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

London, UK – 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 a thick beard and moustache ending in impressive curls, runs both establishments in the six-storey building.

At the Hiba Express, his team serves up Palestinian and Lebanese dishes made from his family recipes. 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,” referring 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 and Arabic artwork, and bordered by a pattern from the keffiyeh. “Cola Gaza” is written in Arabic calligraphy – in a script similar to that of a popular brand of cola.

It’s 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 Cola Gaza in November 2023.

Osama Qashoo, creator of Cola Gaza, hands out cans and leaflets in the Holborn area of London, the United Kingdom, as part of the beverage’s soft launch in September [Courtesy of Cola Gaza]

‘The real taste of freedom’

Nynke Brett, 53, who lives in Hackney, east London, discovered Cola Gaza 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 Cola Gaza 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 that 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” in the West Bank. 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. Cola Gaza, 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 Cola Gaza. Today he doesn’t 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.”

A banner advertising Cola Gaza hangs on the scaffolding on the front of Palestine House in Holborn, London, UK [Courtesy of Cola Gaza]

Not willing to compromise

Although it was only a year in the making, Qashoo says that creating Cola Gaza has been a challenge. “Cola Gaza 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. “Cola Gaza 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 stocking Cola Gaza in his three London restaurants, where, since the beverage was introduced in early August, 500,000 cans have been sold. The cola is also sold by Muslim retailers such as Manchester-based Al Aqsa, which recently sold out, says the store’s manager, Mohammed Hussain.

Cola Gaza is being sold 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 donated towards rebuilding the maternity ward of the al-Karama Hospital, northwest of Gaza City.

A bevy of boycotts

Cola Gaza 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 three to four million cans of their beverages (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, 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.

Sales of Spiro Spathis, Egypt’s oldest soda drinks brand, grew as a result of a nationwide boycott campaign targeting Western names [Yasmin Shabana/Al Jazeera]

Jeff Handmaker, an associate professor of legal sociology at Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands, says that although consumer boycotts seek to hold companies and states accused of atrocity crimes accountable, it’s a tactic to generate awareness 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 raise awareness, and in this regard the campaign to boycott Coke is evidently successful,” Handmaker adds.

Qashoo is now working 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 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’.”