By Isabelle Debre
West Bank, West Bank (AP) – Order cola to wash away hummus in the West Bank under Israeli occupation recently. Popular local alternative: Chat Cola cans.
Chat Cola – Its red tin and iconic white script are remarkably similar to the iconic American soft drink logo – as a Palestinian consumer, its popularity explodes on the West Bank, where its products were occupied over the past year and are angry at America’s unstable support for Israel. Protest against their pocketbook in Gaza with Hamas.
“No one wants to catch him drinking cola,” said Mad Assard, a worker at the Bakery Kafchain Croissant’s home in Ramallah, the West Bank city of the Jordan River. “Everyone is drinking chat now. They’re sending messages.”
Since October 7, 2023 in Hamas, the attack has sparked Israel’s devastating military campaign in the Gaza Strip. A Palestinian-led boycotting movement against companies perceived to support Israel has gained momentum in the Middle East. And Starbucks was on sale last year.
Here in the West Bank, the boycott has closed two KFC branches in Lamara. However, the most prominent expression of consumer anger was the sudden omnipresentation of chat cola as the shopkeeper entrusts the cola can to the bottom shelf or pulls it completely.
“When people started boycotting, they realized that chats existed,” says Fahedaler, general manager of ChatCola, to the Associated Press from a huge red painted factory in the west coast of the hills, Salfit. I spoke. “We are proud to have created a product that matches the products of a global company.”
As the “local buy” movement has skyrocketed during the war, Chat Cola said sales in the West Bank had skyrocketed by more than 40% last year compared to 2023.
Companies said statistics on local market commands are not available due to the difficulty of data collection during the war, but anecdotal evidence suggests that Chat Cola clawed some of Coca-Cola’s market share. It suggests that there is.
“Chat was previously a specialized product, but from what we saw, it dominates the market,” said Abdulqader, 25, the owner of Salfit supermarket, which boasts a fridge full of Fiji drinks. Azeez Hassan said.
But all the workers in the Coca-Cola franchise in the West Bank, a national beverage company, are Palestinians, and boycotts also affect them, said its general manager, Imad Hindi.
He refused to elaborate on the business impact of boycotts, as he strengthened security controls in Israel, which increased the economic free fall of the West Bank and increased the shipping times and costs of Palestinian companies during the war. It suggests that it will not be released.
The Coca-Cola Company did not respond to requests for comment.
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Whether the movement has lasting consequences or not, it reflects a surge in political consciousness, said Sarah Hussein, head of the Ramallah Chamber of Commerce.
“This is the first time I’ve seen a boycott to this extent,” Hussein noted how institutions like the prominent University of Baseite near Ramallah canceled Cola’s orders. “Everything has changed since October 7th, and after Trump, everything will continue to change.”
President Donald Trump’s call for a massive expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza, which he rephrased as a recommendation last week, has made it even more inflamed around the region.
The company is set in an international market as orders are being poured from the US and Europe as well as from Lebanon and Yemen, says PR manager Ahmad Hammad.
Hamad has rebranded what began as a niche mom and pop tactic in 2019, helping to chat with Coke’s cache with the flammable sentiment created by the war.
“We had to take advantage of the opportunity,” he said of the company’s new “Palestinian Taste” logo and flag shades.
With a scramble to meet demand, Chatcola has opened a second production site in adjacent Jordan. We have developed new candy-colored flavours like blueberries, strawberries and green apples.
In Salfit’s sultry plant, a recent lab court graduate said he struggled to produce a soda drink that could be sold to taste, not just a sense of solidarity with the Palestinians.
“In the past, quality has been an issue with local Palestinian products,” said Hannah Al Ahmad, head of quality control at Chatcola. After that, the assembly line rang. “If the quality is not good, boycotts don’t stick.”
Chatcola worked with French chemists to produce flavors. This is hardly indistinguishable from cola, like the packaging. That’s for some flavors: squint at the lemon lime soda in chat and you might mistake it for a can of sprite.
In 2020, the Ramala-based national beverage company sued Chat Cola for copyright infringement in a Palestinian court, claiming that Chat had mimicked the design of cokes for multiple drinks. The court ultimately supposes Chatcola to lay a nuance in CAN design that did not violate copyright laws.
At Salfit’s warehouse, drivers loaded Soda’s “family size” packages on trucks that are tied up not only in the West Bank but also in Tel Aviv, Haifa and other cities in Israel. Staff said chat soda sales in Israel’s mostly Arab cities increased by 25% last year. To broaden its appeal in Israel, Chatcola has secured kosher certification after a Jewish rabbis thoroughly inspected the facility.
Still, Palestinian-led boycotts, sales and sanctions movements, or BDS critics say that their main purpose is to economically isolate Israel for the occupation of Palestinian lands, and that conflicts are evident. It just makes it worse.
“Behavior similar to BDS does not help separate the community and connect people,” said Vlad Khaykin, executive vice president of Social Impact and Partnerships at Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human rights group. Masu. “The kind of rhetoric that is accepted by the BDS movement to justify the boycott of Israel is truly dangerous.”
Chatcola gets in the way to avoid buying from Israel – procuring materials and materials from France, Italy and Kuwait – can’t avoid the situation of Israeli occupation, where Israel controls the Palestinian economy. .
Delivery of raw materials for chatting at Cola’s West Bank factory will be hit by a 35% import tax. Half of that is collected on behalf of the Palestinians. General Manager Arar said his company’s success depends much more on Israeli bureaucratic goodwill than nationalist enthusiasm.
Israeli authorities detained aluminum cargo from Chat from Jordan at the Allenby Bridge intersection for almost a month last fall, closing tens of thousands of dollars and costing parts of the factory.
Among the local buyers, some of the remaining local buyers in Lamula was the croissant house in Ramallah. There, on a recent afternoon at least one thirsty customer stood up to the almost empty fridge and slid next to the supermarket for a can of coke.
“It’s very frustrating,” said Assad, a worker. “We want to be self-sufficient, but we aren’t.”
Original issue: February 25th, 2025, 5:45pm EST
