Hayley Birss 

 Hayley recently received her Master’s from the University of Toronto’s Institute for the History & Philosophy of Science and Technology—their work centers on post-colonial studies of venture capital, climate change mitigation strategies, and biopolitics. More broadly, they seek to understand technoscience’s precarious relationship to the planet and its role in mitigating the climate crisis. Prior to this, she worked in the agriculture technology start-up space and outdoor education.

This article is part of the series “Capital, Technology and Utopia”, which is a collaborative project between Henna Platform and the department of Near & Middle Eastern Civilization at The University of Toronto. You can read in this series also: Building the Economy of Mount Lebanon Through Bargaining by Timothy Boudoumit, Taming the Egyptian Monster by Mosab Alnomire, Muslim Surveillance in China and Japan by Zannatul S. Isaque and The Rebellious Gaze of Abbas Kiarostami by Nora Mezo-Willingham.

Read the Arabic Article here.

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In my early childhood my mother would stuff a large orange into the toe of my stocking. This tradition, carried with her to Canada from her working-class family in post-war Britain, was meant to celebrate generosity and goodwill––a spectacle of luxury embodied by tasting fresh fruit in the middle of winter. The oranges that populated my mother’s holidays as a child, more than likely, traveled by steamship to Britain from the Eastern Mediterranean. With tough skin, few seeds, and extra juice, the large, Middle-Eastern orange variety––the Shamouti––dominated the British citrus market for over a century beginning in and around 1850. Despite a complicated and political growing period, by the time the Shamouti oranges were unloaded on the docks of Liverpool and stock reported in local newspapers, all that remained to the British public was single brand name: the Jaffa Orange––product of Palestine. 

The Jaffa Orange is a kind of spectacle. Guy Debord, a critical theorist, sees the spectacle as capitalism’s instrument for distracting, pacifying, and guiding the modern masses. He says it comes in the form of advertising, television, film, celebrity––a way for the dominant economic structure to reinforce itself. For my mother, the Jaffa Orange represented a symbol of benign prosperity––the small spoils of Christmas festivities. More broadly, however, the Jaffa Orange is a symbol that can also reinforce the political and economic triumphs of the project of civilization and modernity across Empire. From Australia to South Africa, the Americas, India, and the Middle East, British colonial and imperial projects found power in the expansion of agriculture. Industrial forms of agriculture were used on colonial frontiers to demonstrate the technological prowess and expertise of European nations, and doubly optimize seemingly ‘uncivilized’ and ‘wasted’ land.

The Jaffa Orange has a settler-colonial history. Natalie Baloy, in writing about spectacle in Canada, another British expansion site, argues that Indigenous material artifacts are often repurposed by settlers as spectacles. In colonial spaces such as Vancouver she notes that artifacts, like totem poles and mountains, can be repurposed as a spectacle to bolster the strength of the Canadian-settler project. These displays, because of their history of dispossession, however, are also spectres. A spectre is a haunting, another word for ghost. Baloy says, that like a spectacle, spectrality involves our sight, but also plays tricks on and activate our other senses. Artifacts that are repurposed to be used as spectacles by settler-colonial projects will always be haunted. By activating senses more than sight––touch, smell, sound––spectrality is revenant and lingers in the present. The Jaffa Orange is both spectacle and spectre due to its settler-colonial histories of dispossession, because of its taste and smell and rootedness in the land of Palestine. 

The spectacle of the Jaffa Orange was cultivated in Palestine for hundreds of years prior to the beginning of the British Mandate. The myth that Palestine only entered the capitalist system with the onset of Anglo-Zionist settler-colonialism has long plagued historians and activists. Prior to the Mandate period and 1882, the Jaffa Orange was part of a large fleet of exports flowing through Nablus and Jaffa to France, Egypt, England, Asia Minor, Greece, Italy, Malta, and northern Syria. Throughout the 19^th century, citriculture in Palestine was limited to the control of an affluent, entrepreneurial Arab community. During the initial Jewish immigration to Palestine, the business of maintaining orchards and exporting oranges was an integrated venture of Jews and Arabs based out of the Port of Jaffa. Citrus exports accounted for 43% of mandatory Palestine’s export value in 1927 and 84% by 1935. Despite the emergence of Jewish-owned orchards in the 1890s, Arab-Palestinians held more land and production value until 1929. Citriculture was already and always a capital-intensive business in the Middle East. But by 1929, with the increase in Jewish immigration and the immense private capital flowing into Palestine, compounded with the economic preference for Zionist groups under the Mandate government, Jewish-owned orchards began to out-produce Arab-Palestinian orchards. The Jaffa Orange had, and would continue to be, the most profitable crop in Palestine. To reinforce the myth that European-Jews made ‘the desert bloom’ and brought civil economic activity to the region, they had to control the Jaffa Orange. 

From the moment Jewish citriculture began to outpace Arab production and well after the establishment of the State of Israel, Arab-Palestinians relationship to their citriculture was obscured by advertising campaigns promoting Jewish-Israeli industry. Zionist economic achievements in a formerly ‘barren’ land was embodied The Jaffa Orange was an emblem of Zionist economic achievements (in a formerly ‘barren’ land) in Britain. In 1938, the Jaffa Orange syndicate––a conglomeration of Jewish orange pickers and distributors––published a campaign in Britain to showcase the splendour of the Jaffa Orange (Figure 1). In the photo, a young woman with honey-blonde hair and blue eyes, not all different from my mother, is holding an impossibly large silver platter of oranges. All that is seen under the banner of “Keep Smiling” is the signatory of the Jaffa Orange. The campaign’s sister poster (Figure 2), underlines that the plenty and economic spoils brought to British festivities and day-to-day life originated in Tel Aviv, the Jewish-city in Palestine. In London, a burgeoning modern city, the Jaffa Orange becomes a spectacle––as Guy Debord theorizes––of “the visual reflection of the ruling economic order”. In this case, the Jaffa Orange is a product of the agrarian doctrines and civilizing missions of the British people. How spectacular it is to taste citrus on Christmas day––and for cheap! 

In 1948, the State of Israel was founded in lockstep with the permanent displacement of most Palestinians. It is known as the Nakba––the Catastrophe. During the Nakba, Arab-Palestinians were dispossessed of much of their land and nearly all their orchards. After this, Israeli agencies worked hard in the early years of the state to connect the cultivation and economic value of the Jaffa Orange with the logic of Zionist land claims. In 1950, the General Zionist Party published a poster (Figure 3) depicting the industrial achievements of the Jewish people. All the projects––from cityscapes to electrical grids, shipping lines, and the glowing, green, citrus orchards––are reinforced on the poster as “done on your own initiative”. This erases the immense initial and continued work of Arab communities in establishing the economic success of Palestine. Also in the 1950s, the Jewish National Fund published a poster (Figure 4) distributed to both Hebrew-speaking and English-speaking communities depicting orderly, tilled fields. The graphics are cartoonish and use orange and green––the colours of the Jaffa Orange––to animate the scene. 

Critically the children in the foreground share the same vivid hair colour as the cultivated spoils of the neatly tilled, blooming land. Connoting a connection between the Jewish children, agriculture wealth, oranges, and the land of Palestine, the poster boldly declares “THIS LAND IS OURS”. Another poster published by the Israeli Ministry of Labour and Housing, designed by the Shamir Brothers, (Figure 5) depicts an Israeli couple––themselves taller than the ripe citrus trees through which they walk––striding into the grove to pick. Below them, a slogan reads “Citrus is the splendor of our country and its wealth”. For the Jewish settlers in Palestine, the Jaffa Orange came to represent the agricultural and economic innovation of Jewish people–– success in ‘making the desert bloom’. The orange symbolizes a myth of an ancient homeland transformed into an economic wonderland by Jewish settlers.

Following the Nakba, the orange became a strong motif throughout Palestinian resistance movements. The Palestinian artist Sliman Mansour centres the orange in many of his major artworks. He is considered an artist of the Palestinian resistance, or intifada, that gave visual representation to the concept of sumud––steadfast resistance. In several of his paintings, a young Palestinian woman is featured holding oranges and standing amongst the citrus groves. In a 1981 work, Salma (Figure 6), Mansour directly names the woman in the painting after his grandmother. She wears a colourful, embroidered dress––a Palestinian staple––that connects a glorified past with a steadfast present. She becomes a personification of Palestine. This theme continues throughout his other paintings including Lost Sea (1979; Figure 7) and Yaffa (2015; Figure 8), with all three featuring bunches of brilliant oranges. Lost Sea and Yaffa, portray different emotional threads in the aftermath of the Nakba, both within the current of sumud. Yaffa speaks to the pride of orange cultivation on Palestinian land. The Arab woman––the personification of Palestine––effortlessly carries a heavy harvest through the ripe, full orchards tended by a large, united, community. In the Lost Sea, pain and loss is evoked. The orange branch offers a single fruit, overshadowed by the immense inhospitable Mediterranean. Both personifying Palestine, the women look out at the vastness––confronting loss––and clutch the fruit to remember the past. The orange is deeply rooted in the lost land of Palestine. Gideon Ofrat, an Isreali art historian says that a pact with the Jaffa Orange is historically a pact with the land of Palestine itself. Cultivation of the Jaffa Orange (the Shamouti, the “Golden Apple”) can symbolize belonging in the land of Palestine. In his 1962 short story, Arab-Palestinian Ghassan Kanafani describes Palestine as The Land of Sad Oranges. He says that “according to the peasant, who used to cultivate them until he left, [the oranges] would shrivel up if change occurred and they were watered by different hands”. From the Nakba, the ownership of Palestinian orchards––and the Shamouti as a symbol as the Jaffa Orange––shifted to different hands. But following the Nakba, as a type of spectrality, the orange appears as a powerful symbol of Palestinian resistance. 

The Jaffa Orange, well into the 1980s remained a central symbol for the State of Israel. In the late 20^th century, however, the Israeli State started to distance itself from the image––abandoning the powerful spectacle of the Jaffa Orange. The Jaffa Orange’s haunting and broad use in Palestinian resistance tainted the settler-colonial spectacle. The Jaffa Orange was seen less as a wonder of Israel’s agricultural might and more-so as an indicator of settler-aggression. In the confusion, Israel distanced itself from the Jaffa Orange. A vast number of orchards were levelled. Today, Israel promotes its technology and manufacturing sectors on the world stage––not the Jaffa Orange. 

Unlike an advertisement, or a movie, the Jaffa Orange, the Shamouti, is cultivated in dirt––it is literally rooted in Palestine. This is the key to its spectrality and the Achilles heel of its (precarious) use as a spectacle. The fruit is heavy, wet, and sweet. It conjures dreams and memories. You can smell it, taste it, eat it. It is more than a visual affect. As a spectacle, the Jaffa Orange was elevated to represent the strength of the Israeli State and the luxury of colonial spoils, both in Britain and across the Commonwealth. But it is haunted – originally cultivated by Palestinians. 

A symbol in Palestinian resistance movements, the Orange can signify a troubled past. Today, my mother no longer seeks out the large, Jaffa Orange for my Christmas stocking. Instead, I find a pre-boxed Chocolate orange––Terry’s Chocolate Orange^TM, made and manufactured in Britain. The real fruit itself became too much trouble to eat. It no longer signified the same vibrance and goodwill as when I was younger. The spectacle faded. Or maybe its ghosts became too real.