‘Genocide-free' cola makes a splash in the United Kingdom

On a sunny autumn day, the Hiba Express – a fast food chain in Holborn, a bustling central London neighbourhood packed with restaurants, bookstores and shops – is full of diners. Above Hiba is Palestine House, a multistorey gathering place for Palestinians and their supporters, built in the style of a traditional Arabic house with stone walls and a central courtyard with a fountain.

Osama Qashoo, a charismatic man who wears his hair pulled back in a bun and has a thick beard and moustache ending in impressive curls, runs Palestine House in the six-storey building. (He co-founded Hiba Express in 2012 and was involved with the restaurant until 2020.)

At the Hiba Express, the team serves up Palestinian and Lebanese dishes. Inside the space, which is decorated in warm colours and with tree branches and placards with slogans such as “From the river to the sea”, patrons move halloumi cheese, chickpeas and falafel around their plates. At the eatery’s entrance, a doll dressed in a black-and-white keffiyeh scarf sits on a table with a sign above, written in blood-coloured ink: “Save the children.” This is in reference to the thousands of Palestinian children killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza over the past year.

On several tables sit cherry-red soda cans decorated with the black, white and green stripes of the Palestinian flag as well as Arabic artwork, and bordered by a keffiyeh pattern. “Gaza Cola” is written in Arabic calligraphy – in a script similar to that of a popular brand of cola.

It is a beverage with a message and a mission.

Qashoo, 43, is quick to point out that the drink, which is made from typical cola ingredients and has a sweet and acidic taste similar to Coca-Cola, “is totally different from the formula that Coke uses”. He will not say how or where the recipe originated, but he will affirm that he created Gaza Cola in November 2023.

‘The real taste of freedom’
Nynke Brett, 53, who lives in Hackney, east London, discovered Gaza Cola while attending a cultural event at Palestine House. “It’s not as fizzy as Coke. It’s smoother, easier on the palate,” she says. “And it tastes even better because you’re supporting Palestine.”

Qashoo created Gaza Cola for several reasons, he says, but “number one was to boycott companies that support and fuel the Israeli army and support the genocide” in Gaza. Another reason: “To find a guilt-free, genocide-free kind of taste. The real taste of freedom.”

That may sound like a marketing tagline but Palestinian freedom is close to Qashoo’s heart. In 2001, he co-founded the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a group that uses nonviolent direct action to challenge and resist the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land.

This organisation paved the way for the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement four years later, explains Qashoo. BDS boycotts companies and products they say play a direct part in Israel’s oppression of Palestinians.

Qashoo was forced to flee Palestine in 2003 after organising peaceful demonstrations against what he calls the “apartheid wall” – a separation barrier built by Israel inside the West Bank, recognised as the barrier between Israel and the Palestinian territory.

He arrived in the UK as a refugee and became a film student, determined to communicate Palestinian stories through filmmaking. His trilogy, A Palestinian Journey, won the 2006 Al Jazeera New Horizon Award.

In 2007, Qashoo co-founded the Free Gaza Movement, which aimed to break the illegal siege on Gaza. Three years later, in 2010, he helped organise the Gaza Freedom Flotilla mission to bring humanitarian aid from Turkey to Gaza by sea. In May 2010, one of the flotilla’s ships, the Mavi Marmara, was attacked, and Qashoo lost his cameraman and filming equipment.

He was later arrested and then tortured while detained with nearly 700 others. His family went on a hunger strike until he was safe.

After resettling in the UK, Qashoo continued his activism but found it challenging to try to earn a living from films. He then became a restaurateur. But he never expected to become a carbonated beverages purveyor. “I wasn’t even thinking about this” until late last year, Qashoo explains. He adds that he also wanted to create a product that was “an example of trade not aid”.

Fifty-three percent of consumers in the Middle East and North Africa are boycotting products from certain brands over recent wars and conflicts, George Shaw, an analyst at GlobalData, tells Al Jazeera.

“These companies that fuel this genocide, when you hit them in the most important place, which is the revenue stream, it definitely makes a lot of difference and makes them think,” Qashoo says. Gaza Cola, he adds, is “going to build a boycott movement” that will hit Coke financially.

Coca-Cola, which operates facilities in the Israeli Atarot industrial settlement in occupied East Jerusalem, faced a fresh boycott starting on October 7 last year.

Family has also been a factor in Qashoo’s drive to launch Gaza Cola. Today, he does not know the whereabouts of his adopted 17-year-old 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 know where they are.”

Not willing to compromise
Although it was only a year in the making, Qashoo says that creating Gaza Cola has been a challenge. “Gaza Cola was a very hard and painful process because I’m not an expert in the drink industry,” says Qashoo. “Every potential partner was suggesting compromise: compromise the colour, compromise the font, compromise the name, compromise the flag,” he says. “And we said, ‘No, we’re not compromising on any of this’.”

Creating the drink’s logo was tricky. “How do you create a brand which is quite clear and doesn’t beat around the bush?” Qashoo says with sparkling eyes and a cheeky grin. “Gaza Cola is straightforward with honest and clear messaging.”

However, finding places to stock the drink, which is produced in Poland and imported to the UK to save money, was a problem. “Obviously, we can’t get to the big markets because of the politics behind it,” says Qashoo.

He began by getting Hiba Express and other local Palestinian restaurants to carry Gaza Cola. The drink is also sold by Muslim retailers such as Manchester-based Al Aqsa, which recently ran out of stock, according to the store’s manager, Mohammed Hussain. Since early August, 500,000 cans of Gaza Cola have been sold.

Online, a six-pack of Gaza Cola goes 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 donated towards rebuilding the maternity ward of the al-Karama Hospital, northwest of Gaza City.

A bevy of boycotts
Gaza Cola finds itself among other brands raising awareness of Palestine and the boycott against big-name colas operating in Israel.

Palestine Drinks, a Swedish company that launched in February, sells an average of 3 to 4 million cans of their drinks (one is a cola) per month, co-founder Mohamed Kiswani tells Al Jazeera. Matrix Cola, created in Jordan in 2008 as a local alternative to Coke and Pepsi and which operates its main SodaStream factory in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, reported in January that production had doubled in recent months. And Spiro Spathis, Egypt’s oldest carbonated drinks company, saw a big spike in sales during their “100% Made in Egypt” campaign last year.

Jeff Handmaker, an associate professor of legal sociology at Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands, says that consumer boycotts aim to hold companies responsible by generating awareness of corporate or institutional complicity in atrocity crimes.

“In this regard, the campaign to boycott Coke is evidently successful,” Handmaker adds.

Qashoo is now working on the next version of Gaza Cola, one with more fizziness. Meanwhile, he hopes that every sip of Gaza Cola reminds people of Palestine’s plight.

“We need to remind generations after generations of this horrible holocaust,” he says. “It’s happening and it’s been happening for 75 years.”

“It just needs to be a tiny, gentle reminder, like, ‘By the way, enjoy your drink, greetings from Palestine’.”