s surveillance, military infrastructure, and state-sponsored murder. As BDS’s official campaign statement puts it, “The digital infrastructure and military technologies provided by Microsoft are just as essential to the maintenance of Israel’s apartheid state and the execution of its genocide in Gaza as physical walls and munitions.”

Before this Xbox campaign launched, workers within and without Microsoft were already outraged. In November 2024, Microsoft fired two employees, allegedly for holding a protest and vigil outside the company’s HQ in Redmond, Washington. Another employee disrupted the company’s 50th anniversary event on April 4, 2025, calling Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman a “war profiteer” and sending a statement to many of Microsoft’s employees. (Microsoft subsequently fired that employee.) Over 1,000 employees have signed an internal petition as part of the “No Azure for Apartheid” campaign. Microsoft is already feeling pressure. The BDS campaign intends to escalate that pressure.

It’s good timing, too. Microsoft is facing challenges on multiple fronts right now. Organizers at the Communication Workers of America have made public intentions to build a real deal videogame union. Workers at Zenimax, a Microsoft-owned studio, are now on strike. Tariffs threaten to explode the prices of consumer tech. The entire US tech industry is in a fragile and unpredictable place. The Xbox boycott could hone that economic pressure into ethical pressure. It could make it costly to sponsor genocide.

In the face of all this information, potential criticisms of the campaign’s scope feel petty. The campaign has bigger aims than Xbox alone. It is absurd to suggest a boycott will only harm small devs (No Escape has a great blog post debunking this asinine argument) or that the campaign’s scope is too large (Xbox products and software represent a small portion of the market). The campaign is direct, targeted, and forceful. It is an escalation in valuable work already underway.

But aside from organizing objectives and leverage, the Xbox boycott represents an opportunity for you, the person reading this. I often think of Marina Kittika’s manifesto, “Divest From The Video Game Industry,” a messy but sincere acknowledgment of the real harm the tech industry does and a demand for ground-up alternatives. The tools and opportunities that massive tech companies create will fail us. You only need look to Unity’s disastrous development pricing schemes or Microsoft’s onslaught of studio closures and lay-offs to bear this out. So we have to find ways to, as developer Nathalie Lawhead puts it, sustainably fail. This is an opportunity to reject the ease that services like Xbox Game Pass offer in favor of something better.

Granted, consumer boycotts like this can feel small and petty. My refusal to buy from Amazon has done exactly nothing to end its monopoly over American life. But this is an organized effort, with potential prongs and actions across many aspects of our lives. Change starts small, with the heart and the hand. It is when we (as in you and I, not someone else) link those hearts and hands that change can become real. The BNC has organized big wins in the last five years, including Puma dropping its sponsorship of Israel’s soccer team in 2024 and Microsoft itself selling its stake in Israeli facial-recognition company AnyVision in 2020. It has started this campaign right now because it believes it can win. If you and I believe it too, and act accordingly, it can.

You can read about more potential actions to support the boycott on the BDS website and find the No Azure for Apartheid petition here.

Grace Benfell is a queer woman, critic, and aspiring fan fiction author. She writes on her blog Grace in the Machine and can be found @gracemachine on BlueSky.