Dammit this is so dumb. Half of google employees I know are literally racist against Chinese people. This is about China vs Israel, not a change in approach.
This has nothing to do with "a few years", and has everything to do with Israel being perceived as a US ally and China being perceived as an enemy. Basically nothing has changed.
I am with you but unfortunately the sense of "hacker" here is closer to what it is in "hackaton".
A "hackaton" is an event where ivy league students compete to write sloppy code using APIs from different corporations. They also get branded t-shirts and free redbull (paid by said corporations).
These are called sit-ins or "sitdown strike", and are not particularly uncommon. They happen in many democracies around the world (not at google though).