UN242.com

Those lovely jaffa oranges are back in the news. Here, in the land of milk and honey at UN242, we always start our day with a big plate of slice-up Jaffa oranges. Iranians, on the other hand, are up in arms at the arrival in Tehran of tons of oranges labeled “Jaffa Sweetie”. Iran, in an effort to curtail the apartheid policies of the Israeli regime have boycotted Israeli produce for decades. How did this fresh fruit get in? Questions were asked. Fingers were pointed.

It turns out that the Jaffa oranges were Chinese! Chinese exporters in a humourosly futile and grossly naive attempt to make their produce appear more palatable had deliberately mislabeled their fruit as being Israeli. The result: the Chinese are unhappy because they have to take their fruit back; the Iranians are unhappy because they were trapped between touching Israeli fruit and dying of scurvey; and the Israelis are unhappy because the Chinese are clearly selling Jaffa oranges around the world that have never been near an Israeli bigot.

Israeli horticuluralists can be justifiably proud of their enviable success with the humble orange. If you didn’t know, their secret, natural ingredient is the use of ground-up Palestinian children as fertilizer. Yum!