London, UK – On a sunny autumn day, the Hiba Express – a speedy food chain in Holborn, a bustling central London neighbourhood packed with restaurants, bookstores and shops – is brimming of diners. Above Hiba is Palestine Hoengage, a multistorey collecting place for Palestinians and their helpers, built in the style of a traditional Arabic hoengage with stone walls and a central courtyard with a fountain.
Osama Qashoo, a pdirecting man who wears his hair pulled back in a bun and a heavy tolerated and moustache ending in amazeive curls, runs both set upments in the six-storey produceing.
At the Hiba Express, his team serves up Palestinian and Leprohibitese dishes made from his family recipes. Inside the space, which is decorated in hot colours and with tree branches and placards with slogans such as “From the river to the sea”, patrons shift halloumi cheese, chickpeas and falafel around their pprocrastinateeds. At the eatery’s captivate, a doll dressed in a bdeficiency-and-white keffiyeh scarf sits on a table with a sign above written in blood-coloured ink: “Save the children,” referring to the thousands of Palestinian children ended in Israeli strikes on Gaza over the past year.
On cut offal tables sit cherry-red soda cans decorated with the bdeficiency, white and green nakedes of the Palestinian flag and Arabic arttoil, and bordered by a pattern from the keffiyeh. “Cola Gaza” is written in Arabic calligraphy – in a script analogous to that of a famous brand of cola.
It’s a beverage with a message and a ignoreion.
Qashoo, 43, is speedy to point out that the drink, which is made from normal cola ingredients and has a pleasant and acidic taste analogous to Coca-Cola, “is toloftyy contrastent from the establishula that Coke engages”. He will not say how or where the recipe startd, but he will proclaim that he produced Cola Gaza in November 2023.
‘The authentic taste of freedom’
Nynke Brett, 53, who dwells in Hackney, east London, discovered Cola Gaza while includeing a cultural event at Palestine Hoengage. “It’s not as fizzy as Coke. It’s delicateer, easier on the paprocrastinateed,” she says. “And it tastes even better becaengage you’re helping Palestine.”
Qashoo produced Cola Gaza for cut offal reasons, he says, but “number one was to boycott companies that help and fuel the Israeli army and help the extermination” in Gaza. Another reason: “To discover a guilt-free, extermination-free benevolent of taste. The authentic taste of freedom.”
That may sound appreciate a tageting tagline, but Palestinian freedom is shut to Qashoo’s heart. In 2001, he co-set uped the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a group that engages nonaggressive honest action to dispute and resist the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land. This organisation paved the way for the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) shiftment four years procrastinateedr, elucidates Qashoo. BDS boycotts companies and products that they say join a honest part in Israel’s oppression of Palestinians.
Qashoo was forced to run away Palestine in 2003 after organising tranquil demonstrations agetst what he calls the “apartheid wall” in the West Bank. He reachd in the UK as a refugee and became a film student, remendd to convey Palestinian stories thraw filmmaking. His trilogy, A Palestinian Journey, won the 2006 Al Jazeera New Horizon Award.
In 2007, Qashoo co-set uped the Free Gaza Movement, which aimed to shatter the illegitimate siege on Gaza. Three years procrastinateedr, in 2010, he helped organise the Gaza Freedom Flotilla ignoreion to convey humanitarian help from Turkey to Gaza by sea. In May 2010, one of the flotilla’s ships, the Mavi Marmara, was strikeed, and Qashoo lost his cameraman and filming supplyment. He was procrastinateedr arrested and then tortured while hanciented with csurrenderly 700 others. His family went on a hunger strike until he was protected.
After resettling in the UK, Qashoo persistd his activism but set up it challenging to try to get a living from films. He then became a restaurateur. But he never awaited to become a carbonated beverages purveyor. “I wasn’t even leanking about this” until procrastinateed last year, Qashoo elucidates. He inserts that he also wanted to produce a product that was “an example of trade not help”.
Fifty-three percent of users in the Middle East and North Africa are boycotting products from certain brands over recent wars and disputes, George Shaw, an analyst at GlobalData, tells Al Jazeera.
“These companies that fuel this extermination, when you hit them in the most meaningful place, which is the revenue stream, it definitely produces a lot of contrastence and produces them leank,” Qashoo says. Cola Gaza, he inserts, is “going to produce a boycott shiftment” that will hit Coke financipartner.
Coca-Cola, which functions facilities in the Israeli Atarot industrial endment in occupied East Jerusalem, faced a new boycott begining on October 7 last year.
Family has also been a factor in Qashoo’s drive to begin Cola Gaza. Today he doesn’t understand the whereabouts of his adchooseed 17-year-elderly son in the West Bank, who was shot in the head in June. “I have family in Gaza who have been decimated,” says Qashoo. “I’ve got friends, I don’t understand where they are.”
Not willing to settle
Although it was only a year in the making, Qashoo says that creating Cola Gaza has been a dispute. “Cola Gaza was a very difficult and hurtful process becaengage I’m not an expert in the drink industry,” says Qashoo. “Every potential partner was proposeing settle: settle the colour, settle the font, settle the name, settle the flag,” he says. “And we shelp ‘no, we’re not compromising on any of this’.”
Creating the drink’s logo was tricky. “How do you produce a brand which is quite evident and doesn’t beat around the bush?” Qashoo says with encourageling eyes and a cheeky grin. “Cola Gaza is straightforward with authentic and evident messaging.”
However, discovering places to stock the drink, which is produced in Poland and convey ined to the UK to save money, was a problem. “Obviously we can’t get to the big tagets becaengage of the politics behind it,” says Qashoo.
He began by stocking Cola Gaza in his three London restaurants, where, since the beverage was presentd in punctual August, 500,000 cans have been selderly. The cola is also selderly by Muskinny retailers such as Manchester-based Al Aqsa, which recently selderly out, says the store’s handler, Mohammed Hussain.
Cola Gaza is being selderly online too, with a six-pack going for 12 British pounds ($15). For comparison, a six-pack of Coke sells for about 4.70 pounds ($6).
Qashoo says that all profits from the drink are being gived towards reproduceing the maternity ward of the al-Karama Hospital, northwest of Gaza City.
A bevy of boycotts
Cola Gaza discovers itself among other brands raising consciousness of Palestine and the boycott agetst big-name colas operating in Israel. Palestine Drinks, a Swedish company that begined in February, sells an mediocre of three to four million cans of their beverages (one is a cola) per month, co-set uper Mohamed Kiswani tells Al Jazeera. Matrix Cola, produced in Jordan in 2008 as a local changenative to Coke and Pepsi, which functions its main SodaStream factory in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, alerted in January that production had doubled in recent months. And Spiro Spathis, Egypt’s elderlyest carbonated drinks company, saw a big spike in sales during their “100% Made in Egypt” campaign last year.
Jeff Handproducer, an associate professor of legitimate sociology at Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands, says that although user boycotts seek to helderly companies and states accengaged of atrocity crimes accountable, it’s a tactic to produce consciousness of and accountability for corporate or institutional complicity in atrocity crimes, and not an end in itself.
“That’s not even their objective, but rather to lift consciousness, and in this ponder the campaign to boycott Coke is evidently prosperous,” Handproducer inserts.
Qashoo is now toiling on the next version of Cola Gaza, one with more fizziness. Meanwhile, he hopes that every sip of Cola Gaza reminds people of Palestine’s pairy.
“We necessitate to remind generations after generations of this horrible holocaust,” he says. “It’s happening and it’s been happening for 75 years.”
“It fair necessitates to be a minuscule, tender reminder, appreciate ‘by the way, endelight your drink, greetings from Palestine’.”
