by AMY FALLON
Gaza Cola offers its drinkers an ‘apartheid-free’ alternative as they boycott big-name brands.
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.
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