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Iranian Produce In Israel, and Jaffa Oranges In Iran
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Iran :
Jaffa, Palestine before the Nakba.
It was long been known that in spite of the official Iranian trade and diplomatic boycott of the state of Israel, Iranian produce does find its ways to Israeli markets.
Iranian farmers sell to Turkey. Turkey has relations with the state of Israel and many of those same Iranian farm goods are then re-packaged and sold to Israel merchants. Whether there are Israelis how knowingly buy Iranian foods is uncertain, but they do like what they see in Turkish markets and request to buy some. The Turks act as middle-men overbuying from Iran under the false auspicious that such goods will only be sold in Turkey, instead they are often re-shipped to Israel. The ways of the Middle East...
And, now, Iran has also become the recipient of such a scheme. News recently broke that oranges from Jaffa in what is today known as Israel are being sold in Iranian markets. An Israeli seal was found on the oranges. How did they get there? This time China was the middle-man, but it did not take care to re-package the goods. At least this time, for all we know Iranians may have been eating “Israeli” goods for years. The discovery has caused a stir in Iran and the government may well take measures to prevent this from happening again lest its boycott appear to be hollow.
As for those Jaffa oranges. Contrary to the Zionist lie that Palestine was “a land without a people for a people without a land,” Jaffa was the most important Palestinian city before Israel’s violent birth and the Nakba in 1948. A excellent book to read on this is Adam Lebor’s City of Oranges. Jaffa boasted Palestinian’s most important paper Filistine edited by the patriotic, Christian Palestinian Isa al-Isa. It had cinemas, clubs and all the other amusements of a civilized society. And oranges. Lots and lots of oranges. Jaffa was such a prominent Arab city that under the partition plan it was allocated to the Palestinians, making it an Arab island within a Jewish sea.
But the early Zionists did not want any of that. Ben-Gurion wanted Jaffa’s surrender and Menachen Begin actually launched an indiscriminate rocket attack on Jaffa to force the residents to leave. Next time you hear about Hamas’ rockets, remember that it was Israel - as with so much else in the field of terrorism - that was the pioneer in launching rocket attacks against a civilian population. The rockets lasted for three days after the British stopped them. But those days were of horror and most of the Arabs did flee.
Today, Jaffa stands as a reminder that Palestine was a vibrant country before Zionism and a symbol of the flame of Palestinian resistance that will not die until the Palestinians can once again call the orange groves of Jaffa home.
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Kaiser
Apr 28 2009
Washington,
United States
Let the trade flourish between the Middle East countries. This can be one step forward for normalizing the relations between these countries.
Comment Link
(Global Perspectives)
“Today, Jaffa stands as a reminder that Palestine was a vibrant country before Zionism and a symbol of the flame of Palestinian resistance that will not die until the Palestinians can once again call the orange groves of Jaffa home.”
Before you make such definitive statements, check your facts. There never was a “vibrant country called ‘Palestine’. Not even Arabs considered “Palestine” a country, just a very general geographic description that included, at various times, part of the Sinai Peninsula, Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, all or part of Jordan, parts of Lebanon, parts of Syria and even parts of Saudi Arabia and southwest Iraq.
Are all these people liars?
Princeton University Prof. Philip Hitti, an Arab-American historian testified before the Andlo-American Committee in 1946 that “There is no such thing as ‘Palestine’, absolutely not!”
The American consul in Jerusalem reported in 1880 that the area was continuing its historic decline. “The population and wealth of Palestine has not increased during the last 40 years.”
Lewis French, the British Director of Development wrote of Israel:
“We found it inhabited by fellahin who lived in mud hovels and suffered severely from the prevalent malaria... Large areas...were uncultivated... The fellahin, if not themselves cattle thieves, were always ready to harbor these and other criminals. The individual plots...changed hands annually. There was little public security, and the fellahin’s lot was an alternation of pillage and blackmail by their neighbors, the Bedouin.”
Despite the growth in their population, the Arabs continued to assert they were being displaced. The truth is from the beginning of World War I, absentee landlords who lived in Cairo, Damascus, and Beirut owned part of Israel’s land. About 80 percent of the Arabs were debt-ridden peasants, semi-nomads, and Bedouins “From Time Immemorial” (Joan Peters, Harper, 1984).
When the first congress of Muslim-Christian associations met in Jerusalem in February 1919 to choose “Palestinian” representatives for the Paris Peace Conference, the following resolution was adopted:
“We consider ‘Palestine’ as part of Arab Syria, as it has never been separated from it at any time. We are connected with it by national, religious, linguistic, natural, economic, and geographical bonds.”
In 1937, a local Arab leader, Auni Bey Abdul-Hadi, told the Peel Commission, which ultimately suggested the partition of Israel: “There is no such country [as Palestine]! ‘Palestine’ is a term the Zionists invented! There is no Palestine in the Bible. Our country was for centuries part of Syria.”
The representative of the Arab Higher Committee (now the Arab League) to the United Nations submitted a statement to the general assembly in May 1947 that said “‘Palestine’ was part of the province of Syria” and that, “politically, the Arabs of Israel were not independent in the sense of forming a separate political entity.”
In 1974 Hafez al-Assad took Yasser Arafat to task over the matter, telling him: “You do not represent Palestine as much as we do. Never forget this one point: There is no such thing as a Palestinian People, there is no Palestinian entity; there is only Syria. You are an integral part of the Syrian people. Palestine is an integral part of Syria. Therefore it is we, the Syrian authorities, who are the true representatives of the Palestinian people.”
Now who are we to believe—people who actually lived the time, or someone who perpetuates the propaganda invented by Yasser Arafat? These quotes by people who should know prove Arafat’s claim echoed in your post for the lie it is.
The so-called “Palestinian resistance” has even hijacked the use of the term “nakba” for its own purposes. See what Prof. Steven Plaut has to say about it:
“Here’s a little current events quiz: What is the real origin of the term “nakba” and what is its original meaning?
“If you get the answer to the quiz wrong – in other words, if you say it refers to the events of 1948 – you are in very good company. I myself would have flunked the quiz up until a few days ago, when I stumbled on the correct answer. Not only does the bandying about of the “nakba” nonsense word not point to any “depths of roots of Palestinian nationality,” it proves the very opposite: namely, that there is no such thing as a Palestinian nation or nationality at all.
“The authoritative source on the origin of “nakba” is none other than George Antonius, supposedly the first “official historian of Palestinian nationalism.” Like so many “Palestinians,” he actually wasn’t – Palestinian that is. He was a Christian Lebanese-Egyptian who lived for a while in Jerusalem, where he composed his official advocacy/history of Arab nationalism. The Arab Awakening, a highly biased book, was published in 1938 and for years afterward was the official text used at British universities.
“Antonius was an “official Palestinian representative” to Britain, trying to argue the cause for creating an Arab state in place of any prospective homeland promised the Jews under the Balfour Declaration of 1917. By the 1930’s Antonius was an active anti-Zionist propagandist, and as such was offered a job at Columbia University (where some things don’t seem to change much).
“He served as an academic fig leaf for xenophobic Arab nationalists seeking to deny Jews any right to self-determination in or migration to the Land of Israel. And he was closely associated with the Grand Mufti, Hitler’s main Islamic ally, and also with the pro-German regime in Iraq in the early 1940’s.
“Antonius was so passionately anti-Zionist that he continues to serve as the hero and mentor of Jewish leftist anti-Zionists everywhere. For example, the late Hebrew University sociology professor Baruch Kimmerling relied on Antonius at length in his own pseudo-history, Palestinians: The Making of a People (Free Press, 1993).
“So how does Antonius provide us with the answer to the current-events quiz concerning the origin of “nakba”? The term was not invented in 1948 but rather in 1920. And it was coined not because of Palestinians suddenly getting nationalistic but because Arabs living in Palestine regarded themselves as Syrian and were enraged at being cut off from their Syrian homeland.
“Before World War I, the entire Levant – including what is now Israel, the “occupied territories,” Jordan, Lebanon and Syria – was comprised of Ottoman Turkish colonies. When Allied forces drove the Turks out of the Levant, the two main powers, Britain and France, divided the spoils between them. Britain got Palestine, including what is now Jordan, while France got Lebanon and Syria.
“The problem was that the Palestinian Arabs saw themselves as Syrians and were seen as such by other Syrians. The Palestinian Arabs were enraged that an artificial barrier was being erected within their Syrian homeland by the infidel colonial powers – one that would divide northern Syrian Arabs from southern Syrian Arabs, the latter being those who were later misnamed “Palestinians.”
“The bulk of the Palestinian Arabs had in fact migrated to Palestine from Syria and Lebanon during the previous two generations, largely to benefit from the improving conditions and job opportunities afforded by Zionist immigration and capital flowing into the area. In 1920, both sets of Syrian Arabs, those in Syria and those in Palestine, rioted violently and murderously.
“On page 312 of The Arab Awakening, Antonius writes, “The year 1920 has an evil name in Arab annals: it is referred to as the Year of the Catastrophe (Am al-Nakba). It saw the first armed risings that occurred in protest against the post-War settlement imposed by the Allies on the Arab countries. In that year, serious outbreaks took place in Syria, Palestine, and Iraq.”
“Yes, the answer to our little quiz is 1920, not 1948. That’s 1920 – when there was no Zionist state, no Jewish sovereignty, no “settlements” in “occupied territories,” no Israel Defense Forces, no Israeli missiles and choppers targeting terror leaders and no Jewish control over Jerusalem (which had a Jewish demographic majority going back at least to 1850).
“The original “nakba” had nothing to do with Jews and nothing to do with demands by Palestinian Arabs for self-determination, independence and statehood. To the contrary, it had everything to do with the fact that the Palestinian Arabs saw themselves as Syrians. They rioted at this nakba – at this catastrophe– because they found the very idea that they should be independent from Syria and Syrians deeply offensive.
“In the 1920’s, the very suggestion that Palestinian Arabs constituted a separate ethnic nationality was enough to send those same Arabs out into the streets to murder and plunder violently in outrage. If they themselves insisted they were simply Syrians who had migrated to the Land of Israel, by what logic are the Palestinian Arabs deemed entitled to their own state today?”
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=88B96F89-450D-4156-9B83-3BEBB1FA9BDD
Now why don’t we move on to the topic of Jaffa Oranges?
“According to Daniel Rogov, the variety ”originated in China. “No one knows precisely when the sweet orange was introduced into Palestine but the first orange tree was probably brought to this part of the world in the early 16th century, when Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama brought a root of the tree from China to Portugal. It is from that single tree, still preserved in Lisbon at the home of the Count de Saint-Laurent, that all of the oranges of Portugal, Spain, France and Israel have descended.
“In the pre-1948 economy of Palestine
“The first fruits to carry the ”Jaffa orange” brand were from an agricultural colony of the Temple Society in Sarona, Palestine (Sarona was a Templers agricultural village north of Jaffa, one of the earliest modern villages established in Palestine, now located in Tel Aviv, Israel and commonly pronounced Sharona, est. 1871). [The Templers – NOT “Templars” – were German Christians who settled in various locations around Palestine in the second half of the 19th century. The “German Colonies” of Haifa and Jerusalem are named after them and they established several agricultural villages like Sharona.]
“According to the Hope Simpson Royal Commission:
“‘The cultivation of the orange, introduced by the Arabs before the commencement of Jewish settlement, has developed to a very great extent in consequence of that settlement. There is no doubt that the pitch of perfection to which the technique of plantation and cultivation of the orange and grape-fruit have been brought in Palestine is due to the scientific methods of the Jewish agriculturist.’
“By 1939, the combined Jewish and Arab orange orchards in Palestine totaled 75,000 acres (300 km2), employing over 100,000 workers, and their produce was a primary export of the economy. During World War II (1939-1945) the local orange agriculture sunk into a depression. Postwar recovery followed, with vigorous assistance by British Mandate authorities. The 1948 Arab Israeli War brought deterioration and neglect to the fields, as well as the settlement of many remaining Arab orchards by Jewish farmers.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaffa_orange
According to this, it would seem that the Jaffa Orange had nothing to do with any “vibrant country” that never existed in the first place. At best, it was a ‘co-production’ between such varied sources as the Portuguese explorers of the 16th century, local Arab farmers, German Christian farmers and Jewish farmers.
Here’s a copy of the original Jaffa Orange brand from Sharona:
Before you make such definitive statements, check your facts. There never was a “vibrant country called ‘Palestine’. Not even Arabs considered “Palestine” a country, just a very general geographic description that included, at various times, part of the Sinai Peninsula, Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, all or part of Jordan, parts of Lebanon, parts of Syria and even parts of Saudi Arabia and southwest Iraq.
Are all these people liars?
Princeton University Prof. Philip Hitti, an Arab-American historian testified before the Andlo-American Committee in 1946 that “There is no such thing as ‘Palestine’, absolutely not!”
The American consul in Jerusalem reported in 1880 that the area was continuing its historic decline. “The population and wealth of Palestine has not increased during the last 40 years.”
Lewis French, the British Director of Development wrote of Israel:
“We found it inhabited by fellahin who lived in mud hovels and suffered severely from the prevalent malaria... Large areas...were uncultivated... The fellahin, if not themselves cattle thieves, were always ready to harbor these and other criminals. The individual plots...changed hands annually. There was little public security, and the fellahin’s lot was an alternation of pillage and blackmail by their neighbors, the Bedouin.”
Despite the growth in their population, the Arabs continued to assert they were being displaced. The truth is from the beginning of World War I, absentee landlords who lived in Cairo, Damascus, and Beirut owned part of Israel’s land. About 80 percent of the Arabs were debt-ridden peasants, semi-nomads, and Bedouins “From Time Immemorial” (Joan Peters, Harper, 1984).
When the first congress of Muslim-Christian associations met in Jerusalem in February 1919 to choose “Palestinian” representatives for the Paris Peace Conference, the following resolution was adopted:
“We consider ‘Palestine’ as part of Arab Syria, as it has never been separated from it at any time. We are connected with it by national, religious, linguistic, natural, economic, and geographical bonds.”
In 1937, a local Arab leader, Auni Bey Abdul-Hadi, told the Peel Commission, which ultimately suggested the partition of Israel: “There is no such country [as Palestine]! ‘Palestine’ is a term the Zionists invented! There is no Palestine in the Bible. Our country was for centuries part of Syria.”
The representative of the Arab Higher Committee (now the Arab League) to the United Nations submitted a statement to the general assembly in May 1947 that said “‘Palestine’ was part of the province of Syria” and that, “politically, the Arabs of Israel were not independent in the sense of forming a separate political entity.”
In 1974 Hafez al-Assad took Yasser Arafat to task over the matter, telling him: “You do not represent Palestine as much as we do. Never forget this one point: There is no such thing as a Palestinian People, there is no Palestinian entity; there is only Syria. You are an integral part of the Syrian people. Palestine is an integral part of Syria. Therefore it is we, the Syrian authorities, who are the true representatives of the Palestinian people.”
Now who are we to believe—people who actually lived the time, or someone who perpetuates the propaganda invented by Yasser Arafat? These quotes by people who should know prove Arafat’s claim echoed in your post for the lie it is.
The so-called “Palestinian resistance” has even hijacked the use of the term “nakba” for its own purposes. See what Prof. Steven Plaut has to say about it:
“Here’s a little current events quiz: What is the real origin of the term “nakba” and what is its original meaning?
“If you get the answer to the quiz wrong – in other words, if you say it refers to the events of 1948 – you are in very good company. I myself would have flunked the quiz up until a few days ago, when I stumbled on the correct answer. Not only does the bandying about of the “nakba” nonsense word not point to any “depths of roots of Palestinian nationality,” it proves the very opposite: namely, that there is no such thing as a Palestinian nation or nationality at all.
“The authoritative source on the origin of “nakba” is none other than George Antonius, supposedly the first “official historian of Palestinian nationalism.” Like so many “Palestinians,” he actually wasn’t – Palestinian that is. He was a Christian Lebanese-Egyptian who lived for a while in Jerusalem, where he composed his official advocacy/history of Arab nationalism. The Arab Awakening, a highly biased book, was published in 1938 and for years afterward was the official text used at British universities.
“Antonius was an “official Palestinian representative” to Britain, trying to argue the cause for creating an Arab state in place of any prospective homeland promised the Jews under the Balfour Declaration of 1917. By the 1930’s Antonius was an active anti-Zionist propagandist, and as such was offered a job at Columbia University (where some things don’t seem to change much).
“He served as an academic fig leaf for xenophobic Arab nationalists seeking to deny Jews any right to self-determination in or migration to the Land of Israel. And he was closely associated with the Grand Mufti, Hitler’s main Islamic ally, and also with the pro-German regime in Iraq in the early 1940’s.
“Antonius was so passionately anti-Zionist that he continues to serve as the hero and mentor of Jewish leftist anti-Zionists everywhere. For example, the late Hebrew University sociology professor Baruch Kimmerling relied on Antonius at length in his own pseudo-history, Palestinians: The Making of a People (Free Press, 1993).
“So how does Antonius provide us with the answer to the current-events quiz concerning the origin of “nakba”? The term was not invented in 1948 but rather in 1920. And it was coined not because of Palestinians suddenly getting nationalistic but because Arabs living in Palestine regarded themselves as Syrian and were enraged at being cut off from their Syrian homeland.
“Before World War I, the entire Levant – including what is now Israel, the “occupied territories,” Jordan, Lebanon and Syria – was comprised of Ottoman Turkish colonies. When Allied forces drove the Turks out of the Levant, the two main powers, Britain and France, divided the spoils between them. Britain got Palestine, including what is now Jordan, while France got Lebanon and Syria.
“The problem was that the Palestinian Arabs saw themselves as Syrians and were seen as such by other Syrians. The Palestinian Arabs were enraged that an artificial barrier was being erected within their Syrian homeland by the infidel colonial powers – one that would divide northern Syrian Arabs from southern Syrian Arabs, the latter being those who were later misnamed “Palestinians.”
“The bulk of the Palestinian Arabs had in fact migrated to Palestine from Syria and Lebanon during the previous two generations, largely to benefit from the improving conditions and job opportunities afforded by Zionist immigration and capital flowing into the area. In 1920, both sets of Syrian Arabs, those in Syria and those in Palestine, rioted violently and murderously.
“On page 312 of The Arab Awakening, Antonius writes, “The year 1920 has an evil name in Arab annals: it is referred to as the Year of the Catastrophe (Am al-Nakba). It saw the first armed risings that occurred in protest against the post-War settlement imposed by the Allies on the Arab countries. In that year, serious outbreaks took place in Syria, Palestine, and Iraq.”
“Yes, the answer to our little quiz is 1920, not 1948. That’s 1920 – when there was no Zionist state, no Jewish sovereignty, no “settlements” in “occupied territories,” no Israel Defense Forces, no Israeli missiles and choppers targeting terror leaders and no Jewish control over Jerusalem (which had a Jewish demographic majority going back at least to 1850).
“The original “nakba” had nothing to do with Jews and nothing to do with demands by Palestinian Arabs for self-determination, independence and statehood. To the contrary, it had everything to do with the fact that the Palestinian Arabs saw themselves as Syrians. They rioted at this nakba – at this catastrophe– because they found the very idea that they should be independent from Syria and Syrians deeply offensive.
“In the 1920’s, the very suggestion that Palestinian Arabs constituted a separate ethnic nationality was enough to send those same Arabs out into the streets to murder and plunder violently in outrage. If they themselves insisted they were simply Syrians who had migrated to the Land of Israel, by what logic are the Palestinian Arabs deemed entitled to their own state today?”
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=88B96F89-450D-4156-9B83-3BEBB1FA9BDD
Now why don’t we move on to the topic of Jaffa Oranges?
“According to Daniel Rogov, the variety ”originated in China. “No one knows precisely when the sweet orange was introduced into Palestine but the first orange tree was probably brought to this part of the world in the early 16th century, when Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama brought a root of the tree from China to Portugal. It is from that single tree, still preserved in Lisbon at the home of the Count de Saint-Laurent, that all of the oranges of Portugal, Spain, France and Israel have descended.
“In the pre-1948 economy of Palestine
“The first fruits to carry the ”Jaffa orange” brand were from an agricultural colony of the Temple Society in Sarona, Palestine (Sarona was a Templers agricultural village north of Jaffa, one of the earliest modern villages established in Palestine, now located in Tel Aviv, Israel and commonly pronounced Sharona, est. 1871). [The Templers – NOT “Templars” – were German Christians who settled in various locations around Palestine in the second half of the 19th century. The “German Colonies” of Haifa and Jerusalem are named after them and they established several agricultural villages like Sharona.]
“According to the Hope Simpson Royal Commission:
“‘The cultivation of the orange, introduced by the Arabs before the commencement of Jewish settlement, has developed to a very great extent in consequence of that settlement. There is no doubt that the pitch of perfection to which the technique of plantation and cultivation of the orange and grape-fruit have been brought in Palestine is due to the scientific methods of the Jewish agriculturist.’
“By 1939, the combined Jewish and Arab orange orchards in Palestine totaled 75,000 acres (300 km2), employing over 100,000 workers, and their produce was a primary export of the economy. During World War II (1939-1945) the local orange agriculture sunk into a depression. Postwar recovery followed, with vigorous assistance by British Mandate authorities. The 1948 Arab Israeli War brought deterioration and neglect to the fields, as well as the settlement of many remaining Arab orchards by Jewish farmers.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaffa_orange
According to this, it would seem that the Jaffa Orange had nothing to do with any “vibrant country” that never existed in the first place. At best, it was a ‘co-production’ between such varied sources as the Portuguese explorers of the 16th century, local Arab farmers, German Christian farmers and Jewish farmers.
Here’s a copy of the original Jaffa Orange brand from Sharona:
(Global Perspectives)
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