N�rnberg, Mittelfranken, 2007-03-20 - 5:11 a.m.

Winter is orange time which means they are cheap & I buy them regularly � I also prefer the easy to peel mandarines � but since some years it�s hard to find them anymore in our our supershops � well there are similar looking small kind of oranges with all kind of different names, like clementines, satsumas, minneolas, tangerines etc. � but these are all so hard to peel & have a lot of stones (pips?) � I want my goold old easy to peel mandarines back..

While looking for them occasionally in supermarkets I got aware,t that all this orange fruits now come mainly from Spain, Maroc or Turkey. � I remember in my youth, in winter time, whene there is orange harvest time in Israel there were everywhere this big gourgious Jaffa oranges available� where are they now?

I asked even friends: �have you been seeing jaffa oranges in the last view years anymore?� � they shrugged their shoulders.

I remembered having heard of Israel goods gotting boycotted e.g. in Norway by politics & trade companies, but not here � or did I miss some informations? �

Hm � now I googled jaffa oranges & at least I found this article in �times� of 1978 � which explains a lot:

Dinner was finished. Because they had eaten so well, the four children of Mr. and Mrs. Frans Bergs in the southern Dutch town of Maastricht were granted a favorite treat for dessert: big, golden Jaffa oranges from Israel. Unexpectedly, the children complained about the taste. "When we took a closer look," Mrs. Bergs said later, "we discovered small, silver-colored globules inside." The children were rushed to a hospital to have their stomachs pumped; police summoned to investigate erroneously assumed that Mr. Bergs had tried to poison his family. But Dutch health officials began a nationwide search, and by week's end they had discovered 25 oranges from Israel that had been injected with mercury. More sabotaged Israeli oranges were found in nine West German towns.

The pea-sized pellets were not soluble mercury, which can severely damage the kidneys if ingested, but the metallic mercury of the kind used in thermometers �potentially dangerous to very young children but not to adults. Nonetheless, the tampered oranges were a shock to Europe, especially after it became known that they were fruits of political terrorism. In a letter to the West German government, an extremist group calling itself the Arab Revolutionary Army-Palestine Command claimed it had doctored the fruit to disrupt Israel's economy.

At least temporarily, it may have done so. In West Germany, which annually imports 140 million tons of citrus products from Israel, sales were halted while the fruit was checked out. In The Netherlands, supermarket managers put their Jaffa oranges in cold storage until the poisoning scare blew over.

For Israel, the rash of ruined oranges constituted both a new kind of Palestinian attack and a potential economic disaster. The $172 million annual orange export trade is one of the country's major sources of foreign exchange. Israeli growers insist that the injecting took place at shipping centers in Europe and not at the groves themselves; their hypothesis sounded more and more reasonable as first Spanish and then Moroccan oranges, which move through the same European distribution system, displayed the same mercury traces. The Jerusalem Post sarcastically attacked the Palestinians: "They now send their freedom fighters to stab�if not with the sword at least with the syringe�the harmless Jaffa orange."

you see this explains a lot � the fear of quicksilver terror acts have taken them out of our shelves & of course I also found on another site a boycott picture to Israel�s Jaffa oranges �

Hm - I'm thinking about creating another picture with the inscription: "Support Jaffa Oranges!"

But as I had mentioned Norway�s boycot above I also found an older article in Ha'aretz, (April 26, 2002) - By Yair Ettinger � here some excerpts:

�If Israeli and Palestinian representatives ever again wanted to meet in a neutral place to discuss a peace agreement, would Oslo be it? "Not in the foreseeable future," says Professor Nils Butenschon, director of the Norwegian Institute of Human Rights. Mutual distrust between Israel and Norway has grown too deep, he said.

A symptom of this distrust could be seen in Israel's harsh response to UN envoy Terje Larsen's criticism of the IDF's behavior in Jenin. Many outraged Israelis hastened to point out that Larsen is a former senior Norwegian government official, and that his wife is Norway's ambassador to Israel. The reaction stemmed from the fact that over the past few weeks, Norway has emerged as one of Israel's harshest critics - even, said one Foreign Ministry official, compared to other Scandinavian countries, all of which are known for their anti-Israel views.

Yet the harshest criticism is coming not from the Norwegian government, but from groups that in previous years had close very ties with Israel - academics, unions and the opposition Social- Democratic Party.

A week ago Norway's largest trade union, representing some 800,000 workers, declared a consumer boycott of Israel. It urged its members not to buy Israeli goods and to reject invitations from any Israeli bodies.

Supermarket chains promptly began labeling Israeli produce with special stickers to help the boycott, and truckers refused to transport Israeli goods from the ports. This week, a scheduled concert by a Hasidic band in Oslo was canceled - even though the band members were Swiss Jews, not Israelis.

The academic community has been particularly active. Oslo University has publicly urged its faculty to protest against Israel, and senior lecturers have gone even further, calling for a full-fledged boycott.
..
Author Yoram Kaniuk, who has been hosted in Oslo several times in recent years, said that when talk turns to politics, "you discover bottomless hatred. The impression is that suddenly it is permissible to say anything - against Israel and against Jews ... Have you ever heard them talk like that about what the Russians are doing in Chechnya, or about the oppression of 40 million Kurds?"

Maybe we should boycott those who boycott Israel goods � anyway I want my Jaffa oranges back - & my mandarines too..