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. “Gaza Cola” 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 Gaza Cola in November 2023.
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 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 said.
“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 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.”
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’.”