Why Arabs Boycott Pepsi but Not Their PCs

When I first started writing for Times of Israel in 2023, I faced unprecedented backlash back in my university in Qatar. Without going into unnecessary details, the fact is that I was immediately branded with every possible adjective the Arab imagination could summon – complicit in normalization, traitor, spy for the occupation, agent of betrayal, and on and on.

Arabs, after all, are masters at slogans and adjectives, and they take pride in reminding the world that Arabic is a language with over 14 million words. They will use every single one of them to insult you the second you cross their self-declared red lines. Since then, I was cancelled, erased, ignored, and blacklisted. Cancel culture, Arab style, is not just a Western import – it is a perfected art here.

And all of this unfolded in Qatar, a country that, irony of ironies, has not permitted a single public demonstration in support of Palestine since October 7. Not one. Not even when, on September 9, Israel directly targeted Hamas leadership in Doha with ten missiles. On that very day, while Morocco – thousands of kilometers away from the Middle East – saw more than 10,000 solidarity campaigns since October 7, including during the Doha attack itself, Qataris remained passive.

Even Al Jazeera, headquartered in Doha, never dared to mobilize its own citizens for the cause it constantly pushes on other nationalities, preferring to export moral outrage while keeping its own streets quiet and obedient. But anyway, this is not my subject today.

What I want to dissect is the laughable, self-defeating hypocrisy of the so-called “boycott movements” and the Arab mind that fuels them. Whenever you walk into a McDonald’s or KFC, whenever you pick up a Coca-Cola or Pepsi, you risk being assaulted not physically but morally, theatrically, and sometimes even publicly, by Palestinians, Lebanese, Jordanians, and their self-appointed allies.

Suddenly, you are no longer a student or a customer – you are the embodiment of the massacre of 65,000 in Gaza. You become the occupier in person, a walking Israeli F-16, and they feel entitled to lecture you in ethics, morals, and resistance.

Yet look around: every McDonald’s branch in Doha is packed with Qataris, from families to groups of young men in pristine thobes, and it has never once been recorded that these same moral guardians marched into a Qatari McDonald’s to denounce them.

Why? Because they know the result. Because double standards are not just an accident; they are a survival instinct. Principles, in the Arab mind, are never absolute. They are situational. If you truly believed in principle, you would apply it universally, even against your own, even when the cost is high. But this has never been the Arab way.

They shout: We will fight for Palestine! We will give our blood! We will sacrifice our lives! Where is that fight? Where is that blood? Where is that sacrifice? It is nowhere, because it is easier to harass a student in a cafeteria or bully someone online than to actually confront the realities of war, politics, or even their own governments.

The truth is that these acts of “resistance” are nothing more than symbolic bullying campaigns designed to create an illusion of agency. They change nothing on the ground. They do not shift one dollar of US aid, they do not stop one Israeli drone, they do not rescue one Palestinian child. They only serve to give the illusion of vengeance, an emotional placebo for a humiliated people who want to believe their words sting as much as missiles.

And this hypocrisy is not new. The modern BDS movement, born in 2005 and often paraded as a global campaign for justice, is nothing more than a rebranding of the older Arab League boycotts of Israel, which began as early as 1948. Those boycotts failed spectacularly: Israel’s trade flourished, while Arab economies weakened under self-imposed isolation.

The 1973 oil embargo, often remembered as a show of strength, collapsed just two years later under pressure from globalization, and the West adapted by diversifying energy sources. In every case, boycotts served as emotional declarations, not sustainable strategies.

Globalization, integrated supply chains, and interdependent technologies mean that in 2025, boycotting is technically impossible. The products are too interconnected, too global, too embedded. Arabs still pretend slogans can substitute for systems, but the global economy is indifferent to their anger.

And here is the larger absurdity: the boycotts themselves are technically impossible. You say boycott Coca-Cola or McDonald’s? Fine, but why not boycott Intel? Why not boycott your iPhone? Why not boycott the very computer you are using right now to post your slogans on Facebook and X?

Because here lies the ultimate hypocrisy: every single laptop or PC running on an Intel chip owes its architecture to Israel. Intel’s Haifa development center produced the Centrino chip that made Wi-Fi laptops mainstream, and later the Core processor families that dominate global PCs. Apple’s iPhones and iPads contain flash-memory controllers from Anobit, an Israeli company Apple acquired in 2011. The Face ID you use every morning traces back to PrimeSense, the Israeli firm behind Microsoft’s Kinect before Apple absorbed its engineers.

Google Maps is powered daily by Waze, an Israeli-born platform feeding real-time traffic and hazard data to billions. The camera zoom in your Samsung or Oppo? Corephotonics, another Israeli startup, created the periscope lens technology. Even the USB stick in your pocket – the “DiskOnKey” – was invented by Israel’s M-Systems. And every message you send on WhatsApp or video call you make on Zoom likely crosses through Mellanox networking cards, another Israeli firm now powering the global data centers of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.

If boycotting is truly a principle, why not start there? Why does no one ever storm into a lecture hall and accuse students of complicity in genocide because they are typing on Dell or Apple devices? Because unlike Pepsi, there is no Gaza-Cola equivalent of Intel. Because capitalism, which Arabs still pretend is a moral battlefield, has no morals. It has only profit.

Let us be brutally honest: capitalism thrives on exploitation, on rebranding suffering into opportunity. For every McDonald’s boycott, there emerges a “Palestine Burger” joint selling the exact same Big Mac under a new name. For every Coca-Cola demonized, there is a “Gaza Cola” that copies the formula and cashes in on the outrage. It is not resistance – it is entrepreneurship disguised as morality. It is financial opportunism camouflaged with flags and slogans.

And it works only because people want to feel good while consuming, to pretend their purchase of a new soda brand is equivalent to striking a blow against occupation. But you cannot replace Intel. You cannot replace NVIDIA data-center cards that route your WhatsApp calls. You cannot replace Qualcomm Wi-Fi chipsets in your phones. And so, suddenly, the “principle” evaporates.

This is the Arab contradiction: boycott when it is convenient, shout when it is safe, resist when it means nothing. But when the cost is real – when it would mean giving up your iPhone, your MacBook, your daily internet, your Netflix streaming, your social media feeds – then silence. Then exceptions. Then explanations.

They tell you that boycotting Coca-Cola will shake the Zionist economy, as if US multinationals will collapse because a handful of Arabs stopped buying soda, while at the same time they ignore the far more direct and inescapable reality that every keystroke they type, every Zoom call they join, every picture they snap on their phones is powered, somewhere deep inside, by Israeli innovation.

So let us strip the illusion: the Arab boycott is not about Palestine, it is about theater. It is about maintaining the appearance of resistance in a world where actual resistance is either impossible or suicidal. It is about turning moral outrage into a consumer choice rather than a political program. It is about bullying the weak to feel strong while leaving the strong untouched. And above all, it is about the fatal incapacity of the Arab mind to distinguish between substance and spectacle, between true principle and empty slogans.