I was casting about for a couple of food-related posters with which to decorate the kitchen at 2142 G Street, home to the Program in Judaic Studies, when I stumbled across a number of advertisements that touted the merits of oranges from Israel and, by extension, those of Zionism as well.
Dating from the era of the yishuv or, in some instances, from the early days of the state, some promotional gambits were sweet and sappy, like the fruit itself. "Visit Palestine. See Ancient Beauty Revived," trilled a poster produced by the Tourist Office of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, which featured a trio of beautifully rounded oranges adorned by a crown of sparkling white orange blossoms.
Other posters, mixing their metaphors right and left, drew both on Orientalist imagery and the modern preoccupation with physical well-being. Summoning the "genie of Jaffa," who magically materialized from the inside of a Jaffa orange, this advertisement also summoned up the potent word "vitamins," and with it, the promise of good health.
Photographers, too, were beguiled by the potential of the orange and took countless shots of Jewish settlers cultivating the citrus fruit through the most modern methods of irrigation and mechanized farming. They also trained their sights and their cameras on Arab orange growers, many of them from Jaffa, sharply contrasting their traditional methods of farming and distribution with those practiced by the yishuvniks.
Many of these archival images appear in Eyal Sivan's new documentary, Jaffa: The Orange's Clockwork, which explores what happened to the Palestinian population of orange groves and to those who had for years carefully tended to them once the State of Israel came into being and oranges became one of the country's leading exports. It's not a happy story. If, for the Israelis, the orange spoke of possibility, for the Palestinians, it spoke of loss.
Ultimately, Israelis and Palestinians alike freighted the humble orange with profound symbolic importance, linking it to two conflicting national narratives. Along the way, the orange, bursting with juice and color, became a veritable hot potato.
Image: Orange trees loaded with fruit in an orchard, Matson Photo Service. Source: LOC.
