Oman boycotted harder than almost anywhere else in the region.

People were self-righteous about it. Aggressive about it. If you walked into certain places with a Starbucks cup, you were treated as though you had personally committed treason. The moral policing was extraordinary.

And yet here we are now.

Back in the queues. Back at the drive-throughs. Back holding the same cups with absolutely no shame attached anymore.

Only now, many of those businesses are no longer Omani-owned.

That is the punchline nobody wants to talk about.

The franchisees who absorbed the real damage here were not politicians sitting comfortably abroad. They were Omani owners, Omani operators, local investors, local staff. Many were battered so badly financially that they were forced to sell or hand operations over.

So after all the screaming about foreign corporations, what did we actually achieve?

We pushed Omanis out.

Walking in the mall now I see people happily support the exact same brands, only now they are owned by outsiders and foreign operators.

You cannot convince me that this was some great moral victory. It was emotional decision-making with absolutely 

no long-term thinking attached to it.

And before someone rushes to misunderstand the point, caring about Palestine and questioning the intelligence of what happened here are not mutually exclusive. In fact, if you truly care about a cause, you should care enough to think critically instead of behaving like outrage is a seasonal trend.

Because what I watched happen in Oman was extraordinary. People destroyed local ownership to make themselves feel morally superior, only to quietly crawl back once the social pressure faded. No strategy. No endurance. No consistency. Just noise.

And the irony? The brands survived.

The Omani ownership 

didn’t.

Mohammed Ali