Word: jaffa
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Estimates today of the world's population of permanently unsettled refugees range between 10 million and 13 million. Every continent and virtually every nation has been affected. In the Middle East, there are 2.5 million Palestinians who still mourn for the vanished orange groves of Jaffa, which many have never seen. Throughout Africa there are perhaps 3 million refugees. They include victims of the civil war in Rhodesia, nomads in Algeria displaced by fighting in the western Sahara and countless thousands uprooted by Ethiopia's struggle against insurrection in Eritrea and the Ogaden desert. No war anywhere...
...millions of Palestinian exiles living in Lebanon, Jordan and other Arab states, they ask: Why should Jewish emigrants from Russia and the U.S. have the right to settle on land that Arabs have lived on for at least 1,000 years, while refugees born in Haifa and Jaffa cannot go home again...
What unifies the Palestinians most of all, however, is the endless battle against Israel. By now the fight has become almost a mockery of itself: the typical Palestinian longing for the orange groves of Jaffa has become ludicrous in a time when Jaffa itself has disappeared before the encroachments of Jewish Tel Aviv, and whatever orange groves remain are almost blotted out by industrial development. But the Palestinian dream has been kept alive, thanks to sophisticated political work by Arafat and other Palestinian leaders and the willingness of Arab governments to support (however grudgingly) a nearly lost cause...
...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...
...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...