At the steamy plant in Salfit, recent college graduates in lab coats said that they took pains to produce a carbonated beverage that could sell on its taste, not just a customer’s sense of solidarity with the Palestinians.
“Quality has been a problem with local Palestinian products before,” said Hanna al-Ahmad, 32, the head of quality control for Chat Cola, shouting to be heard over the whir of machines squirting caramel-colored elixir into scores of small cans that then whizzed down assembly lines. “If it’s not good quality, the boycott won’t stick.”
Chat Cola worked with chemists in France to produce the flavor, which is almost indistinguishable from Coke’s—just like its packaging. That’s the case for several flavors: Squint at Chat’s lemon-lime soda and you might mistake it for a can of Sprite.
In 2020, the Ramallah-based National Beverage Company sued Chat Cola for copyright infringement in Palestinian court, contending that Chat had imitated Coke’s designs for multiple drinks. The court ultimately sided with Chat Cola, determining there were enough subtle differences in the can designs that it didn’t violate copyright law.
In the Salfit warehouse, drivers loaded “family size” packages of soda into trucks bound not only for the West Bank but also for Tel Aviv, Haifa and other cities in Israel. Staffers said that Chat soda sales in Israel’s predominantly Arab cities jumped 25% last year. To broaden its appeal in Israel, Chat Cola secured kosher certification after a Jewish rabbi’s thorough inspection of the facility.
Still, critics of the Palestinians-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement say that its main objective—to isolate Israel economically for its occupation of Palestinian lands—only exacerbates the conflict.
“BDS and similar actions drive communities apart, they don’t help to bring people together,” said Vlad Khaykin, the executive vice president of social impact and partnerships in North America for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human rights organization.
“The kind of rhetoric being embraced by the BDS movement to justify the boycott of Israel is really quite dangerous.”
While Chat Cola goes out of its way to avoid buying from Israel—sourcing ingredients and materials from France, Italy and Kuwait—it can’t avoid the circumstances of Israeli occupation, in which Israel dominates the Palestinian economy, controls borders, imports and more.
Deliveries of raw materials to Chat Cola’s West Bank factory get hit with a 35% import tax—half of which Israel collects on behalf of the Palestinians. The general manager, Arar, said his company’s success depends far more on Israeli bureaucratic goodwill than nationalist fervor.
For nearly a month last fall, Israeli authorities detained Chat’s aluminum shipments from Jordan at the Allenby Bridge Crossing, forcing part of the factory to shut down and costing the company tens of thousands of dollars.
Among the local buyers left in the lurch was Croissant House in Ramallah, where, on a recent afternoon, at least one thirsty customer, confronting a nearly empty refrigerator, slipped to the supermarket next-door for a can of Coke. “It’s very frustrating,” said Asaad, the worker.
“We want to be self-sufficient. But we’re not.”