The Long-term Impact of the Gaza-Inspired Boycotts

The bright red, 250-milliliter tin certainly looks like a can of Coke. That is, if Coca-Cola decided to swap “Coca” for “Gaza” in its name and emblazoned its classic design with a Palestinian flag, complete with Arabic calligraphy and a red keffiyeh on top. It even tastes pretty similar too, albeit more akin to the candy cola bottles than the classic soft drink itself.

But Cola Gaza doesn’t aspire to be Coke. Rather, it hopes to become an alternative for those who have since turned away from the iconic brand.

Since Israel launched its retaliatory bombardment of Gaza in the wake of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack, in a war that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians and rendered much of the Strip uninhabitable, more than a dozen multinational firms perceived to be supportive of Israel have been subject to grassroots consumer boycotts. Among these are the Coca-Cola Company (which operates a factory in the Israeli-occupied West Bank), McDonald’s (whose franchisee has given free and discounted meals to Israeli soldiers and rescue forces in the aftermath of Oct. 7), and Starbucks (which sued its Starbucks Workers United union for trademark infringement over a since-deleted social media post that expressed support for Palestinians).The boycotts are having a demonstrable impact, resulting in declining sales, layoffs, and untold reputational damage. But they’ve also given way to new and existing brands, several of which have stepped into the void that big multinational corporations have left behind.

Cola Gaza, which entered the U.K. market this month, is one such alternative. Palestine Drinks, a Sweden-based brand that launched in March and supplies the E.U., the U.K., and South Africa, is another. Mohamed Kiswani, the communications director of Safad Food, the Palestinian-owned parent company of Palestine Drinks, tells TIME that the demand for the soda has been overwhelming. “We had no idea that it would be this popular,” he says, noting that the brand has sold roughly 16 million cans in the last five months, the proceeds of which go towards projects supporting Palestinian civil society in the West Bank and Gaza.

Kiswani says that the goal of this initiative, perhaps paradoxically, isn’t about soda at all. “We are not selling drinks,” he says. “We are selling the brand ‘Palestine,’ to get people to talk more about the genocide that is happening.” (In a landmark decision in January, the International Court of Justice determined in an interim judgment that there is a plausible risk of Israel committing genocide in Gaza. A definitive ruling, however, could be years away.)

While these boycotts are international, they’re particularly pronounced on the Arab street. In Jordan, for example, McDonald’s and Starbucks locations—which only a year ago might have been heaving with customers—can be found virtually empty. While products such as Coca-Cola and Pepsi (which has also been snubbed over its acquisition of SodaStream, an Israel-based drinks manufacturer) can still be found on the shelves of Middle Eastern supermarkets, they’re often displayed alongside signs urging customers to boycott the product. Many of the region’s cafes and restaurants have largely eschewed these brands in favor of local alternatives such as Jordan’s Matrix Cola and Saudi Arabia’s Kinza, lest they face boycotts themselves.

International boycott campaigns against Israel are hardly new. Indeed, the Palestinian-led grassroots movement for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions has been putting pressure on Israeli and international companies believed to be complicit in violating Palestinian rights since 2005. Nor is the emergence of new brands seeking to capitalize on such boycotts. During the Second Intifada, a deadly Palestinian uprising in the early aughts that grew out of the collapse of the Oslo peace process, brands such as “Mecca Cola” and “Qibla Cola” emerged as Coke alternatives. While the former marketed itself as part of a wider boycott of American goods over Washington’s support for Israel, the latter billed itself as an ethical alternative for Muslims who “are increasingly questioning the role some major multinationals play in our societies.”

Consumer boycotts have typically followed most all Gaza wars, including those in 2008-09, 2012, 2014, 2018, and 2021. But unlike previous wars, which lasted days and weeks at a time, the current one is in its 11th month, with no apparent end in sight.

“This boycott campaign seems to be on a completely different scale to anything I’ve seen before,” says Will Todman, a Middle East analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who has spent time in Jordan, Morocco, Oman, Tunisia, and Qatar since Oct. 7. “That’s partly because this war is on a far greater, more awful scale than anything we have seen before as well.”

Some of the affected companies have tried to defend themselves, though not always to great effect. An attempt by Coca-Cola’s Bangladeshi franchisee backfired after it rolled out an ad campaign reassuring customers that it is not an Israeli brand. “Even Palestine has a Coke factory,” the ad, which has since been removed from all platforms, reportedly said. The factory in question is an Israeli-owned Coca-Cola franchisee that operates in Atarot, an Israeli settlement in East Jerusalem that is considered illegal under international law. Meanwhile, the McDonald’s Corporation, which is headquartered in Chicago, has sought to distance itself from the actions of its Israeli franchisee, telling TIME in February that they “were made independently without McDonald’s consent or approval.” The burger chain has subsequently said that it will buy back all of its Israel-based restaurants following a deal with its Israeli franchisee, Alonyal. (Coca-Cola and McDonald’s did not respond to a request for comment at the time of publication.)

“BDS has shown complicit companies that the price they must pay for being implicated in Israel’s crimes against Palestinians is steep and will get even steeper still,” Omar Barghouti, a co-founder of the BDS movement, tells TIME, noting that the movement’s effectiveness has been a boon for local alternatives, particularly in the Middle East. “These trends indicate that the boycott impact on these brands will most likely be long term.”

Whether these boycotts do have a long-term impact on consumer behavior remains to be seen. While they have given many of those aggrieved by the ongoing humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza a sense of agency, previous iterations haven’t necessarily resulted in the kind of changed consumer habits that activists may be hoping for. Kiswani, who recalls the boycotts that emerged during earlier Gaza wars, says they all followed the same pattern. “There was a strong boycott for a couple of months, and then it ended.”

But he’s confident that this boycott won’t end like the rest of them. “This time, we can see the boycott is hundreds and hundreds of times bigger,” Kiswani says. “This time is different, because it’s never been like this.”

Brayden King, an expert on the impact of boycotts at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, tells TIME that while most boycott campaigns don’t have a major impact on consumer behavior in the long term, those that do are able to leverage public accountability in its favor. “People hold each other accountable,” he says—a task that is made a lot easier when it concerns goods that are typically enjoyed in social settings, such as food and drink. But another marker of an effective boycott is one that is able to incur sustained reputational damage on a brand. While most boycotts tend to fade after the 90-day mark, according to King, the Gaza-inspired boycotts have long surpassed that, in large part because the war has, too.

“The intensity of the outrage that many in the world feel about this is quite severe, and it doesn’t seem to have dissipated at all, partly because the travesty continues,” King says. “And as long as that continues, there’s going to be outrage and associated behaviors. … And I expect that, therefore, the reputational damage for the brands associated with this is going to be that much greater.”

The longer the stigma around these brands lasts, the more time it gives consumers to develop new habits—ones that may not necessarily end when the war does. “A year is a long time that people may have started to develop a taste for buying other products, and that habit is not going to just go away because a ceasefire comes around.”