BDS-1000 Dossier: Salesforce, Inc.

Key Findings

• Economic: Salesforce has acquired nine Israeli-founded technology companies since 2011 for a cumulative sum exceeding $4.5 billion - including Own/OwnBackup ($1.9B) and ClickSoftware ($1.35B) - and operates one of its three global strategic R&D hubs in Israel, employing roughly 750–1,000 people across Tel Aviv and Nazareth.¹²
• Digital/Cloud: In September 2024 Salesforce launched a local Hyperforce cloud region in Israel - its 17th globally - running on AWS’s Tel Aviv infrastructure; Salesforce’s own Israel sales lead framed the launch alongside “Project Nimbus,” though Salesforce is not documented as a Nimbus consortium member or subcontractor.³⁴⁵
• Political: Salesforce donated $4.7 million to Israeli and humanitarian relief organizations after October 7, 2023, and Marc Benioff addressed the Israeli Prime Minister’s Innovation Summit in 2018, while a Salesforce executive has publicly described a policy of “leav[ing] politics out of the company.”⁶⁷
• Not found: No public evidence of any contract with the Israeli Ministry of Defence, IDF, Israel Prison Service, or Border Police; no listing in SIBAT’s defence-trade directory, the OHCHR settlement-business database, or the UN Special Rapporteur’s July 2025 “economy of genocide” report naming roughly 48 corporate actors.⁸⁹

Target Profile

Key Facts:

• Nine Israeli-founded companies acquired since 2011 for a cumulative sum exceeding $4.5 billion.¹¹³²
• Approximately 750–1,000 employees across Tel Aviv and Nazareth R&D sites - one of Salesforce’s three global strategic R&D hubs.¹¹¹²
• Hyperforce Israel launched September 2024 as Salesforce’s 17th global cloud region, hosted initially on AWS’s Tel Aviv infrastructure.³⁴
• $4.7 million donated to relief organizations (United Hatzalah, Save the Children, Association for Immediate Help for Holocaust Survivors, World Food Program USA for Gaza, High Tech for Israel) following October 7, 2023.⁶

Executive Summary

Salesforce, Inc. is a U.S.-headquartered enterprise cloud, CRM, and AI-agent software company with a substantial and long-running commercial presence in Israel’s technology sector, but the four domain audits underlying this dossier identify no direct relationship to Israeli military, security, or defence-industry end-users. Salesforce entered the Israeli market in 2011 through the acquisition of Navajo Systems and has since built one of its three global strategic R&D hubs in Israel, acquiring eight further Israeli-founded companies - BlueTail, Implisit Insights, Datorama, Bonobo AI, ClickSoftware, Zoomin, Own (OwnBackup), and Doti AI - for a cumulative sum exceeding $4.5 billion.¹¹³² These are controlling, wholly-owned operating acquisitions whose personnel and intellectual property have been folded into Salesforce’s Israel R&D organization, employing roughly 750–1,000 people across Tel Aviv and Nazareth.¹¹¹²

The strongest documented vectors of an Israel nexus are economic and infrastructural rather than military. Salesforce’s venture arm, Salesforce Ventures, and CEO Marc Benioff personally have invested in multiple Israeli technology startups, and in September 2024 Salesforce launched a local Hyperforce cloud-infrastructure region inside Israel - its 17th globally - running on Amazon Web Services’ Tel Aviv Region infrastructure.³⁴ Salesforce’s own Israel sales leadership publicly framed this launch in the context of Israeli government data-residency requirements and referenced “Project Nimbus,” the large multi-year Google/AWS Israeli government cloud program, though no source reviewed documents Salesforce itself as a Nimbus consortium member, subcontractor, or direct government contractor of record.³⁵¹⁴ Separately, in 2026 the U.S. Army awarded Salesforce a $5.6 billion contract described by Salesforce as intended to accelerate “military modernization and Department of War readiness” - a documented U.S. defence relationship, but one with no identified Israel-specific dimension.¹⁵

What is not supported by the evidence is any direct contracting relationship between Salesforce and the Israeli Ministry of Defence, the IDF, the Israel Prison Service, or the Israel Border Police; any appearance in SIBAT’s defence-trade directory; any role supplying Elbit Systems, Israel Aerospace Industries, Rafael, or Israel Military Industries; any settlement-linked construction, machinery, or franchise presence in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, or Golan Heights; and any listing in the OHCHR settlement-business database, the Who Profits database, or the roughly 48 corporate actors named in UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese’s July 2025 report “From economy of occupation to economy of genocide.”⁸⁹¹⁶ Salesforce’s only documented relationship with an Israeli government body is a civilian one: its reseller partner AllCloud built diplomatic-service and emergency-response cloud systems for Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.¹⁷

Politically, Salesforce donated $4.7 million to Israeli and humanitarian relief organizations following the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks, and Benioff addressed the Israeli Prime Minister’s Innovation Summit in 2018, but the company’s Israel R&D executive has publicly stated the company “leave[s] politics out of the company,” and Salesforce’s PAC reported zero federal candidate contributions in the 2024 cycle with no Israel-specific lobbying identified.⁶¹⁸⁷ Weighed together, these findings produce a BRS of 544 (Tier C, High), driven almost entirely by the Economic domain (Economic = 8.00), with Military (0.09) near the floor, Digital (1.52) and Political (1.93) modest, reflecting a company whose Israel exposure is commercial and infrastructural rather than security-sector in character.

Timeline of Relevant Events

Corporate Overview

Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE: CRM) is a U.S.-domiciled global corporate parent headquartered in San Francisco, California, operating an Israeli subsidiary, salesforce.com Israel Ltd., registered in Tel Aviv and listed among Salesforce’s corporate subsidiaries in SEC filings.^21222324 Israel is one of Salesforce’s three global strategic R&D hubs, alongside the United States and India, with physical sites in Tel Aviv and Nazareth employing approximately 750–1,000 people; the Israel center’s current stated core mission is AI trust, safety, and governance work for Salesforce’s Agentforce platform, led by SVP Oren Winter.¹¹¹² Nine Israeli operating companies acquired since 2011 - Navajo Systems, BlueTail, Implisit Insights, Datorama, Bonobo AI, ClickSoftware, Zoomin, Own Company, and Doti AI - have been folded into this R&D organization rather than retained as standalone branded subsidiaries.¹¹³² Salesforce’s local go-to-market relies on Israeli reseller/implementation partners: AllCloud, named Salesforce’s 2024 Israel Partner of the Year and Project of the Year, built cloud systems for Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Asperii is documented as an official Salesforce reseller in Israel.¹⁷²⁵²⁶ No public evidence identified of any Salesforce office, reseller, or franchise located in West Bank, East Jerusalem, or Golan Heights settlements.

Domain Summaries

Military: Military

Mechanism of Involvement

No public evidence identified of any contract, tender, or memorandum of understanding between Salesforce and Israel’s Ministry of Defence, the IDF, the Israel Prison Service, or the Israel Border Police. Salesforce’s one documented relationship with an Israeli government body is civilian: reseller partner AllCloud built an “Emergency Event Management System” and a “Resources Plus” cloud asset-management platform connecting Israel’s 108 diplomatic missions for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, with AllCloud’s own case study stating the platform enabled “real-time aid” to Israelis during the June 2025 military campaign against Iran.¹⁷²⁷ Salesforce’s Hyperforce cloud platform became locally available in Israel in September 2024, with Salesforce materials describing it as enabling “sensitive data from government entities and regulated companies to remain within Israel”; no specific Israeli defence or security agency is named as a Hyperforce Israel customer in the sources reviewed.³²⁸ Separately, Salesforce Ventures’ 2025 portfolio review names three companies under a “Defense” heading - OneBrief, Forterra, and Second Front Systems - all serving U.S. Department of Defense/Joint Staff customers, with no identified connection to Israel, the IDF, or Israeli end-users.¹⁹ The 2026 U.S. Army $5.6 billion contract for “military modernization and Department of War readiness” is likewise a U.S.-domestic relationship with no Israel dimension identified.¹⁵

Counter-Arguments and Evidence Limits

Salesforce does not appear in SIBAT’s Defense and HLS Directory or any other Israeli Ministry of Defence-run trade directory.⁸²⁹ No public evidence identified of Salesforce supplying components, sub-systems, or services to Elbit Systems, Israel Aerospace Industries, Rafael, or Israel Military Industries, nor of any ruggedised or mil-spec product variant. Salesforce’s nine Israeli acquisitions are documented commercial/enterprise software firms; no defence-sector target companies have been identified among them.¹ Salesforce does not appear in PAX’s June 2024 report on companies arming Israel, in Al-Haq’s advocacy materials, or in the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre’s coverage of the Palestinian tech sector, though these sources discuss other companies (IBM, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon) in comparable contexts.³⁰³¹³² Salesforce is named once in Who Profits’ report on IBM, but only as a generic corporate “partner” of IBM alongside Adobe, Apple, AWS, Cisco, Microsoft, and others, with no Israel-specific elaboration.³³ An early claim linking Hyperforce Israel to Project Nimbus was not corroborated by independent coverage of the launch; Nimbus is documented as a Google/AWS-specific contract.⁵¹⁴

Named Entities and Evidence Map

AllCloud (reseller/implementation partner for MOFA)¹⁷²⁵; Asperii (official Israeli reseller)²⁶; Colin Powell (Salesforce director, 2014–2021; former U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, no Israel-specific nexus identified)¹⁰. A former Salesforce head of strategic investments is separately described in reporting as an advisory-role strategic partner of Stratos Ventures, a US-Israeli defense-tech venture fund formed in 2026 targeting Israeli defense and homeland-security startups - a personal, post-Salesforce advisory affiliation, not a current corporate relationship, and unverified beyond the single reporting thread reviewed.

Digital: Digital

Mechanism of Involvement

Salesforce Ventures has been an investor in multiple Israeli cybersecurity and cloud companies, including early participation in Checkmarx (an Israeli application-security firm later used as Salesforce’s designated static-analysis provider for its AppExchange Security Review) and in Wiz, the Israeli cloud-security company later acquired by Google for approximately $32 billion; Marc Benioff personally invested in Wiz’s 2020 seed round and in other Israeli startups including BigID, Zebra Medical Vision, and Enclave.¹⁹ Salesforce’s September 2024 acquisition of Zoomin brought in co-founders with prior senior roles at Verint and NICE Systems - companies with documented histories in communications-interception and analytics technology - as a personnel-lineage finding rather than an equity relationship, now inherited into a wholly-owned Salesforce subsidiary.² Hyperforce Israel, launched in September 2024 on AWS’s Tel Aviv Region infrastructure, was framed by Salesforce’s Israel sales lead as complementary to Project Nimbus and Israeli government data-residency requirements, with Bank Leumi named as the platform’s first live customer.³⁴⁵

Counter-Arguments and Evidence Limits

No public evidence identified of Salesforce being named as a formal Project Nimbus consortium member or subcontractor, nor of Salesforce’s own Hyperforce workloads being provisioned into a segregated defence/intelligence enclave rather than AWS’s general-availability commercial Israel Region. No public evidence identified of any commercial relationship between Salesforce and Israeli-origin biometric, facial-recognition, or predictive-policing vendors (e.g., Trigo, BriefCam, AnyVision/Oosto), and no public evidence identified of Israeli-origin surveillance tools being resold or used internally by Salesforce. Salesforce does not appear in the OHCHR Special Rapporteur’s July 2025 report naming Google, Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Palantir, and other technology firms, nor in the AFSC “Companies Profiting from the Gaza Genocide” tracker, nor in the Don’t Buy Into Occupation report materials.⁹ A BDS-aligned company-listing site classifies Salesforce as “Boycott Safe,” an assessment that the underlying audit treats as an outlier given the R&D, acquisition, and cloud-infrastructure findings documented here, and which should be read as one campaign source’s non-listing rather than an authoritative clearance.

Named Entities and Evidence Map

Checkmarx (Salesforce Ventures portfolio company; AppExchange security-review provider); Wiz (Salesforce Ventures portfolio company, acquired by Google ~$32B)¹⁹; Zoomin (wholly-owned Salesforce subsidiary; founders with prior Verint/NICE roles)²; Own/OwnBackup (wholly-owned Salesforce subsidiary; co-founder Ariel Berkman previously served in IDF intelligence Unit 81)²; Bank Leumi (first live Hyperforce Israel customer)³.

Economic: Economic

Mechanism of Involvement

Salesforce has acquired nine Israeli-founded technology companies since 2011 - Navajo Systems ($30M), BlueTail, Implisit Insights, Datorama ($800–850M), Bonobo AI ($45M), ClickSoftware ($1.35B), Zoomin ($450M), Own/OwnBackup ($1.9B), and Doti AI (~$100M) - for a cumulative sum exceeding $4.5 billion, all folded into a strategic Israel R&D organization now employing roughly 750–1,000 people.¹¹³² Salesforce Ventures has invested in at least twelve Israeli companies, and Benioff holds personal investment stakes in several more.¹⁹ Salesforce.com Israel Ltd. is a registered Israeli legal entity headquartered in Tel Aviv.²²²³²⁴ Hyperforce Israel, launched September 2024, runs on the same AWS Tel Aviv Region infrastructure selected in 2021 for Project Nimbus.³⁴⁵

Counter-Arguments and Evidence Limits

No public evidence identified of Israeli beneficial ownership or state ownership of Salesforce; Salesforce is its own ultimate parent, publicly listed with no controlling shareholder. No public evidence identified of Salesforce corporate treasury holdings in Israeli sovereign bonds or Israel Bonds instruments. No public evidence identified of any Salesforce office, reseller, franchisee, or sales activity specifically located in or targeted at West Bank or Golan Heights settlements, per review of Who Profits and OHCHR settlement-business database materials. Salesforce is not named in UN Special Rapporteur Albanese’s July 2025 report, the OHCHR business-enterprises database, Who Profits, the Don’t Buy Into Occupation coalition materials, or the BDS Movement’s November 2024 corporate-targeting guide.⁹¹⁶ Salesforce’s SEC-reported geographic revenue segmentation discloses only Americas/Europe/APAC totals; no Israel-specific revenue figure is separately broken out.³⁴ The Own acquisition was followed by layoffs of approximately 700 Own employees post-close, an operational detail the audits note without further characterization.

Named Entities and Evidence Map

Navajo Systems, BlueTail, Implisit Insights, Datorama, Bonobo AI, ClickSoftware, Zoomin, Own/OwnBackup, and Doti AI (wholly-owned acquired Israeli operating companies)¹¹³²; salesforce.com Israel Ltd. (Tel Aviv subsidiary)²²²³²⁴; Mason Morfit / ValueAct Capital (board member and ~$1B shareholder; no evidence identified of ValueAct holdings in Israeli defence companies)¹⁰; Colin Powell (former director, no Israel-specific nexus identified)¹⁰.

Political: Political

Mechanism of Involvement

Salesforce issued two public statements in October–November 2023 on the Israel-Hamas war, acknowledging civilian deaths on both sides and donating $4.7 million split among United Hatzalah, Save the Children, the Association for Immediate Help for Holocaust Survivors, World Food Program USA (for Gaza humanitarian aid), and High Tech for Israel.⁶ Marc Benioff spoke at the Israeli Prime Minister’s Innovation Summit in 2018, confirming high-level engagement with the Israeli tech ecosystem.⁷ Salesforce maintains an Israeli R&D subsidiary and cloud infrastructure as documented above.¹¹¹²³

Counter-Arguments and Evidence Limits

The Salesforce PAC reported $0 in federal candidate contributions for the 2024 election cycle, and no public evidence identified of Salesforce lobbying specifically related to Israel-Palestine, boycotts, or trade legislation.¹⁸ No public evidence identified of corporate donations to FIDF, JNF/KKL, or settlement organizations beyond the humanitarian relief donations documented above. Salesforce is not listed in the OHCHR settlement-business database (2025 update, 158 companies) or the Who Profits database, and no public evidence identified of Salesforce being targeted by official BDS National Committee, USCPR, or Palestinian Genocide Campaign lists.⁹¹⁶ A Salesforce Israel R&D executive publicly stated the company “leave[s] politics out of the company.” No public evidence identified of HR actions, employee disputes, or documented internal conflict over pro-Palestinian or pro-Israel speech at Salesforce. The underlying audit notes an asymmetry - Salesforce issued comparable or larger public statements and donations for Ukraine (over $2 million, 2022) but no comparable statement was identified for the Myanmar/Rohingya crisis or the Sudan civil war - documented as a pattern in crisis-response thresholds rather than as an Israel-specific finding.³⁵ Salesforce’s cloud infrastructure separately powers the U.S. Customs and Border Protection/ICE/USCIS Unified Immigration Portal, with CBP spending $148.5 million on Salesforce products from 2018–2024; this is a U.S. domestic immigration-enforcement relationship, not an Israel-related one.³⁶

Named Entities and Evidence Map

Marc Benioff (Chair & CEO; public relief-fund statements; 2018 Innovation Summit appearance)⁶⁷; Salesforce.org/Salesforce Foundation (Benioff as Chairman; charitable disbursements)³⁷; Oren Winter (SVP, Head of Israel R&D Center)¹¹¹²; Mason Morfit (director; ValueAct Capital, no Israeli defence holdings identified)¹⁰.

BDS-1000 Score (V4)

• V_MAX: 8.00 Sum_OTHERS: 3.54
• BRS Score: 544 Tier: C (High)

The Economic domain (Economic = 8.00) is the sole determinant of V_MAX, driven by nine Israeli-founded company acquisitions totaling over $4.5 billion, a major R&D hub employing hundreds, and continued VC-level capital deployment - high on both magnitude and directness of financial exposure. The Military domain sits near the score floor (0.09), reflecting the near-total absence of a defence-sector nexus. The BRS methodology is scale-free: each domain’s score is Impact (activity type) × a function of Magnitude (scale) and Proximity (directness), combining V_MAX with a damped contribution from the remaining domains (Sum_OTHERS) into a single evidence-vetted composite; scores are fixed following human review of the underlying audits.

Methodology Note

• Scoring is evidence-only, drawn exclusively from the four domain audits (Military, Digital, Economic, Political); no claim outside those audits is incorporated into this dossier.
• Impact (I) reflects the type of activity (e.g., direct defence contracting vs. commercial cloud services); Magnitude (M) reflects scale (deal size, employee count, contract value); Proximity (P) reflects directness of the Israel/Palestine nexus.
• Temporal rule: divested, exited, or non-renewed operations are mitigated rather than scored as ongoing exposure; no divestment or exit from Israel was identified for Salesforce in any domain.
• Entity attribution follows a no-transitive-guilt standard: a company is scored on its own documented conduct, not that of investors, resellers, or portfolio companies absent a direct, documented relationship (e.g., Salesforce Ventures’ U.S. DoD-focused “Defense” portfolio companies are noted as having no identified Israel connection, not attributed to Salesforce’s Israel score).
• Settlement-linked commercial operations, where identified, dual-count in Economic and Political; no settlement-linked Salesforce operation was identified in any audit.
• “No public evidence identified” is used verbatim wherever a documented check (database search, report review, filing review) returned nothing, consistent with the source audits’ own language.

End Notes