Coca-Cola, Nestlé latest multinationals to face boycott in Turkey over alleged support for Israel 

TURKEY— American soft drinks company Coca-Cola and the world’s largest food company Nestlé are the latest multinationals to face boycotts in Turkey over their alleged support of Israel’s war against Hamas.    

Leading the boycott is Turkey’s parliament which in November stopped its cafeterias from selling products made by multinational companies this week, claiming that they support “Israeli aggression.”  

Parliament speaker Numan Kurtulmus announced the decision in Turkey’s Black Sea region, calling on citizens to follow suit.  

“We will not use any products of the companies that support the Israeli aggression that are used in the Turkish Grand National Assembly. We will not buy them from now on, and we will scrap those products that we had already bought,” Kurtulmus was quoted as saying by the state-run Anadolu News Agency. 

Calls for boycott against multinational brands including Starbucks and McDonalds have grown in Turkey over their presence in Israel with several universities and local municipalities heading to the calls.  

Earlier this month, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s younger son, Bilal Erdogan, called for a boycott against multinational brands.  

“The priority should be the brands that openly support Israel, then those that do not openly condemn Israel, and then those that do not support Palestine,” he was quoted as saying by the Demiroren News Agency.   

 According to a local media Al Monitor, more than a dozen local administrations in various regions of the country have joined the boycotts announcing they would stop selling products manufactured in Israel in their respective facilities. 

 American fast food restaurant chain McDonald’s is e often the target of regional protests and boycotts in the face of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  

Several McDonald’s stores across Turkey were vandalized amid anti-Israel protests last month. 

Over the weekend, footage circulated on social media of an individual releasing mice inside a local McDonald’s store in Istanbul to protest the company’s Israel branch providing discounts to Israeli soldiers.  

 The protests prompted the company to issue a statement saying there was no connection between McDonald’s Israel and McDonald’s Turkey. 

 Previously, Turkey’s state-run railway company also announced that it was removing Starbucks products from onboard cafeterias in its high-speed train lines, citing a lawsuit the company filed against a union of its workers in the United States over a pro-Palestinian tweet.